Come Into The Factories

A Mighty Machine of British Workmanship. "This is what YOU are making posters "

NARA website : Advanced Search: enter "control number" which is the NAID or National Archives ID. JPEG downloads can be quite large MB in size: the screenshot below is 716KB.

The Bristol Hercules Sleeve Valve Engine: Control Number ( NAID ): 44266118
The Vickers-Armstrong Wellington II: 44266120
The Short Stirling: 44266122
The Handley Page Halifax II: 44266124
The Avro Lancaster I: 44266126

 

National Archives NextGen Catalog

 

Last Buick for the duration.

 

Beautiful car. That's the first new Caddy design since the war, made from 48 to 53. The 48 still used the flathead V8 and got the brand new OHV V8 in 49. Flathead and four speed automatic were the same ones used in the Stuart and Chaffee.

 

A battleship a week that is some going. Makes you wonder of Britain's manufacturing capabilities these days would we be able to produce such armaments should we find ourselves in a similar situation.

 

Andsco & von Poop,

A day is a long time here:

Yesterday there was a Tweet on BAE announcing it would no longer have the capacity to produce large gun barrels (155mm cited IIRC) and their USA plant would be available. I failed to locate this tweet.

Any industrial capacity we have today in 2023 would be hampered by the decline in iron & steel production, lack of shipbuilding yards, lack of chip making plants (everything needs them) and much more.

The current issues around shell production, with stockpiles run down after supplying the Ukraine, has appeared in the press. It is a problem for virtually every Western nation and it takes years to get such factories built, working 24/7 has problems too. BAE I think is the UK's only large calibre shell producer, with three sites operating on the various components.

I recently read a FT journalist's article on the downside of vehicles going battery powered and the likely impact on the remaining engineering capacity. See: Beyond Gigafactories

 

"A battleship a week" is nonsense. It has to be using "battleship" to mean something like "armed vessel", in the same way that people can conflate tanks with other armoured vehicles. It might conceivably mean corvettes or other little convoy escorts.

 

Interesting film on the German helmet.