The Kaiser Jeep Tornado OHC six is one of the more obscure footnotes in American engine design. Designed by Italian A. C. Sampietro who had also designed a high-performance head for the Nash-Healy, it was mostly a classic European style true hemispherical combustion chambered-head cast from aluminum alloy and featuring an OHC, a true rarity on this side of the Ocean on production engines. It was never installed in this version of the then obsolete Jeep wagon, but south of the border, it made the old Willys wagon fly.
Here’s a very stilted translation of the ad copy:
I wonder how much further along engine tech would be if we had been forced to keep developing engines like this (and other earlier, advanced designs) in a linear fashion rather than several decades of short bursts of panic-induced “innovation” followed by relapse into lazy, bloated, but cheap crap technology we already knew?
Indeed. We wasted a decade in the seventies trying to make results that technology like the analog electronics of the day could not possibly produce. Nobody but Mazda had a worthwhile product that could be sold in the USA. Engineering by bureaucratic fiat isn’t working today any better than it did then.
A really good engine from thinair brilliant, how come no-one noticed?
Willys/Jeep/AMC had the greatest names for engines. The old Jeep 4-cyl after the war was advertised as having “Go-Devil Power.”
Is it me, or does most of the good stuff stay overseas/in other countries? Meanwhile we got the cheap stuff!
Most GM and Ford fans would agree.
I think of the Tornado as a really cool engine, too, especially for a 60’s American motor. But you’re missing what I think is the coolest design feature of the Tornado. It only had six cam lobes. Each lobe operated both the intake and exhaust valve for its cylinder. A nightmare to ground a custom cam, for sure, but remarkable in its simplicity. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen one in person, and I can’t seem to find a photo of one with the cam cover removed.
Visit my Facebook site “Looking Back Racing” and I will post it for you. Incidentally, the Rover SD1 a shortstroke four main bearing six had a similar design with that same single lobe but placed over one of the inclined valves with a long rocker to the other. You are right it is only luck that the two valve events are out of phase by about the angle that the hemi inclined valves need to be set at, and little or no flexibility in camming results.
IKA (Industrias Kaiser Argentina) used the Tornado in their Torino sedan/coupe – the hottest 380W model had triple Webers and was raced with some success, including at a Nurburgring endurance race. The car was essentially a Pininfarina facelift of the mid-sixties Rambler American, and in a strange parallel to the AMC story in the US, IKA was eventually bought by Renault, who continued to market the car into the 80s.
I was in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago, and they are still a fairly common sight there (not as common as Peugeot 504s but more so than 404s!) along with their competitor, the Ford Falcon (original US model, not Australian), which soldiered on with refreshes into the 90s I think. A Torino 380w coupe, complete with spare tire mounted on the trunk, is definitely on my Fantasy Garage list…
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKA-Renault_Torino
Edit: I guess it would have helped to read the newer post before commenting on this one…
Yeah, it was really tough in the US market during the ’60s, putting up with cheap crap like the low-priced, mass-produced, reliable V8s and inline OHV sixes made by (insert favorite US brand here) while Latin America enjoyed the luxury of a flathead Continental six with an aluminum OHC head cobbled onto it.
Now that I’ve spewed my bile, gentle readers, please remember that the mantra of the US manufacturers in those days was simple, reliable, inexpensive power. They rarely wandered off that path because they didn’t have to. They failed not during the ’50s and ’60s, when American mass-production methods were the envy of the world, but from the early ’70s on, when the oil crises and tightening pollution standards served notice that the times they were a’changin.
You reminded me that fleet buyers could still spec inline 6s and three on the tree transmissions (or powerglides) after they were well past their prime for the Chevy’s they were buying.
I’ll concede your point too, especially in transmissions. Powerglides and FMXs both dated to the ’50s or early ’60s and were still in production years after they should have been put out to pasture.
Your last sentence was the point I was making.
No offense taken, I hope! The Mexican ad dates to 1962. At that time, I wouldn’t have wanted a Tornado. Fast forward ten years, and I fully agree with you.
Too much money and very cheap fuel has stifled any advancement in US engine design fuel economy has never really mattered that much, but every time gas spikes panic sets in temporarily and US makers rush around trying to create a pickup truck that gets 40mpg in stead of learning how to build a proper car, Some most noticeably Ford have begun improving their fleet by importing cars it makes in other markets no not the Falcon thats way too good to allow on US roads, though the supercharger off the 5.0 Falcon is going in the Mustang you arent allowed 4 door seans with go that are a natural Taxi in the land of OZand NZ you have crown craptorias for that or perhaps that awful heap the Taurus excretia.
These engines are not entirely uncommon, I have seen then in the junkyards. I have always heard bad things about them. They did try to sell them but when they just could not convince anyone to buy them they convinced the government. Any M715 you find will be filled with one of these motors which will then be summarily removed by it’s new civilian owner and replaced with Chevy 350.
why dint they make a 460 v12 sohc hemi engine.