The Napier Cub was an unusual and very large experimental 16-cylinder 'X' pattern liquid-cooled

aero engine An aircraft engine, often referred to as an aero engine, is the power component of an aircraft propulsion system. Aircraft using power components are referred to as powered flight. Most aircraft engines are either piston engines or gas turbin ...

built by the British engine company D. Napier & Son. The Cub was the only Napier 'X' engine design. First flown on 15 December 1922 in an

Avro Aldershot The Avro 549 Aldershot was a British single-engined heavy bomber aircraft built by Avro. Development and design The Aldershot was designed to meet the 1920 British List of Air Ministry Specifications, Specification 2/20 for a heavy long-range d ...

biplane bomber aircraft, the only other application was in the Blackburn Cubaroo. Only six engines of this type were ordered and produced.Lumsden 2003, p.171.

Design

The four

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...

s of four cylinders were arranged in a flattened 'X' when viewed from the front. The angle between the upper cylinders was 52.5 degrees, the lower cylinders 127.5 degrees, which gave an angle of 90 degrees between the outer cylinder banks. The cylinders consisted of separate individual steel forgings with welded steel water cooling jackets. The carburettor was situated below the propeller reduction gear at the front of the engine and fed the inlet valves through four inlet

manifolds In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a n ...

. The valve drive gear,

magneto A magneto is an electrical generator that uses permanent magnets to produce periodic pulses of alternating current. Unlike a dynamo, a magneto does not contain a commutator to produce direct current. It is categorized as a form of alternator, ...

s and pumps were fitted to the rear of the

crankcase A crankcase is the housing in a reciprocating engine, piston engine that surrounds the crankshaft. In most modern engines, the crankcase is integrated into the engine block. Two-stroke engines typically use a crankcase-compression design, res ...

Specifications (Cub)

References

Notes

Bibliography

* Lumsden, Alec. ''British Piston Engines and their Aircraft''. Marlborough, Wiltshire: Airlife Publishing, 2003. .

External links