V12 engines on the custom scene: exotics from the USA

I must say that despite the fact that Europe from Britain to Bavaria is now definitely the leader in terms of the percentage of use of twelve-cylinder engines, many V-engines were created in the USA at one time. Apart from the mentioned Lincoln-Zephyr and GMC engines, all of them are now almost museum exhibits, but at one time they could well be found in hot rods. For example, Dick Saunders became famous during his lifetime for dealing specifically with exotic American engines: Auburn, Stutz and sixteen-cylinder Marmon were commonplace for him. People familiar with his work have always noted Saunders’ unusual creativity when working with unpopular engines. And for himself, Dick built a truly amazing car: a ’29 Auburn Speedster with a Packard V12 engine and two McCullough superchargers.

Hot rod with boat stern

Saunders built this car back in ’47, and until his death in the late ’70s, he constantly drove it, including at drag races, changing, refining and correcting things. Unfortunately, the car has lost a lot without its owner, including two superchargers, and after the last restoration it looks completely different. The photo from above is almost the only high-quality photo taken during Dick Saunders’ lifetime. And sometimes nothing is known about the fate of many of his other custom cars at all – a normal practice for those who do not particularly chase magazine covers or shows and build a working car for tracks and roads. Like Joe Panek, the racing driver who built a fighting Ford with a Cadillac V12 under the hood. The car was created back in ’64, but it is still alive, and its GMC supercharged 6-71 engine is not in perfect, but quite acceptable condition.

The little red Dragster

Popular Hot Rodding magazine wrote an article about this car in December 1964. According to the information from there, you can find out that the 1936 engine was wasted from 368 to 402 – this is from 6 liters to 6.6. Also, in my other article, I wondered: how to put supercharging on an engine with such an unusual arrangement of spark plugs? It turned out that the usual arrangement of the soup on top is not suitable, and the compressor must be installed in front. Moreover, due to the peculiarity of the engine, Joe had to turn the boost upside down, and as a result, the entire system moves backwards. The intake system was once installed on a World War II bomber, but Panek completely rebuilt it and only the throttle valve remained original. The fuel pump also came from the field of aviation. Joe also decided to make sure that the supercharger supplied more air than pressure, and therefore air flows from the soup to the engine through four-inch channels, which is an inch more than standard systems of this type. To attach the C&O Hydro automatic transmission to the old engine, Joe had to invent a new crankshaft hub – like many other things, Joe made this spare part with his own hands. The ignition is powered by a twelve-volt boat battery using two Studebaker tramblers with six cylinders each. Most of the control system used to be in a Willys 47 van, and this particular model was chosen because it was installed in a hot rod with minimal changes to the body of the car. As a result, all of this can run at seven thousand RPM-perhaps even more, but Joe was hesitant to exceed the 7,000 mark, so as not to damage the engine. A separate interesting point is the photo of the lightweight front axle, which shows the absence of brakes on the front wheels. In short, it was a very unusual project, and although Panek was building a fully functional drag car, the hot rod received its first award at the Southern California auto show even before Joe first rolled it onto the track. Below I attach English-language scans of the article, which were shared by one of the users of the H.A.M.B. forum. I omitted quite a lot of technical details, taking only the most interesting and significant, but those interested can look at everything with their own eyes, and perhaps ask a question or correct me if I made a mistake.

The Rusty Diamond of Speed

Bob Bandtsen, the owner of Bendtsen’s Speed Gems garage in Minnesota, added another exotic motor to his family. Bob and his company specialize in adapting old and exotic engines to modern transmissions, and the best way to advertise yourself in this business is to show up at meetings of fans of hot rods and custom cars on their own production. And in order to clearly demonstrate the fact that Speed Gems can connect any engine to any transmission, Comrade Bandtsen decided to install a Seagrave V12 engine and a GM 700R4 transmission in his family. The twelve-cylinder Seagrave is, in fact, an engine from Pierce-Arrow, the production of which began back in 1932, if not earlier. When Pierce-Arrow decided to stop producing these units, Seagrave bought everything necessary for self-production of engines and continued to build and sell these engines right up to the 70s. Specifically, the Seagrave that Bob used in his car dates back to the 41st year, and the 700R4 transmission, for comparison, was developed only in the 82nd. Unfortunately, I could not find a mention of the volume of the engine used by Bandtsen: Seagrave produced engines in 462 and 906 cc, which did not differ much in appearance, but… Still, visually speaking, it’s kind of like a smaller unit, with a volume of 7.5 liters.

Of course, in addition to the engine with a gearbox, the car itself is also needed, and the choice fell on the Model A of the 31st year. It is not reported in what condition the car was originally in, but the list of changes is approximately as follows: the roof was cut down by 10 centimeters, 100 cutouts were made in the trunk lid and red LEDs were hidden under it as a rear light and a 45-liter stainless steel gas tank, a custom copper radiator was installed, hydraulic brakes with large fins from Viisk, The front lights are from a 1937 Pontiac, and the dashboard was given to a Dodge 50. This rat-rod also has a fully custom frame, electric power steering and an electronic ignition system. You can see how it all looks from the outside below.

The Road Fighter

But it’s more and more exotic. And if you want madness, then here, for example, Cliff Hicks’s car, completely built from scratch with an Allison V12 engine, which was removed directly from a Lockheed P-38 fighter jet. The V-1710 engine family is simply huge, and some models included such a very new thing at that time as a turbocharger, while early models were produced either without it or with a much more familiar supercharger. And the latest versions of this engine carried both turbocharging and auxiliary supercharging at the same time. Another interesting fact is that the Allison V-1710 was the only American liquid-cooled engine in the entire U.S. arsenal during World War II.

Unfortunately, the original text does not say which model of the V-1710 fell into the hands of Comrade Hicks, but one way or another, such an engine should produce something around 1,840 horsepower at 3,000 rpm. Cliff had been planning to build himself a similar car for a very long time. “I saw a car with an airplane engine in the 50s when I was sixteen,” recalls the creator of the crazy hot rod. “And I told myself that one day I would have one.”

Yes, Hicks is already far from young: at the time of writing this text, he should be 83 years old. Together with his younger brother Dan, Cliff is a long-time racer: in ’58, he held the A Gas Supercharged class speed record for a quarter mile – 200 km/h. In addition, he owns the Cliff Hix Engineering workshop, and some consider him a genius among car mechanics. In short, Cliff knew for sure that he could master such a project and tame it. So he and his brother took the fiberglass body from the Model T 27 and began to lengthen and expand it. The redesigned hull was reinforced with steel pipes, after which a massive frame was constructed from pure steel. Cliff also designed and built the helical suspension and adapted the Richmond Super Street five-speed manual transmission with overdrive for the aircraft engine. To stop such a hot rod, good brakes were needed, so Hicks modified two pairs of drum brakes: from Buick for the front wheels and from blue ovals for the rear.The engine was also at least slightly modified: the original text mentions that the two magneto’s were replaced with a modern electronic system with two tramblers for 12 cylinders each (since each of the 14-centimeter-wide engine cylinders uses two spark plugs).

The result exceeded all expectations: Cliff admits that the first test run in a car almost ended in the nearest ditch. “That’s when I found out that overkill is overkill,” sums up Hicks with a huge smile on his face.

In general, we can summarize it this way: V12 engines of all grades may well compete in popularity with V6 as a motor for those who do not want V8 in their project. And the fact that at the beginning of the last century, twelve-cylinder V-shaped powertrains were used wherever they could be used, sometimes gives the green light to absolutely insane projects that are powered by nothing other than this type of engine. It is difficult to say what awaits us in the future, since according to the saddest forecasts, the internal combustion engine as such is an endangered species – the era of electric vehicles and solar energy is about to come. But nevertheless, I still hope to see a lot of interesting projects with V-shaped gasoline monsters in my lifetime, and I really want the twelve-cylinder engine to take not the last place among them.

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