I do have the workshop manual for the FOUR bank P&W R-4630 if you need it Geoff, 28 pots and 56 spark plugs. Perhaps you could secret yourself away under the desk for a late night, undisturbed read.

However, I would commend to all the aero engine petrol-heads a most excellent, but I suspect very hard to find book now, by the enigmatic L J K Setright, a bit of a Jez Clarkson forerunner which McSpool will understand.

His book, "The Power to Fly" deals only with piston engines developed specifically for military service and I see Amazon has one at 275USD - its only 1/2" thick. Two notable pages that stuck in my mind were the simplicity of a stripped down sleeve valve cylinder compared to a conventional poppet valve one; and the BMEP chart which has all the air cooled radials around the left middle, the Merlins and Griffons towards the upper right, but has the Sabre drawn off the chart scale beyond the top right corner.

Of course Mr. Ball-Spinnington some of us had the pleasure of getting up close and dirty with the pristine A57 in Mr. Carl Gas-Axe Multibank-Brown's M4A4. Whilst I have the thing committed to videotape on the borrowed camcorder, these things have an audio compressor necessarily and even a CD cannot manage the +110dB range of your lugholes.

Hence the shattering rip of the 30 holes in unison from a burbling idle to heavy right hoof is somewhat lost, but perhaps I shouldn't have stood 2ft 6in behind it. No one can erase the personal recording retained between my ears though, and I do believe McSpool has a personal copy too.

I'm not sure though now when I see the original B&W film of Normandy with columns of radial and A57 Shermans rolling by the British and Canadian troops whether they are grinning or grimacing. . . . . . . . . . .

R.