Originally Posted by
Allan Lupton
It would help if you tried to understand what the rest of us have written. As I wrote before, the Ghost engine was a cast-iron sidevalve and the Hawk (and therefore its derivative, the Eagle) was a separate-cylinder fabricated engine with overhead valves and camshafts. Those engines did not have a reduction gear, and the much later RR engines that did were not epicyclic gears. A reduction gear is not a control gear and my earlier question asked what control gear you referred to.
good morning
Many thanks for the comment. I can only repeat what the documentation I have has stated. Allegedly RR put 2 ghost engines together to make a V12. Wether that was 2 actual engines or the internal specifications I don't know.. It is simply what I have read in a document in my possession. In the process they patented what they called an epicyclic control gear. Maybe it ment something different then I simply don't know. If you ' google' epicyclic control gear' it would immediately point you towards planetary gearing.
As to wether or not the eagle engine actually had a reduction gear I would suggest that as the propeller on the Handley page was enormous ( something in the range of 10 to 12 feet from memory) I would suggest the engine spinning at about 1400 rpm it would certainly need a reduction gear.
and if you look at any eagle engine pictures it looks to me suspiciously like a gearbox between engine and prop.
Many thanks
Gary