enginehistory.org

[dpennings]

Hi all,

somehow I have in mind that the water jackets of some WW1 engines where manufatured by electroforming, can anyone confirm this?

Dominik

[kmccutcheon]

That is correct. Some WWI-era engines had copper water jackets that were fabricated by electroplating.
_________________
Kimble D. McCutcheon

[wallan]

Just like Emil Jellinek got Daimler to call their cars, Mercedes, after his daughter, French electrical industrialist Jules Gastambide was persuaded by Leon Levavasseur to finance his aviation and engine company and he named it after Gastambide's daughter Antoinette. Levavasseur supposedly invented the V-8 aero engine, pre-WW1 and to form the water jackets, the cylinder liners were coated with graphite filled wax, copper electroplated onto it and then the wax was melted out. He may have been lucky in that, unwittingly, the electrolyte probably contained Rochelle salt, (European food additive E337) which exhibits piezoelectricity, and aids in the process. (it comes from La Rochelle in the West of France) As the copper was deposited uniformly, it would exhibit most of the properties of pure metals, in that they are soft, lustrous, (and usually silvery!) and would have been easily damaged.
For those who are interested, Rochelle salt was/is one of the ingredients used in electroless plating where decorative metals are coated onto polymers. First major use was when Biro pens were introduced to North America in the 1940s.

[dpennings]

thanks for the answers.

Seams like there was a strong bond between the copper and the iron, otherwise the water jacked would have come loose due to different heat expansion

[rwahlgren]

I thought this is what this thread was going to be about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrohydraulic_forming