Interesting Nuffield/Morris/MG prototype testing video
Discussion
Assuming that all the cars shown were filmed at the same time, and were in production or about-to-be launched models, the film must be 1950-1952. The cars are a Morris 'MO' Oxford (built 1948-1954), a Morris 'MM' Minor (1948-1953) and an MG TD (1950-1953). Reel 2 has a Wolseley 6/80 (1948-1954) in it as well.
The MOs have the pre-1953 grille, and the film is still under the Nuffield Organisation brand. The BMC merger happened in April 1952, so we're probably looking at 1950/1951.
Morris at the time probably had the best testing/proving/QC procedures of any mass-production car maker outside Detroit, and was certainly in the same ball park as the American 'Big Three' at the time. Shame that most of it was thrown out of the window following the merger with Austin. Just as it was Morris which developed the first flow-production and lean management techniques in the 1930s...which were largely ignored by the rest of the industry until F.G. Woollard's writings on the subject were rediscovered in the late 1950s by Kiichiro and Sakichi Toyoda conducting research on their own ideas for reorganisation their production system.
30 years after this film it was all gone under a sea of Marinas and Itals.
The MOs have the pre-1953 grille, and the film is still under the Nuffield Organisation brand. The BMC merger happened in April 1952, so we're probably looking at 1950/1951.
Morris at the time probably had the best testing/proving/QC procedures of any mass-production car maker outside Detroit, and was certainly in the same ball park as the American 'Big Three' at the time. Shame that most of it was thrown out of the window following the merger with Austin. Just as it was Morris which developed the first flow-production and lean management techniques in the 1930s...which were largely ignored by the rest of the industry until F.G. Woollard's writings on the subject were rediscovered in the late 1950s by Kiichiro and Sakichi Toyoda conducting research on their own ideas for reorganisation their production system.
30 years after this film it was all gone under a sea of Marinas and Itals.
The Austin Morris merger was certainly not good for either firm. Austin made the mass produced gruel and Nuffield stuff was a lot nicer. The Z Magnette and Pathfinder were both very promising designs, and the Minor was a much better car as a prototype with the OHV Wolseley 8 engine than the dreadful 803cc A Series it was lumbered with. Nuffield with Morris, MG, Riley and Wolseley would have flourished in the sixties before it drowned in a sea of A60 based crap.
Still, at least the Mini and 1100 appeared.
Still, at least the Mini and 1100 appeared.
Touring442 said:
The Austin Morris merger was certainly not good for either firm. Austin made the mass produced gruel and Nuffield stuff was a lot nicer. The Z Magnette and Pathfinder were both very promising designs, and the Minor was a much better car as a prototype with the OHV Wolseley 8 engine than the dreadful 803cc A Series it was lumbered with. Nuffield with Morris, MG, Riley and Wolseley would have flourished in the sixties before it drowned in a sea of A60 based crap.
Still, at least the Mini and 1100 appeared.
If it had been a true merger of equals, with the best parts of each firm taken on a rational basis, BMC could absolutely have florished. Still, at least the Mini and 1100 appeared.
Austin had one of the world's most modern integrated car factories in the post-1950 redeveloped Longbridge, which in terms of technology and capacity far eclipsed anything in the Nuffield Organisation at the time. I'd also judge Austin to be superior in engines. Nuffield may have had the fairly decent X-Series, the Riley Twin-Cam and the various Wolseley OHV/OHC heritage units but they were still making old-fashioned sidevalve dross for their bread-and-butter cars. Meanwhile Austin had (after cribbing from Chevrolet) a superb range of modern, efficient, durable OHV engines which would become the A- and B-Series, plus the 2.2-litre unit from the Sixteen which would go into the taxi cabs and the light commercials, and the six-pot from the Sheerline. The implementation of the A-Series in the Minor was nasty, and sadly (since it was essentially BMC's first corporate engineering project) a sad taste of the way things were going, with a ridiculously low final drive to get decent performance which made the car horribly fussy and smashed the bottom end to bits.
Morris, via Issigonis, had been gifted superb mass-market cars in the MM and MO (and to a lesser extent the MS) and the makings of some great sports cars with the MG Y-type and TD. When Austins were still flabby, tottery things built on chassis with cam-and-peg steering and hydro-mechanical brakes, Morris had unibody cars with rack and pinion steering, fully hydraulic brakes, excellent road manners and superb space utilisation.
Nuffield's production facilities, consisting of a dozen or more plants scattered around the Midlands as a legacy of William Morris growing his business by buying out his suppliers, were under-sized and the supply chain was complicated. This was exactly why Morris had developed such good accounting and production methods - it was starting at a disadvantage and so had to make the best use of what it had. Which is exactly the same reason why Toyota developed its famous production system along similar lines, at a time when capital, labour and raw materials were scarce in Japan and car demand was high.
The early post-war years for Nuffield were a bit of a mess with the Morris/Wolseley badge-engineered range sitting awkwardly with the low-volume and out-dated MGs and Rileys. But Gerald Palmer really seemed to be working on the right lines with the Magnette/4-44 and the Pathfinder/6-90 twins, as well as overseeing the modernisation of Issigonis' MO design into the Oxford Series II and the (sadly aborted) plan for a similar update of the Minor. If a Nuffield range along those lines had been implemented with decent engines - an OHV successor to the X-Series to replace the ancient sidevalves and perhaps a larger OHC unit for the upmarket cars (perhaps in single- and twin-cam form for Wolseley/Riley) then they'd have been on to a winner.
If BMC had genuinely combined Austin's engines and drivetrains and its production facilities with Nuffield's accounting, production system, R&D and testing techniques, plus the Morris body, steering and suspension technology and the Issigonis/Palmer design philosophy (imagine those two working together as a Technical Director/Chief Engineer combo?) they'd have done much better.
But instead, as you say, nearly everything was standardised on Austin lines so the Farina-B A55 was still a soggy-handling mess while the Series V Oxford was worse to drive and not as spacious as the Series III model it replaced.
To be honest, I'm far less interested in retreading a well worn set of tyres on British motor Industry history, than seeing the very beginning of datalogging! In motorsport, datalogging didn't get going until the late 60s, with on-board tape recorders that could at a picnh record one lap (See Peter Wright's book) Today, a single team may record Gigabytes of data every race, analysing it as they go in the pits and by the Internet back at base. Even club racers today will have datalogger, and road cars record their performance and report when necessary via the OBD system. While here were the very first attempts at doing it. Fascinating!
John
John
2xChevrons said:
If it had been a true merger of equals, with the best parts of each firm taken on a rational basis, BMC could absolutely have florished.
Austin had one of the world's most modern integrated car factories in the post-1950 redeveloped Longbridge, which in terms of technology and capacity far eclipsed anything in the Nuffield Organisation at the time. I'd also judge Austin to be superior in engines. Nuffield may have had the fairly decent X-Series, the Riley Twin-Cam and the various Wolseley OHV/OHC heritage units but they were still making old-fashioned sidevalve dross for their bread-and-butter cars. Meanwhile Austin had (after cribbing from Chevrolet) a superb range of modern, efficient, durable OHV engines which would become the A- and B-Series, plus the 2.2-litre unit from the Sixteen which would go into the taxi cabs and the light commercials, and the six-pot from the Sheerline. The implementation of the A-Series in the Minor was nasty, and sadly (since it was essentially BMC's first corporate engineering project) a sad taste of the way things were going, with a ridiculously low final drive to get decent performance which made the car horribly fussy and smashed the bottom end to bits.
Morris, via Issigonis, had been gifted superb mass-market cars in the MM and MO (and to a lesser extent the MS) and the makings of some great sports cars with the MG Y-type and TD. When Austins were still flabby, tottery things built on chassis with cam-and-peg steering and hydro-mechanical brakes, Morris had unibody cars with rack and pinion steering, fully hydraulic brakes, excellent road manners and superb space utilisation.
Nuffield's production facilities, consisting of a dozen or more plants scattered around the Midlands as a legacy of William Morris growing his business by buying out his suppliers, were under-sized and the supply chain was complicated. This was exactly why Morris had developed such good accounting and production methods - it was starting at a disadvantage and so had to make the best use of what it had. Which is exactly the same reason why Toyota developed its famous production system along similar lines, at a time when capital, labour and raw materials were scarce in Japan and car demand was high.
The early post-war years for Nuffield were a bit of a mess with the Morris/Wolseley badge-engineered range sitting awkwardly with the low-volume and out-dated MGs and Rileys. But Gerald Palmer really seemed to be working on the right lines with the Magnette/4-44 and the Pathfinder/6-90 twins, as well as overseeing the modernisation of Issigonis' MO design into the Oxford Series II and the (sadly aborted) plan for a similar update of the Minor. If a Nuffield range along those lines had been implemented with decent engines - an OHV successor to the X-Series to replace the ancient sidevalves and perhaps a larger OHC unit for the upmarket cars (perhaps in single- and twin-cam form for Wolseley/Riley) then they'd have been on to a winner.
If BMC had genuinely combined Austin's engines and drivetrains and its production facilities with Nuffield's accounting, production system, R&D and testing techniques, plus the Morris body, steering and suspension technology and the Issigonis/Palmer design philosophy (imagine those two working together as a Technical Director/Chief Engineer combo?) they'd have done much better.
But instead, as you say, nearly everything was standardised on Austin lines so the Farina-B A55 was still a soggy-handling mess while the Series V Oxford was worse to drive and not as spacious as the Series III model it replaced.
The 803 cc A Series, as designed by Austin, was utter crap. I read somewhere that Morris Engines in Coventry (Eddie Maher?) was responsible for sorting it out and coming up with the superb little 948 c unit. They did development work such as the Cooper S unit as well as building it and they may (?) have designed the C Series but I'm not sure about that. Austin had one of the world's most modern integrated car factories in the post-1950 redeveloped Longbridge, which in terms of technology and capacity far eclipsed anything in the Nuffield Organisation at the time. I'd also judge Austin to be superior in engines. Nuffield may have had the fairly decent X-Series, the Riley Twin-Cam and the various Wolseley OHV/OHC heritage units but they were still making old-fashioned sidevalve dross for their bread-and-butter cars. Meanwhile Austin had (after cribbing from Chevrolet) a superb range of modern, efficient, durable OHV engines which would become the A- and B-Series, plus the 2.2-litre unit from the Sixteen which would go into the taxi cabs and the light commercials, and the six-pot from the Sheerline. The implementation of the A-Series in the Minor was nasty, and sadly (since it was essentially BMC's first corporate engineering project) a sad taste of the way things were going, with a ridiculously low final drive to get decent performance which made the car horribly fussy and smashed the bottom end to bits.
Morris, via Issigonis, had been gifted superb mass-market cars in the MM and MO (and to a lesser extent the MS) and the makings of some great sports cars with the MG Y-type and TD. When Austins were still flabby, tottery things built on chassis with cam-and-peg steering and hydro-mechanical brakes, Morris had unibody cars with rack and pinion steering, fully hydraulic brakes, excellent road manners and superb space utilisation.
Nuffield's production facilities, consisting of a dozen or more plants scattered around the Midlands as a legacy of William Morris growing his business by buying out his suppliers, were under-sized and the supply chain was complicated. This was exactly why Morris had developed such good accounting and production methods - it was starting at a disadvantage and so had to make the best use of what it had. Which is exactly the same reason why Toyota developed its famous production system along similar lines, at a time when capital, labour and raw materials were scarce in Japan and car demand was high.
The early post-war years for Nuffield were a bit of a mess with the Morris/Wolseley badge-engineered range sitting awkwardly with the low-volume and out-dated MGs and Rileys. But Gerald Palmer really seemed to be working on the right lines with the Magnette/4-44 and the Pathfinder/6-90 twins, as well as overseeing the modernisation of Issigonis' MO design into the Oxford Series II and the (sadly aborted) plan for a similar update of the Minor. If a Nuffield range along those lines had been implemented with decent engines - an OHV successor to the X-Series to replace the ancient sidevalves and perhaps a larger OHC unit for the upmarket cars (perhaps in single- and twin-cam form for Wolseley/Riley) then they'd have been on to a winner.
If BMC had genuinely combined Austin's engines and drivetrains and its production facilities with Nuffield's accounting, production system, R&D and testing techniques, plus the Morris body, steering and suspension technology and the Issigonis/Palmer design philosophy (imagine those two working together as a Technical Director/Chief Engineer combo?) they'd have done much better.
But instead, as you say, nearly everything was standardised on Austin lines so the Farina-B A55 was still a soggy-handling mess while the Series V Oxford was worse to drive and not as spacious as the Series III model it replaced.
The A60/Oxford stuff did sell quite well but Peugeot went and took their markets overseas with the 404 - looked similar but much, much better made.
Gerald Palmer was a very talented engineer and the equal of Issigonis. I recommend reading his biography if you haven't already.
The Jowett Javelin is a remarkable design really and the Pathfinder with torsion bars and a rear axle with coil springs and radius arms plus transverse links was impressive stuff for 1954.
This should have had a long and prosperous life - what a waste.
Touring442 said:
The 803 cc A Series, as designed by Austin, was utter crap. I read somewhere that Morris Engines in Coventry (Eddie Maher?) was responsible for sorting it out and coming up with the superb little 948 c unit. They did development work such as the Cooper S unit as well as building it and they may (?) have designed the C Series but I'm not sure about that.
The original 803cc with the 'bent wire' crankshaft certainly had its bottom-end weaknesses, and offered little to no power advantage over the 917cc Morris sidevalve it replaced due to the poor initial manifold design when teamed with the Weslake siamese-port head, which offered good potential efficiency but needed correct and unconventional manifolds to work to its best (something which wouldn't be properly acheived until the 1980s with the A-Plus version). I don't know enough about, or have enough experience with, the 803 to agree or disagree whether its flaws made it 'complete crap', but the 948 was certainly much better!Morris Engines certainly designed the C-Series, which is why it is very different in lay-out to the Austin-penned A- and B-, which are fundamentally different-sized versions of each other. The C- has its camshaft on the opposite side, an integral intake gallery in the head, very different head bolt arrangement and skewed main bearing caps. It's also a heavy, over-sized, slow-revving lump of an engine, reflecting Morris' problems with its previous OHC and OHV sixes which had reliability issues so they were playing it safe when handed the brief for the new corporate 'six.
2xChevrons said:
It's also a heavy, over-sized, slow-revving lump of an engine
No better or worse than the Vauxhall and Ford straight sixes though? The 3 litre/MGC redesign was a bit of a cock up though. 120 bhp in 1968 when the BMW 2500 SOHC was doing 150. BMC had really lost the plot by that point though. What on earth were they thinking? Palmer had designed a straight six DOHC using MGA twin cam bits in the fifties - that would have been a superb thing once fully tested.
The 803 A Series also had a bypass oil filter system that didn't really filter oil. 10'000 miles and many were just shagged out.
Best A Series was probably the 998 - whisper quiet idle and superb economy. The A Plus in the Metro could idle at 600 rpm like a sewing machine. I spoke at length to David Vizard once who offered his services to BL but was rebuffed. He built a 1275GT Mini in the seventies that he toured the US with on an economy run, regularly getting 50-60 mpg whilst having the same power output as a standard car - shows how good a design the A Series was.
Touring442 said:
No better or worse than the Vauxhall and Ford straight sixes though? The 3 litre/MGC redesign was a bit of a cock up though. 120 bhp in 1968 when the BMW 2500 SOHC was doing 150. BMC had really lost the plot by that point though. What on earth were they thinking?
Palmer had designed a straight six DOHC using MGA twin cam bits in the fifties - that would have been a superb thing once fully tested.
The power/litre figures don't seem much different from the Ford Zephyr or the Vauxhall P-type Velox/Cresta engines. But having driven both those cars and a variety of C-Series-powered Austin Westminsters the C-Series certainly feels stodgier and less willing than either of those engines. Apparently the Cresta engine weighs 200kg dry, while the C-Series was a whopper at 277kg. The Vauxhall engine also has square cylinder dimensions, against the C-'s stroke being nine mil longer than its bore. Palmer had designed a straight six DOHC using MGA twin cam bits in the fifties - that would have been a superb thing once fully tested.
But it is a very sturdy and reliable motor, which is what Morris was aiming for. Probably because it is hampered by its rather restricted 'breathing' so it can't make enough power to really trouble its over-built component parts.
The revamp for the MGC and 3-Litre was, as you say, typical of the farce of late-era BMC, as was ignoring that their Australian arm had produced a six-cylinder version of the B-Series which was lighter, smaller and more powerful than their own effort.
I've also read (although with no really strong sources) about the ideas for a twin-cam head option for the C-Series for use in MGs and Rileys, which supposedly might explain why the stock engine, intended therefore only for Austin and Morris fare, was so lacklustre and strangled. Of course the problems with the Twin-Cam B-Series would probably have deterred BMC from going on with the idea, as would the (self-inflicted?) lack of success of the Pathfinder and the Two-Point-Six. Even if those problems proved to be very easily fixed with a bit of investigation.
Len Lord probably had a hand in all of this - his decision to back Issigonis and basically fire Palmer wasn't a good one in retrospect. I bet the 1100 and Mini didn't make the profits that the simple, reliable Minor did. Given time, the MGA TC's engine issues would have been sorted - it was down to carb vibration apparently making the mixture go lean. GP was a far more hands on engineer than Issigonis.
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