Williams 265 c.i.d. bus engine taken apart for CADing.  This is the standard and final Williams design, single acting cross head, sliding camshaft, poppet valved, uniflow with a pressure relief valve in the head, in-line 4 cylinder.  There is significant and measurable thermal expansion at the head end of the cylinder block because of the heat of steam at that end and the coolness at the exhaust port end of the cylinder block.  Purportedly this engine would produce close to 500 hp, and it should because of its displacement and robust design.  Piston ring oiling is through a small hole drilled into the side of the cylinder at just above BDC.  At one time this engine was installed in a Bluebird bus.  We donot know what steam generator went with that installation.

There appear to be a couple of potential problems with this engine.  The crankshaft does not have counter-balances with balancing being done with a weight at the end of the crankshaft.  That is not pictured.  Secondly the cam and cam followers are under high loads.  The camshaft is assembled with a long key way machined into the relatively small diameter camshaft.  A long key lays in this key way and then the many individually machinedcams are slid over the key.  Because of the large forces thesecams tend to wear and they shift one way as they push the cam follower up and shift the other way when the cam followerpushes things down.  This little bit of play will tend to effectively lessen the valve opening. We think that the top two cam grinds are way too small to let in enough steam to overcome internal friction.  The Williams were attempting to get high efficiency and they ended up with a low powered engine. 

Boiler Photos:

Peter Nuskey and the Green Monster boiler showing the end with the blower fan.  This is a Babcock & Wilcox type of a boiler made by the famous Harry Peterson for Howard Landon’s Green Monster car, the one with a Doble “F” engine in it.  It is being used as a shop boiler here to run dyno tests on the Williams bus engine.