German engine?

If you look at early LZ concept cars, Stout Scarabs, some of the weird stuff Ford was studying, the backbone/cross suspension small cars in the Benz museums, Tatras/Skodas, etc. there were lots of minds running with similar ideas in the thirties. I think if you lined up all of this stuff you would find all of them influencing each other!
 
As Porsche worked for Ledwinka (Tatra) before he was given the "Volkswagen" project no wonder they share some designs like the air cooled rear engine and the central tube chassis design. The VW's front suspension however was also used on the Auto Union Grand Prix race cars.

Ford US did business with Nazi Germany until the US joined the war in 1941. Actually they exported trucks to support the low output of the Germany plants and helped mobilizing the Wehrmacht. In return Cologne shipped V8 Deutsch-bodied covertibles via the Dutch Amsterdam Ford plant to the US.
 
DavidG said:
Ventilo,
What is your documentation for the claims you make in your second paragraph?
Click to expand...

Very well documented in this book (incl. photos):
Rosellen, Hanns-Peter: ”… und trotzdem vorwärts”, Zyklam-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. (1986), ISBN 3-88767-077-9

Rosellen wrote the best books on the German Ford history - unfortunately out-of-print and in German only.
 
The reason I ask it that the claim that somehow there was reciprocity in what would have been a significant amount of trucks versus a handful of Deutsch-bodied makes no sense whatsoever.
 
ventilo said:
Very well documented in this book (incl. photos):
Rosellen, Hanns-Peter: ”… und trotzdem vorwärts”, Zyklam-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. (1986), ISBN 3-88767-077-9

Rosellen wrote the best books on the German Ford history - unfortunately out-of-print and in German only.
Click to expand...

I'm sure that Bruce must have a copy. He probably picked it up when he was about 8 years old, living in Germany. I think he wrote a book report on it in the third grade. :)
 
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Russia buil the TU_4, which was a copy of the B-29. Several of these landed in Russia after bombing Japan, due to either fuel or mechanical problems. One thing they couldn't make at that5t time was the tires, which they bought form war surplus after the war. Great movie of this on Utbe.
 
A friend who is an airplane freak told me something interesting...ALL the Russian bombers made after their B-29 clone used the same fuselage cross section as the B-29. They made their own jet bomber designs more or less corresponding to what we were doing in the '50's and '60's, but all had the same diameter and cross section as a B-29.
I guess they REALLY liked those jigs!
 
I'll try to bring this thread back to topic a little bit ;)

Here's a photo taken on a former Soviet air base in Eastern Germany featuring a Soviet DC-3 clone and some real Fords:
p1010399whoej.jpg
 
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