Oiler (pronounced oi-ler)
(1) A person or device that which is some way
delivers oil.
(2) A worker employed to oil machinery.
(3) Any of several devices, other than pressure
devices, for feeding lubricating oil to a bearing.
(4) In oil exploration, a productive well.
(5) An oilcan.
(6) An oilskin garment, especially a coat.
(7) A ship which uses oil as fuel (archaic).
(8) In admiralty slang, an oil tanker used to
refuel other vessels.
(9) In admiralty slang, an assistant in the
engine room of a ship, senior only to a wiper, mainly responsible for keeping
machinery lubricated (archaic).
(10) In the cleaning kits of firearms, a small
(typically thumb-sized) metal container of oil, often containing an integral
brush.
(11) As an ethnic slur (mostly southern US), a Mexican (sometimes extended to other of Latino appearance.
Circa 1290: The construct was oil + -er. Oil was from the Middle English olyer, oyller & oyellere (the later alternative spellings included oylle, olie, oli, eoli, eoyle, olige, oyll, uile, oile & oyl. Oyler was from the Anglo-Norman olie and the Old French oile, from the Latin oleum (olive oil), from the Ancient Greek ἔλαιον (élaion) (olive oil). The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought most likely to have been borrowed from the Latin –ārius where, as a suffix, it was used to form adjectives from nouns or numerals. In English, the –er suffix, when added to a verb, created an agent noun: the person or thing that doing the action indicated by the root verb. The use in English was reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant -our), from the Latin -ātor & -tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr. When appended to a noun, it created the noun denoting an occupation or describing the person whose occupation is the noun. The meaning “an appliance for distributing oil in machines" was in use by 1861 and was adopted by the British Admiralty in 1916 to describe "navy vessels carrying oil for use by other ships"; although such vessels had been in use for some years, the Royal Navy having begun the conversion from coal to oil a decade earlier, by 1911 only the submarine fleet ran exclusive on oil and coal (sometimes sprayed with oil) still fuelled most of the navy’s vessels.
Evolution of the Ford 427 side-oiler
The side valve (usually called “the flathead”, an
allusion to the almost flat plate covering the combustion chambers) Ford V8 of
1932 is remembered for its vices as well as the many things which made it one of
the great engines of the mid-century. In
the 1930s, those vices could be both forgiven and worked-around but by 1953, it
was still in production and outdated (though in overseas production it would continue,
in French Simca cars until 1961, in Brazilian Fords until 1964 and remarkably, until
1990 in the Simca Unic Marmon Bocquet military truck. For 1954, Ford responded to the modern
overhead valve (OHV) V8s others had introduced with the debut of two new
engines, essentially (by the standards of the time) small and big block
versions of the same design. Known as
the Y-Blocks because of the shape of the castings, they were sturdy pieces of
machinery and addressed many of the problems identified in the flathead over
two decades of production but neither was suited to the evolutionary path the
American automobile would follow during the 1950s.
1962 Ford 406 FE V8 with 3 x 2 barrel carburetors.
That path was not one which anyone in Detroit was
likely to foresee in the late 1940s when the design work on the Y-Blocks began
but by 1954, it was at least competitive with the competition. However, in 1955, Chevrolet introduced their
small-block V8 which was light, compact and free-breathing, not something which
could be said of the Y-Blocks and more importantly, the design afforded a
potential for development which would play out over decades. By contrast, the Y-Blocks’ potential in both
capacity and power output soon plateaued and Ford was forced to resort to exotic
solutions like supercharging, something not practical for low-cost
mass-manufacturing. Ford’s solution was
not one new V8 but three. All released
during 1958, the SD (Super Duty, a large, low revving truck engine), the MEL (a
big block for what were now very large Lincolns and Mercurys) and the FE
(thought at the time a big-block but subsequently listed by pedants as a
mid-block because later castings would out-weigh it by so much). The durable SD would remain in the catalogue
until 1980, its demise prompted only by the implications of the second
oil-shock in 1979, the sole complaint about it being its prodigious thirst. The MEL would last a decade, early attempts
to use it on the race-tracks abandoned because of the penalty imposed by
excessive weight although it did enjoy some success in powerboat racing where
it’s capacity to run reliably at full throttle for sustained periods was much
admired.
Lubrication systems: 1964 Ford 427 FE V8 top oiler (left) & Ford 427 FE V8 side oiler (right).
Although it would quickly earn a stellar
reputation which endures to this day, Ford’s FE V8 engine didn’t enjoy a wholly
auspicious start, associated as it was with the ill-fated Edsel (FE really did
stand for “Ford-Edsel” despite some post-debacle attempts to suggest “Ford Engine”
(MEL stood for Mercury-Edsel- Lincoln)).
Offered initially in several displacements, the most produced in the
1960s would be the 352 & 390 cubic inch (5.8 & 6.5 litre) versions,
both of which briefly were offered in high-performance versions until the
decision was taken to develop such engines as a separate FE branch, the first
fruit of which was the 406 (6.6 litre) which debuted in 1962. The 406 had performed well on Ford’s test-rigs,
its output slightly exceeding the engineers’ projections and when installed in
the new, slippery bodies offered that year, proved fast on the track. The power and speed however came at the cost
of reliability and the increasing speeds on the circuits had exposed weaknesses
in the bottom-end, the main bearing caps “walking” when the vibrations reached
a certain resonance. The solution was to
“cross-bolt” the caps; an addition two securing bolts (installed sideways
through the block) per cap augmenting the pairs mounted in the conventional vertical
position. This approach, still widely used
to this day, proved successful and was carried over when in 1963 the FE was
further enlarged to 425 cubic inches (7.0 litre), Ford labelling the new mill the
427 to align it with the displacement limit used by both NASCAR (National
Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (the International
Automobile Federation and world sport’s dopiest regulatory body)). However, greater capacity meant more power, higher
speeds and increased heat and the 427 began to also to suffer, the higher
internal pressures meaning lubrication to the now cross-bolted main bearings had
become marginal. Ford’s solution was to
reverse the priority with which oil was delivered. The original design (subsequently known as the
“top-oiler”) lubricated first the valve-train at the top of the engine, then
the main bearings which supported the crankshaft. The new process reversed this order and the
design became known as the side-oiler.
1966 Ford 427 FE V8 side oiler with tunnel-port cylinder heads and Kar-Kraft transaxle, the specification used in the GT40s which recorded a 1-2--3 finish at that year's 24 Le Mans 24 hour classic.
Introduced in 1965, the side-oiling proved the
final solution and the 427 became a paragon of reliability, powering even the
Le Mans 24 hour winning GT40s in 1966 & 1967. Today the 427 is perhaps best remembered as the
power-plant in the 427 AC Shelby Cobra (although some of those actually used the
rather more tame FE 428) but in those happy days when one could tick a box and
have what was essentially a racing engine installed in a road car, it was available
also in full-sized machines (the Galaxie), intermediates (the Fairlane) and, at
the tail-end of production, a few (by then somewhat toned down) were even put
in the Cougar, Mercury’s Mustang-based take on the pony-car. By then however, the side-oiler’s days were
numbered because not only was it noisy, apt to be cantankerous and a bit of an
oil-burner, the complex lubrication and cross bolting made it quite expensive
to build, added to which the big bore was at close to the limit the FE block
could accommodate so during the manufacturing process, even a slight shift in
the casting cores meant a scrapped block.
Thus the attraction for most purposes of the 428 with its smaller bore.
Cutaway schematics: The pushrod 427 FE (left) and the 427 SOHC (right).
The side oiler also provided the basis for one engine which wasn’t quite mythical because quite a few were built but remains mysterious because nobody seems quite sure how many but the consensus is it was somewhere in three figures. This was the 427 SOHC (single overhead camshaft (the “sock” in the slang of some)) which for all sorts of reasons never made it onto the circuits for which it was intended nor into even one road car, despite the wishes of many. Popularly known as “the cammer”, even some sixty years on there’s still a mystique surrounding the cammer and if one can’t find an original for sale (one sold at auction in 2021 for US$60,000), from a variety of manufacturers it’s possible still to buy all the bits and pieces needed to build one.
