VINTAGE SMOKE
SUPERCHARGED CUMMINS
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the diesel engine was rising to meet the needs of a market growing ever more friendly. The support infrastructure was improving and diesels had made leaps and bounds in output, power density, reliability and user-friendliness. One of those improved diesels came from the Cummins Engine Company.
The engine that would put Cummins into the big leagues began production in 1933 and was designated the Model H. So successful was this diesel that it became the cornerstone for a corporate history that has passed the century mark and shows no signs of fading away. You can see the more detailed two part story of the long history of the Model H and all its derivatives in the April and May 2019 issues of Diesel World. The Model H started as a good design and improvements of all types would follow.
One update that yielded a significant boost in power came for 1937 in the form of a supercharger. They knew then, as we know now, there is no good excuse for a naturally aspirated diesel. Implementation of practical forced induction had held things up and it took a transplanted Austrian engineer to develop a practical, affordable supercharger that helped move Cummins way up the industry power curve. Even better it cam from a company based in Indianapolis, less than 50 miles away from Cummins’ Columbus, Indiana, home.
ALPHABET SOUP: MADE SENSE AT THE TIME
Cummins had a somewhat incomprehensible engine nomenclature system in the early days and we need to outline it here before we go farther. Cummins historians have dubbed it “alphabet soup.” It started with a basic one letter engine model series identifier, such as “H.” To that could be added more designators to further define the engine’s intended purpose.
In the earliest days of the H series diesels, adding a
“B” indicated an automotive application, e.g. “HB.” The HB standard build-out often included automotive style mounting points, a generator, automotive style water pump, possibly a fan, automotive style flywheel and bellhousing... all subject to the customer’s needs, of course. The “BI” (“I” for Industrial) were the so called “mobile industrial” engines (e.g. “HBI”). They were intended for a variety of uses, including heavy off-highway such as graders, cranes or crawlers, but also in stationary jobs. They might include some automotive-like features but most likely would be built to match a customer’s specification. Just an “I” designation (e.g. “HI”) indicated a stationary industrial powerplant. “IP” (e.g. “HIP”) indicated an industrial engine on a base with a radiator and fan and possibly a clutch and power take-off. “HM” was the marine version. HGA was a generator setup. An “S,” for supercharged, was another letter that could be added to any engine so-equipped starting in 1937, such as the HBIS in this story. Model H engines also had a numeric designator, 400 for the four-cylinder and 600 for the six-cylinder. These numbers happened to also roughly coincide with the displacement range, the 400 being 448 cubic inches and the 600 at 672 cubic inches.
The alphabet soup was served into the early ‘50s and then gradually began to fade away. It contained many contradictions and could change without warning. An
example of that was when larger main bearings were introduced in 1935 and all the H-line were designated the HB series. The earlier engines became “HA” by default. A plain “HB” was still an automotive engine to which all the other letters could be added, but then we have the HBI and the other letters to stir around in the soup. While the sales and service literature is not always consistent, it’s relatively easy to figure things out.
THE SUPER H
By 1937, the H-series had undergone many small improvements that made the supercharger possible. One of the more significant was that previously mentioned upgrade to the stronger crankshaft for 1935 with main bearings were increased in diameter from 3.250 to 4.50-inches. The HA was originally rated for a maximum of 125 horsepower at 1800 rpm and 420 lbs-ft at 500 rpm. The HB updates brought it up to 150 horsepower at 1800 rpm and 500 lbs-ft at 800 rpm. The addition of the Schwitzer-cummins supercharger gave the HBS engine 200 horsepower at 1800 rpm and 625 lbs-ft at 800 rpm.
The compression ratio was dropped on the blown engine from 17:1 to 14:1. Fuel delivery at 1800 rpm was increased from 28 cc’s/500 revolutions with 0.020” orifices to 41 cc’s. Yes, that is an arcane way to measure delivery. According to Keith Baylor, that is how the Single Disc pump test stand measured it; 500 revolutions of the pump and end result should be the specified amount of fuel. Fuel rail pressures were increased from 120 psi at governed speed to 135 psi and, yes, the Cummins single disc system was an early form of a common rail system. Boost pressure is not listed in any publications we found specific to the HBS line, but in some other applications the Schwitzer-cummins supercharger delivered 8-10 psi and the HBS line most likely fell into this range.
SUPERSEDED
The HBS line gave way to the 743 cubic inch model NHS 4-valves (and the NR, 2-valves with the same displacement) starting in 1945. The 672 cubic inch HB line continued in some form or other until 1970, though it wasn’t a “mainline” engine after about 1956. The HBS supercharged coexisted with the 743 cubic inch, 275 horsepower NHBS supercharged from ‘45 into 1954. By then, Cummins was in the midst of their troubles with the Double Disc injection pumps and moving towards the PT system. Also, the superchargers were giving way to turbochargers. From what we can see, the last of the supercharged HB and NH diesels were gone after 1956 but in the 1960s, the C180 engine was supercharged, again using a Schwitzer blower.
SCHWITZER-CUMMINS SUPERCHARGERS
The Switzer-cummins supercharger was a positive displacement pump invented by Louis Schwitzer (18801967). It was similar to what we know as a Roots blower (as used on the GM 2-strokes), which was invented in the 1860s for supplying air to blast furnaces in steel manufacture. Schwitzer has often been credited with building the first positive displacement supercharger in the early 1920s but Gottlieb Daimler used Roots blowers on engines as
early as 1900. We don’t know all the contextual details to make the call on who was first and with what but Schwitzer had a supercharger on the market by 1930. Schwitzer was also a pioneer in developing centrifugal blowers and turbochargers and all we have mentioned here is just the “tip-o-the-iceberg” on a big list of technological innovations he made in a long career.
The company he formed with Laurence G. Cummins in 1918 began in Indianapolis, Indiana, more to manufacture liquid pumps and air moving machinery than it was to build superchargers. Just to settle the obvious question, Laurence Cummins had no connection to Clessie Cummins and the engine company, though because of the name there must have been a distant familial thread at least. Clessie Cummins’ son, Lyle, was consulted for this story and backs up the lack of a direct connection, either family or business. He did say that Clessie Cummins and Louis Schwitzer were acquainted professionally.
Schwitzer was an engine nut and, in fact, won the first race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909 (not the 500). He remained on the Speedway Technical Committee until 1945 and is considered one of the founding fathers of the Indy 500 race. Before he was the President and Chief engineer of Schwitzer-cummins, he worked for Pierce-arrow, and Marmon and had a hand in designing some famous technology for those companies. In his later years, Schwitzer became an Indianapolis philanthropist and you can see his name on buildings and institutions all over that city.
The Schwitzer-cummins supercharger was an easy choice for the Deusenberg-built, Cummins-powered race cars in their legendary first try at the Indy 500 in 1934. These cars used highly modified Model H four-cylinder engines. That’s probably where the connection was made to add blowers to the production HB in 1937. Concurrently,
Schwitzer had also developed centrifugal superchargers and these were fitted to the Lycoming engines used in Auburn and Cord automobiles. Schwitzer-cummins blowers also ended up on Cat, Mack and International diesels in the ensuing years.
Schwitzer-cummins became Schwitzer Corporation in
1957 and had already begun producing lightweight turbochargers. Schwitzer licensed Holset to produce some of the earliest turbochargers in Europe. Eventually Cummins Engine acquired Holset, so there’s one small connection at least. Schwitzer lasted into the early 1990s, still in Indy, and then the core of it’s turbocharger operation became a part of Borg-warner.
CONTEXT
Those 200 horsepower put the Cummins HBS and all the derivatives at the top of the power heap in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In it’s displacement and package size range, nothing could beat it. It isn’t clear just how many trucks were powered by the HBS but they would have been the trucking industry’s barn burners. Cummins Applications Engineer and Cummins historian Keith Baylor says, “I’ll bet it was not much different than later years, where the fleets ran base models and wildcatters drove the hotrods.”