Found! One of the elusive Crosley-Fageol flat-eights
Back when I had dreams of building the CrosRod, one of the engines I envisioned powering the wee beastie was a Fageol flat-8 engine. Built as a boat motor when Fageol owned the rights to the Crosley four-cylinder in the late 1950s, Fageol simply took one regular block and one mirror-block (with the intake and exhaust on the opposite side of the block), then mated them together using a special crankcase and four special connecting rods.
I quickly discarded the idea when I realized that these engines are so rare, nobody I’d spoken with had ever seen one. Even if I wanted to find a mirror block (not as rare, but still rare) and build my own, I’d still need to have some ultra-specialized parts fabricated. But I remained enthralled with the idea, and thus was very delighted by Jim Bollman’s selection for this month’s Crosley of the Month on the Crosley Automobile Club’s website: a genuine Fageol flat-8, owned by Mike Grimes out in California. Mike said he stumbled onto it about 30 years ago:
A guy in Palmdale was building up a Willys pickup with a 455 Olds in it and he spotted this car in a junk yard in the LA area. The car had 12″ mag wheels on it which he felt were perfect for the front end of the Willys, so he bought them. As he got ready to leave the man at the junkyard stated that now he could run the car through the crusher. Not liking what he heard he bought the rest of the car and hauled it home so the engine wouldn’t be destroyed. When I heard about it I looked at it and he sold the engine to me for what he had paid for the car, with the condition that I had to take the whole thing.
The car consisted of the chassis without a body and had been partially cut up. It was pretty crude so that wasn’t an issue. I kept the VW front end, Fiat transmission and Crosley rear end, and of course the engine. Upon inspecting the engine I found that it had a pretty poor lashup to secure the flywheel to the crankshaft, no way to tighten the single bolt (sort of like a VW) and that the flywheel had come loose and broken two of the dowel pins. It probably made a real ugly sound when running and that’s why it ended up in the junkyard. The frame was pretty well rusted so I scrapped it.
As he describes the engine, it
uses a modified Crosley crankcase of the left side and the right side half is milled out of a BIG piece of aluminum, both halves held together with through bolts extending outward to the cylinder block bases. The right cylinder block is a Fageol mirror image block so that all of the manifolds are on the top of the engine. There is no offset between the right and left blocks so the rod caps have flanges on them to accommodate articulating connecting rods on the right side, like in a radial aircraft engine. It has two Crosley distributors, one for the right side and one for the left. The left block is a Crosley military block with the governor removed and the oil pump in its place. All in all it’s a pretty clever arrangement.
It uses a wet sump system and both tower shafts for the camshafts operate off the same bevel gear. Mike said it’s all actually very simple, and he has plans on restoring it in the near future.
As far as its rarity, Mike said that Nick Brajevich told him that Fageol built just 13 of these engines. Has anybody else seen another? And can anybody tell us who built a sports car around Mike’s engine?
