50 Years Of The Small Block

So there you are, one fine spring day in May 1952, designing the first new Chevrolet V-8 since 1919. It's a nice solid design. Ed "Crankshaft" Kelley established the basic layout by shrinking down the famous 1949 Cadillac V-8 to 231 cubic inches. Your team has been careful to design all the parts in the traditional way the guys in manufacturing are comfortable with so nobody has to break any habits or try anything new and scary. No surprises--that's the Chevy way, hold the fashionable frills. This thinking has given Chevrolet an (admittedly narrowing) edge over Ford in the sales charts for a decade and a half.

Then wham! A dervish named Ed Cole whirls in, hell bent on shaking up the organization. He and his sidekick Harry Barr headed the team that designed the overhead-valve Cadillac V-8. But that was years ago. Technology marches on. Forget no surprises. Ed's battle cry is: "Kick the hell out of the status quo." He and Harry walk through the engine engineering department and slam-dunk all your work in the ash can. "Hey, waitaminit!" you stammer, "they're supposed to start tooling that engine in, like, 15 weeks!"

Ed Cole.

The loudest stammerers were probably reassigned to less stressful work elsewhere within GM. Cole and Barr, along with Al Kolbe and a tight-knit group of other innovators, assembled a dream team of GM's best and brightest, tripling the size of Chevrolet's engineering staff in 15 months. That this team designed, developed, and tooled an all-new engine (and an 85-percent-new car) between May 1952 and September 1954 is impressive--especially considering it was designed using lead pencils and slide rules. That such a hastily conceived engine thrives some 50 years and 90 plus million engines later is downright astonishing.

Loren "Bob" Papenguth was one of the whiz kids plucked out of the GM research department in June 1952 to work miracles with the mouse-motor's valvetrain. He remembers an articulate, hard-nosed but soft-hearted Ed Cole as a contagious workaholic who loved what he was doing so much that he inspired the same dedication in others.

"Every morning, Ed would show up at the experimental operations on St. Aubin at about 7:30. Anybody who had anything to do with what was hot then would gather there and go through the day's Q&A period with Ed about what was going on."