I was reading an online press release the other day, covering the unveiling of the 2006 C6 Corvette. The horsepower figures on the Z06 performance version are unreal…. 500 NET horsepower, from a small block engine that they somehow managed to squeeze 428 ci out of. If only dreams were money. At any rate, what really got me thinking while reading this article wasn’t the details on the Vette, but a quote from one of GM’s reps. He mentions that this latest incarnation of the tried and true pushrod V8 comes after 90 million predecessors. 90 Million small blocks produced since 1955; from the original 265 to the 400, and everything in between. This inspired some quick curiosity math on my part:
Given that a conservative figure for the dimension of a typical Chevy small block, from flywheel to water pump pulley, is about 27 inches... (Buick, Pontiac, and Olds were typically a bit longer) Now let’s say we were to take all 90,000,000 and line them up, end-to-end. We would wind up with a train of engines that would stretch approximately 61722 kms, or 1.54 times around the circumference of the earth. Or we could look at it this way: Assuming that GM engine production facilities had run continuously for the last 50 years, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... that’s a new small block rolling out the door every 17.52 seconds.
Stay tuned all this week for more fun with math.
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