By the Numbers: How Ford Built 15 Million Flatheads
This story first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.
Making a powerful engine is easy. Making 15 million of them requires something more.
The simplest stuff often takes the most work. That was certainly the case for the flathead. Ford’s quest to create an affordable, mass-production V-8 required a $50 million investment (more than $1 billion in today’s dollars).
Ford design engineer Charles Sorensen’s strategy was to integrate as many components as possible into a single elaborate casting to save cost, weight, and machining. FoMoCo’s final design combined eight cylinders, the upper half of the crankcase, oil galleries, coolant passages, the flywheel housing, and all intake and exhaust runners into a single iron casting.
Two Ford Model A four-cylinder water pumps were employed to save cost. The “flat” heads were drilled and tapped for spark plugs, and they provided combustion-chamber clearance for the opening valves. While the intake runners were nicely direct, exhaust passages had to wrap either around the ends of the block or between the two center cylinders. To resolve overheating issues, water pumps were moved from the heads to the block after a few years of production. Carburetion advanced from a single- to a two-barrel Stromberg riding atop a two-plane intake manifold in 1934.
The result was a genuinely mass-production V-8, with a single Dearborn, Michigan, foundry supplying 3000 engines per day to 33 Ford assembly plants. Machining required less than three hours. A bare block became a fully assembled V-8 in two hours.
The engine at launch delivered five more horses than Chevy’s overhead-valve six and was notably lighter and more compact. Pricing initially ranged between $460 and $650 (about $10,000 to $14,000 today). No wonder it was a hit. Nearly 100,000 customers placed orders for the ’32 Ford V-8 sight unseen. By the time production ended, more than 15 million had been built.
