Design Details of the BMW-801A (2.3MB PDF)
by Miles V. Cave

The AEHS is indebted to Mr. J.L. McClellan and to the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company for their generosity in allowing the publication of this look inside the BMW-801A. This article originally appeared in the November and December, 1942 (Volume 41, Numbers 11 and 12) issues of Aviation magazine, published by McGraw- Hill Publishing Company of New York, NY, USA.

It was reconstructed from microfilm by J.L. McClellan. The reconstruction process used by Mr. McClellan is highly labor intensive, using much level stretching, followed by hand touch-up of lines and clean up of extraneous marks, gray areas, and other image defects.

The microfilm was taken from a tightly bound volume, so that there is some distortion of the images, especially near the binding. It has not been practical to remove or compensate for all the distortions, so none of the illustrations in this reconstruction should be considered reliable sources as to fine details of shape, proportion or spatial relationship. The distortions are, in general, small, and should not detract from a general appreciation of arrangement and relationship. Mr. McClellan has attempted to represent the original layout of the article, but there are some exceptions. Limitations in the compositing tools cause a difference in the text flow relative to the illustrations, compared to the original, so that some changes have been made, to compensate partially for that effect, and the tabular data have been removed from the flow of text and brought together on a single page after the text, partly to make them more accessible, and partly to sidestep problems with page layout.