One of the basic truths that we hold to be self-evident around here is that if you are reading BangShift you love engines. You like the noise they make, the smells they give off, the parts and pieces that make them tick, and the work they can get done at a race track, on the street, in your tractor, or powering your home when the lights go out. This film called Engines: The Nations Power was made by Chevrolet in 1940 and it isn’t so much a Chevy ad as much as it is a look at the power plants that literally kept a nation moving, a nation that was unknowingly on the brink of a global war.
We love the way that the narrator talks about power and engines and frankly the very idea of producing an engine is elevated to some sort of patriotic accomplishment on the order of commanding an army! The pride in the guy’s voice when he talks about how many are built and how much work they get done on a yearly basis in the country is cool.
Of course the shots of the engines are the thing we dig the most, especially the behemoth old industrial piston engines and other stuff that simply doesn’t really exist in today’s world. Ok, they exist but we do not rely on them like they did back when this was made. The footage of parts being manufactured and engines being assembled in a Chevrolet plant are cool. Inline engines are the order of the day here when it comes to cars. The small block V8 was still 15 years off in the distance.
