Mystery cars - Hoffman X-8

Incedible Hoffman X-8 makes an appearance at Pebble Beach.

POSTED IN HTTP://AUTOWEEK.COM  - AUGUST 20, 2012

Among the Packards, Ferraris, and Cobras on the lawn at the 2012 Pebble Beach Concours, there were some wonderful oddballs. One such car was the 1935 Hoffman X-8 that Myron Vernis of Akron, Ohio, brought with him to the Pebble Beach lawn. During the concours, dozens of people could be seen reaching for their programs to search for information on the Hoffman X-8.

Hoffman X-8

From the front, its shield-shaped grille and headlights give the little car a striking, art-deco appeal. In profile and from behind, it looks a bit like a two-thirds scale Tatra. Like the Czech car, it was a novel approach to car-building for its time. It's a steel unibody car, and its engine is mounted behind the passenger compartment, just like a Tatra. Unlike the Hans Ledwinka's creation, however, the X-8's engine is mounted in front of the rear axle, making it a mid-engine car.

The X-8 is powered by—you guessed it--an X-8 engine with eight cylinders, arranged in an X configuration. Henry Ford experimented with X-8 engines but the one in this car is a unique design. While Ford's X-8's were air-cooled flatheads, this car's engine has overhead cams and it's water-cooled. 

Click <here> to see Henry Ford's X-8

The X-8 was built as a prototype by an inventor named Roscoe C. Hoffman of Detroit. It's unclear which carmaker it was intended for, but Vernis believes that either the Fisher brothers or Henry Ford funded the project.

In 1961, Hoffman gave the car to Brooks Stevens as a gift and it remained in the famed designer's museum even after his death in 1995. Stevens' son, David Stevens was on hand with Vernis, eagerly assisting him in explaining just exactly what the X-8 was and what it was doing on the lawn at the most prestigious car show in the world.
Monterey car week is packed with car shows, vintage racing, and auctions. Autoweek will be there providing streaming photo galleries and live coverage of the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, historic racing at Laguna Seca, the Monterey car auctions and plenty more. Go to Autoweek's Pebble Beach home page for complete coverage and live updates.

Click <here> to see a vdeo of Jay Leno discussing the car.

Read more: http://autoweek.com/article/events/incredible-hoffman-x-8-makes-appearance-pebble-beach#ixzz58wtw5Hs5

Henry Ford’s Incredible X-8 engine

Henry Ford’s X-8 engine

Henry Ford had some world-changing ideas—and some other ideas that went nowhere at all. Here’s the story behind his strange but fascinating X-8 engine.  

One notion that captured the imagination of Henry Ford throughout his life was the X-8 engine configuration, and he experimented with the oddball layout in various forms for decades. Despite its obvious shortcomings for automotive use (in our view, anyway) the concept is not as off the wall as it may seem. General Motors launched an extensive two-stroke X-8 development program in the 1930s, and the 1935 Hoffman X-8 prototype (created for the Fisher brothers by engineering consultant Roscoe Hoffman) uses the engine design to good effect. 

Click <here> to see the Hoffman X-8

Though Ford’s experiments through the years included numerous variations, here we’re going to focus on one particular X-8 engine: the 1920-1927 prototype that Ford hoped would eventually replace the venerable 1908-1927 Model T. Let’s jump in for a closer look.

Henry Ford’s patent no. 1,639,333

On the left and below are the drawings for Henry Ford’s patent no. 1,639,333, which he applied for in 1920 and was granted on August 19, 1927. 

The Ford take on the X-8 could be described as two V-4 engines conjoined, one pointing up and one pointing down, but with one notable difference: The single-plane crankshaft has only two throws, one for each plane of four cylinders, front and rear. The two main journals carry caged ball bearings, and there are two camshafts on opposite sides of the engine, driving conventional L-head poppet valve gear.

Much of the design and development work was carried out by Ford’s right-hand engineering man Eugene Farkas (1881-1963), a Hungarian immigrant and a graduate of the prestigious Royal Joseph Technical University in Budapest. Apparently, Ford’s contributions to the X-8 were mainly in vision and supervision, as there were dozens of Ford projects commanding his attention in these years, from railroads to rubber plantations.

While there were water-cooled and overhead-valve versions of the X-8, the primary design settled upon an L-Head layout with air cooling and a fan at each end of the crankshaft. As many as two dozen prototypes of this model were built, and a good handful still exists today, including the example above on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Displacement in these prototypes was typically in the 110-120 cubic-inch range, with a bore and stroke in the neighborhood of 2.5 inches and 3.00 inches, respectively. The flywheel and ring gear doubled as a type of supercharger, but the crankshaft speed was insufficient to produce significant boost, reportedly.


A car was designed to house the X-8 engine in 1925, and with no need for a radiator, the design employed a sloping front doghouse similar to the early air-cooled Franklin. However, by 1926 the X-8 was nowhere near ready for production. Despite years of development, the engine’s cooling and lubrication problems were never solved. As Ford’s inner circle, including his son Edsel, struggled to persuade him to replace the aging Model T, part of the difficulty was in convincing him to drop the troublesome X-8. 

Their arguments won out, and when the Model A was introduced to the public on December 2, 1927, under the hood was a conventional 200.5 CID inline four.