Ernst Fuhrmann (figure 7) was only made an honorary professor by the university of Vienna in 1977. At that time, he had already been the chairman of the board at Porsche for five years, not exactly the best years for the company. In the beginning of the 1950s they were much more successful and this period determined the fame of the later professor.
The project with the number '547' was inofficially named after him. It was all about changing the engine, which was still very much based on the Beetle-engine, into a racing engine of that time. Don't make the mistake of thinking, oh, that shouldn't be too difficult, then, the Beetle engine was only so robust, as long as high performance wasn't demanded.
At least the Porsche people had already replaced the, typical for a boxer-engine, long intake manifolds with more carburettors. The quantity of oil was also increased and given additional cooling and filtration. Indeed, the step taken by Fuhrmann was more complicated. After all, he was well qualified, since his doctorate was all about the valve-drives of racing engines.
The construction of a boxer engine remains relatively simple, if one uses only one camshaft (ohv). If however, one want's to modify it by fitting DOHCs, then 4 camshafts are needed. So, Fuhrmann took the cams off the standard camshaft and gave it a small bevel-gear. He used thess to drive two bevel-shafts to the two cylinders on each side, they were directly geared with the lower exhaust camshaft and with the others, through a further lay shaft.
So, apart from the four camshafts, four other shafts were needed as well. Nevertheless, as one can see in the above table, the performance of the engine was much higher. Of course, it was still a two-valve engine, indeed the valves were now placed in a V-shaped array. In addition, it now had a double ignition, which could be differently adjusted through either of the two distributors. In the first engines they were flanged onto the intake- camshafts (see picture 1.), but because all the play in the complicated drive system accumulated there, they were later directly connected to the crankshaft (see picture 2.) By the way, because the oil-cooling took place outside of the engine, the oil-cooling inside the air-filter casing could be done away with. It became much more slender and all the cylinders were given the same amount of cooling. The armoured piping from the additional pump to the oil-cooler can clearly be seen in picture 1. Here, the air-deflectors which cased the cylinder, are also absent, making it easier to recognise that this is in fact, an air cooled engine.
