The Hudson Super Six engine in 1929 represented the culmination of years of refinement of an engine design first introduced in 1916. Hudson filed patents on the "Super Six Principle" in December of 1915, and immediately began producing and selling engines embodying the newly patented design principles. Although the patent covers a number of refinements to engine design, the most significant was the concept of counter-balancing the crankshaft to reduce engine vibration at higher speeds. This single modification in design boosted horsepower of Hudson's basic six-cylinder inline engine by an astonishing 80 percent -- probably the largest single gain in engine efficiency achieved during the entire life of the internal combusion engine. Thanks to this and other features, the big Hudson six-cylinder engine produced more power than larger V-8 engines offered by Packard and a other manufacturers of the same era. However, the increased smoothness of operation of the V-8 design caught the public's fancy, and in 1930 Hudson joined the march toward 8-cylinder engines with an inline-8.
One unusual feature of the Super Six engine is its F-head design, in which the intake valves are located in the cylinder head and the exhaust valves in the block. This design ensures an excellent flow of intake mixture, good cooling of the exhaust valve, high compression, and improved efficiency and reliability. Few car makers ever used this design, because it is more expensive to produce than alternatives, but it does enhance horsepower output. High class British Motor manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Rover recognized the superior factors of this design, using it for a number of years into the 1960's. Hudson Super Six engines were made with the F-head design from 1927-29. The 1919 thru 1923 Essex four cylinder engine also was an F-head. In other years,through 1956, Hudson, Essex and Terraplane six and eight cylinder engines were of the more standard L-head design, with both intake and exhaust valves on the side, until O.H.V. V8 engines were introduced as an option on some 1956 models.
This artist's illustration is from a Hudson marketing brochure issued in 1929. It depicts the right (passenger) side of the engine, and shows in nice detail the coil and distributor, at the front, and just below them the miniscule oil pump, whose function is only to pump oil up to the overhead valve system. The rest of the engine is lubricated using the simple but reliable "splasher" concept in which piston rods splash downward into a large reservoir of oil.
The large black can-like object near the center is the air filter. It looks like a can because that's basically what it is -- a tin can with diagonal vanes mounted on the aft-facing end to induce a centrifugal flow of air coming into the carburetor. This probably is sufficient to keep hummingbirds out of the carburetor, but not much of anything smaller.
The Marvel carburetor and its associated "carburetor heat" mechanism are just behind the air filter. The heater system draws hot engine exhaust from the exhaust manifold and passes it around a riser that carries the gas-air mixture up from the carburetor to the intake manifold. A control within the driver's compartment allows adjustment of the amount of heating -- lots to start a cold engine, and then less or none at normal driving temperatures.
The generators sits just under the carburetor, and just behind it is the starter motor. The drawing also depicts in partial cutaway the clutch and transmission, which bolt onto the back end of the engine block.