After inventing the internal combustion engine, it became clear that man always wanted more power, not only for racing and record-breaking, but also for his road vehicles. Today we have road-going production motorcycles that are more powerful than their Grand Prix counterparts of 15 years ago. The merits of using multiple cylinders are well known, and to make compact engines with larger numbers of cylinders, 'vee' engines are a good solution. Most bespoke race vee engines have two...
One of the functions of a crankshaft, besides playing its fundamental part in an engine's basic mechanism, is to transfer oil, especially to the con rod big-end bearings. In some cases, where all main bearings are directly fed from the main oil gallery in the cylinder block, and where drillings can take oil directly from the main bearing to the crankpin, there is no requirement to seal any drillings. However, in a great many cases, there is a need to reliably seal oil drillings, and...
If the ECU can somehow be considered as the brain of the engine then I guess the wiring harness is roughly equivalent to the rest of the nervous system. In humans and other animals, receptors in the skin send impulses to the brain via dendrites and the nerves. These impulses are then reconfigured and sent back to the muscles to produce some form of movement. And while great care is taken to ensure that the body's nervous system is not overstressed or abused, likewise shouldn't we...
Isn't it strange to think that what we regard today as being 'obvious' wasn't quite so obvious in the early days of race engine design. Take the head gasket, for instance. Today's young engineers are almost conditioned to think in terms of separate castings for the combustion chamber and valves, and that of the cylinder-supporting structure. But in days gone by, the very idea of having separate components bolted together with apertures where engine coolant, oil and...
It's an obvious thing to say, perhaps, but while an engine has to contain lots of moving components in order to function properly, it also contains many parts that are not intended to move at all. For example, cylinder heads and crankcases are not intended to move, but they are still in motion. In this article, 'motion' means that by introducing loads to the structure of these components, continuous deformation will take place, depending on the magnitude of that loading. Where...