Monday, November 10, 2014
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For many companies supplying a race engine, the choice of con rod can be a very straightforward affair. Often there are multiple suppliers of uprated engine internals, and there are a number of very competent and successful con rod manufacturers. The...
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Tuesday, September 30, 2014
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We motorsport engineers are a lucky bunch; I tell people that, as an engineer, there are few areas of the engineering industry that can approach the rewards of Formula One in terms of the scope for creativity and the willingness of companies to explo...
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Monday, August 18, 2014
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This article is unusual in that it looks at a concept that will almost certainly never be applied to a race engine but is technically interesting enough to merit examination. In the 1950s a British truck maker made a production engine the likes of wh...
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Wednesday, July 09, 2014
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In the previous article, there was a picture of a very basic Scotch Yoke mechanism, and the mechanically astute among you would have noticed some obvious problems with such a basic implementation of the principle behind it. The two glaring ones are h...
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Thursday, May 08, 2014
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Anyone who deals with engines will be familiar with the con rod (unless you are a fanatic of the rotary engine to the exclusion of all others). It is a simple articulating link that connects the piston to the crankshaft and, in doing so, converts rec...
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Thursday, March 27, 2014
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The recent article on additive manufacturing in Race Engine Technology (issue 76, February 2014) by David Cooper was a good read; the possibilities of this technology are almost limitless, and con rods are perhaps an ideal opportunity for this produc...
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
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With few exceptions, con rods for automotive engines are split at the big end, and the joint is held together by a pair of threaded fasteners. The pattern is much the same for racing con rods, the only common exceptions to this being rods for two-str...
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Wednesday, January 08, 2014
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In the RET-Monitor collection of articles, there are already dozens of articles covering con rods, many of them covering individual design features. The aim of this article though is to bring some elements of these together and give some of the basic...
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Monday, December 02, 2013
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For a number of reasons metals are excellent materials from which to con rods. They are relatively cheap, and generally of excellent quality. You can make a mess of the rod’s manufacture but the material has every chance of being very good. Pow...
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Monday, October 07, 2013
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The easiest route into motorsport is to use what already exists and then re-use it – for decades the use of a lightly modified production car or motorcycle has been a traditional way to start racing. In motorcycle road racing in particular ther...
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