Well how about that, I'd assumed it was gyro thingies.
http://heat-ranger.com/
No8 Wire Extraordinaire
Well how about that, I'd assumed it was gyro thingies.
http://heat-ranger.com/
Don't you look at my accountant.
He's the only one I've got.
Low personal B.M.E.P.
Hey, i've got a house which faces the wrong way. You'd have thought the poms would have realised the sun is north here in NZ wouldn't you ?Originally Posted by Flettner
Nothing new under the sun. Mate had a Scott which would sometimes start up in reverse...
Forum whore
I guess I shouldn't be so uncharitable, there seems to be a miss understanding over which way we were looking at the engine.
Isn't it great that the twostroke is so versatile, already paying dividens regarding engine choice.
Forum whore
A friend of mine had his house lifted up and turned 180 degrees and re piled, I kid you not.
i'm a wanker
i start up in reverse most mornings lol
Forum whore
I used to race a big single (86 mm bore x 64 mm stroke) converted to rotary inlet, so no flywheel at all, and because of the ultra-short stroke no inertia to speak of in the tiny crankshaft either. Starting the beast was an art: run, bump the saddle, drop the clutch in the same fraction of a second, and grab the clutch back again in the next fraction. If I was lucky the engine would start making two-stroke noises.
When the flag dropped at my first race, I gave it some throttle and let the clutch out. Luckily I was on the last row of the starting grid....
Low personal B.M.E.P.
After filtering through to the front of the queue at a set of lights, the Scott stalled as he was coming to a stop. It was still just rolling so he bumped it and it started...You can guess what happened when the lights changed.
I didn't see it - but I met him shortly after it happened and he was still shaking. Only light damage to the Scott and one car...
Hardcore Biker
Not to miss out on capitalizing on the bi-directional versatility of the 2 stroke engine, Australia invented the Lightburn Zeta. Not a Britten or Ryger though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_(automobile)
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
No8 Wire Extraordinaire
Quite a looker, and would have made that sneaky U turn that ended up a 3 point turn, somewhat embarrassing.
Still they could have sold the technology to French tank manufacturers what with effectively 4 reverse gears.
Don't you look at my accountant.
He's the only one I've got.
Muddler/Dabbler.
Did exactly the same thing with my first bike, a ex WD Royal Enfield two stroke paratrooper bike,- seems it was a DKW clone (BTW a lot of them were left in Holland after the war) - It was my first modification to an engine and of course I got the timing wrong and we all know what happens then.
When I finally got it all sorted I found that I had managed to get the top speed up from 40mph to 45mph - fantastic!
Best cures for the problem? correct ignition timing and a rotary inlet valve (maybe not) - and commonsense, none of which I had in those days.
Forum whore
Maybe not, indeed. My bike was rotary but that didn't stop it from running the wrong way around. Carburation was way off, of course, with a disk that opened 65° before TDC and closed 40° before BDC, but it ran anyway.
Heck, it even ran when the disk hexagon was smashed and the disk stuck open permanently. It was the birth of the 24/7 idea.
Forum whore
We used to have (was my Dads, Dads) an old Arcamedies outboard motor, it was Rotary Valve and it ran both ways. In fact it was supposed to run in reverse to back your boat out into the lake, all you did was flick the timing plate under the flywheel around at idle. How was that possible that it ran so well in reverse? Some time ago I was perveying a scrap yard (as you do) and found one of these engines (got it for a dollar). On disassembling it I found the answer, the disc ran in it's own housing and was driven by a pin against the side of the crankshaft, on reversing the pin would now drive on the opposite side of the crank offering correct timing for reverse operation. Clever Swedes. Dog bone crank.
Muddler/Dabbler.
Good heavens! that sure blew my theory to hell! I was always convinced that it only happened with piston port and reed valve! Maybe expansion chambers and the resonance they created had something to do with it?
My old RE 125 only had a makeshift megaphone (the small end off an old time gramophone speaker) attached to the exhaust port to carry the heat away from the cylinder, - the things we used to do!!
Forum whore
I think it was bought into NZ buy the National government (Muldoon) in the late 70's (along with some others) to work on repowering diesel engines to gas. Bill Sheilds was the project manager and I think Bill Burch was suppling the money. Any way they ended up in a heap outside a bussiness here in Hamilton some years later, after being used to convert the Hamilton (and I think other cities) buses to CNG.
I was lucky enough to "hook" one before they went to scrap but it's been sitting a long time.
Hardcore Biker
Interesting to hear about that Archimedes outboard, Flettner. Kiekhaefer Mercury had that feature on some of their inline sixes in the late-'50s/early'60s. Called "Direct-Reversing," if you pulled your throttle lever from Forward through Neutral to Reverse, it would shut off the engine and engage a second starter motor that spun the engine in the reverse rotation (the magneto was also repositioned to get the appropriate timing. I suppose the idea was that this was cheaper than building a shifting lower unit for these big-for-their-time engines, and they just had a simple, tough, physically-small lower unint with bevel gears and no shift mechanism. This system would not have been so hot for the average boater, whose outfit might sit unused for months at a time; it naturally depended on being in a good state of tune, with fresh fuel, etc., so "Direct Reversing" was soon dropped and replaced by ordinary shifting lower units.
But one group really liked the Direct Reversing motors. These were sawmill operators located on the water, who had vast numbers of logs penned-up, waiting to be winched up into the mill. They had tough little boats that would push the floating logs around, and you can imagine that the tough, no-shift Direct Reversing lower units were preferred in this environment. These engines always worked well because they ran all day, every day.
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