Radial engine bike by Jesse James

[nudemetalz]

These http://www.coatesengine.com/index.html

IS what I meant http://www.kiwibiker.co.nz/forums/sh...y+valve&page=3

Ah, yes I've seen that before. Point taken.

[Pancakes]

Yeah! Like those Coates ones but I've only seen ones that were all in the same cylinder, like the intake cam and exhaust cam are now the valves and seals too.

[Animal]

Hi sAsLEX, bloody good to see you're still with us! Have you made your c*****x yet?

The Coates system is certainly very clever! I was toying around with a similar concept a few years ago but gave up because it was going to be too expensive to manufacture a prototype. Does that sound familiar?

[Animal]

Man you guys know tons about these old engines!

Which makes it impossible to hide our age!

[James Deuce]

With the sleeve-valve radials...we had them here a wee way back in NZ's aviation history, them being Bristol Hercules radials on our Safe-Air Bristol Freighters. Also the RNZAF used them back in the '50s.
They were such a big old brute of an aircraft with bugger all speed, but sounded awesome as they tried to climb with a full load.

Here's also a sound file of 2 starting up, running, and then shutting down.
http://www.enginehistory.org/Sounds/Nord/Hercules.mp3

Bristol Freighters were still in service in the mid-70s. They were replaced with BAe Andovers.

[Sully60]

Good point. Just like a stationary V8, give it a tickle & the car lurches to the left (love that )

I don't know if anyone elese has posted this, but the longitudinal engine bike was featured in the Cycleworld mag from the states and the engineers involved commented that the torque reaction was surpisingly minimal. The sound would be very cool too but bugger trying to set up the cam timing!

[terbang]

Only the poms would get involved with THIS sort of thing. I remember seeing one in a Commer truck when I was an apprentice in the mid 70's. Sounded very impressive for a 2 stroke(wheres Ixion?).

[James Deuce]

Only the poms would get involved with THIS sort of thing. I remember seeing one in a Commer truck when I was an apprentice in the mid 70's. Sounded very impressive for a 2 stroke(wheres Ixion?).

Motu posted a thread up about tis engine along with an animated gif of it running. I'll try to find it.

[Bass]

Only the poms would get involved with THIS sort of thing. I remember seeing one in a Commer truck when I was an apprentice in the mid 70's. Sounded very impressive for a 2 stroke(wheres Ixion?).

I believe that most big marine diesels are 2 strokes - exhaust valves in the heads and inlet ports around the bottom of the cylinders.
I remember having a look around the engine room of the Aotea, a medium size container ship. She had a straight 6 Mitsubishi.
The engine was 3 stories high, the sump plug was a full height door. There was an exhaust valve chained to the top catwalk beside the rocker arms. It was twice as tall as me.
The turbo chargers were about a meter in diameter, produced about 80 psi and the inlet manifold was a registered pressure vessel.
It took about 6 hours to blow up the air tanks to do a cold start. However, once she was warmed up, to go astern, they stopped the engine and restarted it in the opposite direction.
Each cylinder had a separate head and they could do a valve job with the engine running.
At least, that's how I remember it, but I don't really trust my memory any more.

[Bass]

The sound would be very cool too but bugger trying to set up the cam timing!

The cam timing on a radial is actually not too bad, once you've figured out how they work. Even seeing the motor off our Wilga in bits, it took me a while.
The cams are actually rings (usually one inlet and one exhaust) which are driven off the crankshaft by an epicyclic gearbox because they rotate much slower than for a conventional layout where the cam runs at half crank speed.
Each ring has a number of lobes, (actually the lobe number is half the number of cylinders minus one), so that e.g. a 9 cylinder radial cam has 4 lobes.
The firing order for the same example is 1,3,5,7,9,2,4,6,8. In effect it fires 5 cylinders on the first crank rotation and the remaing 4 on the second. The firing pulses are evenly spaced cos it actually takes slightly more than one rotation to fire the first 5 and slightly less to fire the last 4.

Each cam lobe moves 1 cylinder per rotation, so for a 9 cylinder engine, the cam runs at 1/9 of crank speed.

Consequently, they are always gear driven and aligning the timing marks is pretty straightforward.

[Animal]

Only the poms would get involved with THIS sort of thing...

Bloody hell, that's just terrifying! And no doubt after they recognised the pointlessness of that design, the went to work on the prototype BAe 146.

[Animal]

Motu posted a thread up about tis engine along with an animated gif of it running. I'll try to find it.

Please do!

[Animal]

I finally found a legible illustration of a Napier Sabre sleeve valve - sorry about the delay!

Two horizontally-opposed 12-cylinder engines sitting on top of each other with geared counter-rotating crankshafts and sleeve valve induction and exhaust control, centrifugal supercharger... that's a helluva lot of moving parts!

[Bass]

That is just so cool, a sleeve valve, supercharged H24.

I remember years ago that BRM made a 1.5 litre (I think) H16 that absolutely screamed and went like a cut cat but was a bit of a hand grenade.

[rwh]

That is just so cool, a sleeve valve, supercharged H24.

I remember years ago that BRM made a 1.5 litre (I think) H16 that absolutely screamed and went like a cut cat but was a bit of a hand grenade.

I think the BRM I heard of was a V16: 2 V8s end to end.

[edit: ok, both v16 and H16 engines existed, but the H16 seems to have been a 3 litre.]

Richard