Cooling an air-cooled engine

[jrandom]

I can't believe such an intricate mechanism can contain such violent explosions.

I had an almost identical reaction the first time I looked inside a (fucked) CV joint. I was amazed that such a clonky-dinky bit of steel had ever worked at all, let alone spun away quietly for years under torque that would rip my arm off in an instant.

Any sufficiently advanced form of metallurgy is indistinguisable from magic.

I prefer to get my fixes these days playing with guns - the oldest and simplest, yet still most ejaculatorily-compensating, form of internal combustion engine.

And I don't think Pirsig's engine ever actually seized; that was just a plot device to hang more MOQ shite on.

[scumdog]

Ba-dum, tsh.

Seriously, though. You're committing Engineering Design Error #1 by falling in love with an intermediate hypothesised solution rather than focusing on your true requirement.

Your true requirement is to make the bike go faster.

Burning more fuel in each engine combustion cycle is an excellent brute-force way of achieving that, but cooling the air intake is not the only way of burning more fuel in each combustion cycle.

For that matter, burning more fuel in each combustion cycle is not the only way of making the bike go faster.

Haven't read the whole thread but relating to the above; to make heat you have to burn fuel, at idle (when there's not much airflow over the engine) your bike is not burning sufficient fuel to make heat of damaging proportions. (Unless you have a fairly high 'idle' speed of course!).

Example: My 7 litre hot rod engine has no fan, I can fire it up from cold and let it idle and it will take 15 minutes or more before it gets to normal running temperature, if I hold the revs at 2,000rpm or so it will overheat in just over 5 minutes.

[frogfeaturesFZR]

Persigs bike was a BMW was'nt it ?

[MikeyG]

Have you ever tried leaving the fridge door open on a hot summer's day to keep the kitchen cool? Works a treat. Try it some time.

Fridges use a heat pump to pull heat out of the insulated box and push it out the back. Leaving the fridge door open should have no effect at all in the long term. Short term effects are noticed from all the stuff you have in it defrosting.

[MikeyG]

Wrapping copper or other tube into the cooling fins would rely on heat being conducted through the fins and into the tube, for highest efficiency you will need good joins with large surface area between the fins and the tube. Soldering the tube to the head with big blobs of solder may help.

Or when you are sitting at the lights you could just turn the bike off until the light goes green.

[jrandom]

Leaving the fridge door open should have no effect at all in the long term.

... apart from heat dissipation from the compressor motor gently warming up the surrounding area.

[Ixion]

Persigs bike was a BMW was'nt it ?

His was a CB77 Honda. His companion (John ?) had a BMW

[xwhatsit]

Wrapping copper or other tube into the cooling fins would rely on heat being conducted through the fins and into the tube, for highest efficiency you will need good joins with large surface area between the fins and the tube. Soldering the tube to the head with big blobs of solder may help.

Or when you are sitting at the lights you could just turn the bike off until the light goes green.

I was thinking about using large blobs of thermal paste. Solder too would help, didn't think about that.

What I should really do is keep the connected copper tubing up, but use it to boil water... what can I do with that? Make coffee, for one. Run a small turbine?

[Dadpole]

You could install a boiler and small funnel. That would get people wondering WTF.