Unusual Engine Designs. Wooler Motorcycles.

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I daily drive a turbo 5 cylinder for whatever it's worth. I think it's the right number of cylinders.

Odd numbers of cylinders are...odd numbers to have for cylinders in engines.

There must be some good reason why most vehicles have four, six, or eight, cylinders.

Inventors have designed engines that were supposed to run on gunpowder.

Yes. Gunpowder as fuel.

Some cable network, maybe History, had a segment about a 19th century patent for a gunpowder motor that looked like it might work, but I cant find the video on Utube. But I found other vids. Turns out that in the 1600's a guy designed a device to create vacuums by exploding gunpower in a giant cylinder (kinda like a gas engine piston as big as a house with a lit fuse as a spark plug, and designed to fire just once and then to stop with the piston in the up position so that the cylinder would contain the desired vacuum. It predated both gas engines AND reciprocating steam engines.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 19 Jul 2020, 3:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

Counterbalanced cranks & balance shafts can deal with this , a lot of the best 4cyl motors & so on have custom weighted cranks anyway.

[Researched] The first ever car created, in 1769.



And the engine.



Car engine evolution has sure come a long way since the 1700's.

Ah, the Wooler sometimes nicknamed the flying banana for obvious reasons.

In 1914 a rotary valve two stroke bike made by Scott was entered for the IOM TT but failed to win. Somewhere a replica of one of these exits incorprating surviving parts but I can't find a picture of it.

Their normal engine was strange because it had overhung cranks which cause a big issue because as the engine works hard the cranks can flex eventually causing the con rod to shear destroying the crankcases. This was especially a problem with the longstroke engines which liked breaking the cranks as well.

These little issues have resulted in only eleven bikes still being matching numbers!

There is one big advantage; you can replace the big end roller bearings at the side of the road with two spanners and a pair of thin nose pliers.....no other bike can boast this party trick!

I have had vehicles with 4, 5 and 6 cylinders. Obviously they do vary a lot, but here is my impression of 5 cylinder engines all running on gassoline.
Note. These cars were in standard forms so no engine mods had been done to them.

Audi. (Audi 90 2.3) Absolutely incredible torque. Far more torque then most diesel engines I have come across! Accelerating hard it could spin the wheels in 1st, then 2nd, and then 3rd with an occasional slight spin in 4th.... So acceleration was brisk and only twice in all the time I owned the car did I ever get that engine to stall! If I tried to stall it on purpose, the whole car would bounce with my foot hard on the brake rather then stall! (Manual transmission). I would be more likely to snap the driveshafts then stall the engine!
But that engine just would not rev. It would start to dull in its revs at 4000 revs and would not go any higher then 4500 revs. It never went near the rev limiter where the red line was somewhere around 7000 revs. 4500 was all you could get. MPG was average at about the mid 30's. Car was rated at 135bhp. It handled like a front wheel drive brick. The weight of the car kept it on the road so if one cornered (Front wheel drive) one would accelerate in the direction one wanted to go. If overtaking on a straight road at speed with the foot down, the changing lane while heavy accelerating would cause the back of the car to drift outwards and one had to keep countersteering this back and fore to keep the car in a straight line which was odd for a front wheel drive vehicle but would have been expected if the car was rear wheel drive.

Volvo 850 2.5 non turbo, and the Volvo 850 2.3T5 turbo. These would rev ok. Not quite as torquey as the Audi, but still these had torque in the low revs. In the lower rev ranges, both these Volvos drove and felt the same despite the T5 having an extra official 85 brake horsepower available. The T5 only was different in two ways. The first was that when the engine revs got higher which was around the mid range onwards, the car was quicker then the standard non turbo car. The second was that the T5 had traction control.
Both cars suffered from heavy front tyre wear due to the torque in a front wheel drive vehicle at the front and the weight of the engine on the wheels not being sufficiently heavy enough to pull the weight of the vehicle without loosing traction, so having the turbo was almost a pointless excercize unless one was already travelling at sufficient speed to overcome the lack of traction. The most miles I had out of front tyres with the non turbo was about 6000 which by then the tyres were beyond being legal. The T5, by careful driving would only get 4500 miles from front tyres!
The 2.5 was rated as 140bhp and the T5 was rated at 225bhp. They averaged 25 to 30mpg for the 2.5 and 20 to 25 for the T5 which wasn't a lot. So all the 5 cylinder engines were not that great with mpg figures, but did have impressive low rev torque.
Now traction control. There was one medium sized roundabout on the way to where I worked that was at an angle (Due to the gradient of the land) so it demonstrated how traction control could cause issues. If I went round the roundabout and came off at about 200 degrees (Which was the exit I needed to take so it was almost a straight line if the roundabout wasn't there), going round the roundabout at around 35mph and accelerating out of it (The road changed from 40mph to 50mph on the exit hill out of it so one would put ones foot down on the exit... And tis was done when there was no other traffic on the road at 4am to 6am due to morning work shifts), the 2.5 or the T5 with the traction control turned off would spin the inside wheel as it lost grip when I went to accelerate out of the roundabout due to the angle of the road, but the wheel that gripped would hold the road so while traction was lost, the car still handled ok.
Now trying this with the T5 and the traction control turned on was almost lethal! Both front wheels span together and the car went straight and almost crashed. It was like being on ice! Ok for a straight road as traction control would either gain grip or more likely spin both front wheels at the same time with those tyre hungry cars where I could be needing to change front tyres after just 2500 miles if I was heavy footed, and 4000 miles or less on the non turbo version.
But that and the rear trailing arm pivot joints which would need changing to pass every years MOT, made these cars expensive to keep even if one ignored the mpg figures. Both were estate cars (Station wagons?) and both vehicles had an extra two rear seats to fold up in the boot for children, which made then 7 seat vehicles.
Older Volvos I had were rear wheel drive (Apart from the 480) with 4 cylinder engines which did either average mpg or exceptionally good mpg in the forms of the 360GLT's and the 740GLT. 43mpg towing caravans where the whole journey was foot down was impressive as both the 360 and the 740 gave me similar mpg figures on the mountainous twisty routes between south and north Wales and back.

I did have a 6 cylinder Audi 80 which was one of the very last of the 80/90 series where they called them all Audi 80 (Previously the Audi 80 had smaller less powerful engines and the 90's had the larger more powerful engines). The last of the 80's had the new Audi A4 floorplan which really sorted out the handling, so the 6 cylinder Audi 80 saloon I had in front wheel drive form handled so well and was so grippy, that it puzzled me why they made it in a 4WD version at all! I was climbing twisty 1 in 4 hills (25%) with 90 degree bends on ice and snow with hardly a wheel out of place. I once did the 17 mile journey to work on what I assumed to be a cold wet road one morning, and had felt the car drift now and then so I was puzzled if the car was ok. I got into work, and stopped at the car park after having done 60mph most of the way (Apart from a few 40mph areas). I opened the car door and went to get out and ended up flat on the floor! It was all black ice all the way in!
That 2.6 Audi (150bhp) 6 cylinder car was soo impecable with the handling that it was boring to drive. It took 90 degree corners where I was tired and forgot to slow down at 60mph and did not even drift. It was glued to the road!
It was a wierd engine which revved and revved but had very little low down torque. It was therefore easy to stall, but get the revs up and whoosh! I would hit the rev limiter at 35mph in 1st, about 68 to 69mph in 2nd, and I never did find what 3rd, 4th or 5th was (Except that it was limited to 155mph) as I once tried going up a hill on a quiet road and hit 100mph and chickened out and came straight back to 60 which from 60 to 100 and back to 60 was done in about a quarter of a mile or less, and at 100 the rev limiter still had not been touched... That car was also quiet. Pedestrians would not hear it other then the tyres even when at high revs. Once on the way home I turned a 90 degree corner to find two local elderly ladies running for it in both directions. They had been standing in the middle of the road having a chat! I didn't know Mrs B could move that fast at her age! Haha! Ooh. The Audi brakes were amazing too. It was like... Well. I once tried in snow to see what the antilock brakes would do, so on a straight road on my own I slammed on and almost went through the window if I had no seat belt! I drove forwards and walked back to look at the road as I assumed the wheels had cut through the snow onto the tarmac below. Nope. It had done that on the snow! Incredible car that I only parted with as I had failed the MOt so had a bill for 4 new discs with the main Audi dealer so I could either pay out and keep it or part exchange it with a secondhand dealer I used (Independent.. Not Audi). I then had a diesel Citroen Xantia (Poor brakes! Nice novel suspension) and the dealer sold the Audi 80 on to another local man. Surprizingly, it sailed through its MOT with no brake disk issues mentioned which surprized me and the dealer was puzzled too. The Audi had no brake issues. It was the Audi dealer who had failed them. It was puzzling as the service a few months prior to the MOT I had to have one changed as the wheelnut thread had stripped. Why I was puzzled why it dis not just need three disks. Why four?
I found the Audi dealership to be the major flaw with buying an Audi. All over you if you wanted a service or to buy a new car, but if you wanted a small part from their car parts desk and wanted to fit it yourself, you were often waiting half an hour to be served. But start looking at a new car and six staff would be running to you as if from no where!

About hydrogen cell cars:


link

Knowing. Nothing of Volvo’s. Or fuel cell tech. , this was kinda interesting thread for me .
Had no clue. MG. Was such a gearhead. And sciences based stuff always catches my interest.

My first car was a V8. Almost all of the rest have been 4 bangers. One on propane, 3 diesels (no turbo), several gassers, one of them was a boxer engine. And I had one V6 for a short time.

The only odd number of cylinders I’ve ever had has been my inline 3 motorcycle.

driven several but never got to OWN a v-phuqing 8. nothing like that basso burble.

Meh, if it’s just a basic old car like mine was you’re not missing much. My first car had a 90L gas tank and you could watch the gas needle fall if you put your foot into it. Back when gas cost less than half of what it does today it cost me $12/day in fuel to drive to school (college) and back. Now the same commute in that car would cost approx $28/day for gas. Efffffff that! That’s a part of why I drive a 4 banger car - it’s expensive enough paying ~$350-550/mo for gas, not really interested in driving a penis compensator truck that would run $700-1000+/mo for fuel alone.

you're speaking to a person who drools when he sees an old [mid-80s to mid-90s] caddy sedan de ville roll by, having had the luxurious experience of driving them and just FLOATING over all the bumps in the road so quietly and serenely, it makes driving tolerable even with all the brassholes i have to share the pavement with. their gas mileage is actually about the same, even better, than the mileage i get from my '97 honda CRV AWD.

My current car is odd in that it has a lovely 4 cylinder Merc diesel engine in it... Odd because the i ternet states that the engines are 3 cylinder diesels. But mine has four injectors so has to be a 4 cylinder. It sounds like a 4 cylinder too with loads of torque.
My brother has the same car but with a little revvy 3 cylinder petrol engine. It has a lovely raspy exhaust note to it. It needs revving to get the power, but is nippy enough even with 4 people in it. I think mine is quicker but it is hard to tell as when he gets the revs up, it goes... And mine relies more on its torque with the turbo to get the acceleration... So though there is about 25 bhp difference with the larger diesel engine having more bhp, in reality, both seem to zoom along. I would find it difficult to leave him as his little engine seems to have all the power it needs in the hands of someone who is used to it.
And that is the point with cars. People who do tne write ups generally have not been in the cars long enough to really get to know them. A few cars I have had I have read the write ups to and I was thinking "Are you sure they drove the same car?" Example, the Volvo 360 GLT I found to be amazing, but the official write ups say otherwize... But a car the officials thought was amazing I actually owned for about 8 months and was kind of relieved to part with it as though I can agree that it was a good engine, the rest of the car and the handling was not up to the competition... It led me to consider if the manufacturers had some input into pushing their models? Or prehaps when the cars were new they handled and drove differently to when they were a few years old? Who knows!

Oh. Well in that case you might like driving my first car. It was a 1983 Oldsmobile Delt 88 Royale Brougham 2 door couch on wheels - the hood was long enough that when cruising over wavy roads it would “woomp,” like sheer metal being waved by a stagehand to make a thunder sound effect loud enough that my deaf friend could hear it.

But I bet highly doubt that an AWD ‘97 CRV could get that poor of fuel mileage unless it has a hole in the gas tank.

a '93 caddy sedan de ville with the 4.9l v8 averaged about 20 mpg if you were light with the gas. i get about that much with my honda [also light with the gas as i'm babying it, it's 23 years old now].