Reader Norman Weis sent in a list of motorcycle topics a while back. Now, I love motorcycles, but not to the point where I study them as voraciously as some. However, one of the topics Herr Weis suggested piqued my interest — oval pistons.
|
||||
 Allison V-3420 [image credit -wikipedia.org] Keeping up with the Jones during war time isn’t easy when they are the Germans and the British. We needed more power and we needed it now. So going with what we know we took two Allison V-1720′s and connected them together. Continue reading When two engines are better then one – The Allison V-3420 At the end of World War Two the aircraft engine manufacturers took a bigger is better attitude towards design. Managing to create two running aircraft engines with five thousand horsepower each. Of course to produce that with a piston engine takes a large amount of displacement. How about a nice little 127 liter engine for the new bomber of the moment.  We make this look good
Continue reading 7700 cubic inches of aircraft engine goodness
So let’s say you just built a supertanker, or maybe a giant cruise ship. You need to power it somehow. You start doing the calculations on how much power you need and you think to yourself, “Crap. I would need 15367 LS1 engines to make the torque I need to move this through the water. What am I to do?!” Well, you start off by ripping everything off the hull so you can drop one of these bad boys in. Behold, the Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C. At least in 1958 you couldn’t. The hope was that this newly discovered energy source could someday propel our cars. Ford, overcome with delirious hope for the future, even built a model of what they called the Nucleon. It was their take on what a nuclear-powered car in some shimmering future would look [...]
Aircraft are designed for a particular takeoff distance based on their planned mission profile. Sometimes, though, you need to get that aircraft into and out of smaller airfields. Getting into them is relatively easy since landing distance is much shorter than the required takeoff distance. Getting out is much harder.
One of the best things about being an engineer is figuring out solutions to problems. That’s what we do. 
The moon is an inscrutable old hunk of rock that’s been confounding humankind since we first turned our collective eyes skyward. But when the greatest special effects extravaganza in history moon-landings forced us all to start pretending the moon wasn’t made of cheese or occupied by Martin Landau and some weirdos [...] |
 |
|||
|
Copyright © 2013 Atomic Toasters - All Rights Reserved
RSS |
||||
