Engine Appreciation

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This is the craziest engine I've ever seen. It'll probably be the craziest engine I ever see.

Check out this guy's driving.

Honda Civic engine swapped into a Crown Vic.

Here is an unique engine design. The Wooler 2 stroke single cylinder twin piston engine which needed almost zero compression for it to work. The whole motorcycles were extremely well designed for their day, and were often seen competing on the Isle of Man TT. They never won the event as they would normally come in the top 20 (Out of 120-200 competitors depending on the year with some years closing in on the top 10), but they did achieve a world record while racing which stood until fairly recently, and for any motorized piston engined vehicle that could carry a person. The record was for fuel efficiency, which I am trying to find what the official figure was. I Think it achieved with a figure of around 250mpg while racing on the TT or 350mpg? Whatever it was it was incredible!)

(Just found out that some were 4 stroke, and I also remember where I got the info from. An old motorcycle book. Why I could not find the info via the internet! Not sure where the book is at the moment).



Now these motorcycles which were not cheap, so not that many were made, but extremely cheap to run, had features like their exhaust actually going through the frame tubular pipes, so the motorcycle frame itself became its exhaust, it had a pump that slotted into another part of the frame, and the entire motorbike could be built up from a frame in just 12 minutes as it only used two sizes of spanners to put the lot together (Which came with the motorcycle and fit in the little motorcycle toolkit).

The best way to describe the engine was a single tube that contained a spark plug at each end, and a single cylinder shaft with a piston at either end which was simply shot back and fore as the engine fired up. Drive was taken at the middle of the shift and converted to rotary motion which was either sent via a leather belt to the rear wheel like most motorcycles used to be in those days, or sent via a shaft drive to the rear wheel on slightly later models. Even later models had double cylinder double piston versions of these unusual engines, and then later Wooler experimented with other engine designs.

The earlier motorcycles had extended fuel tanks right forward in front of their steering columns, but the motorcycles used so little fuel, later designs copied the same look, but turned the area in front of the steering column into house the lights instead.