First, the radial-engined motorcycle built by Jesse James. What's even cooler-but-crazier, if you read the comments on this article about an alternate take on the radial-engine concept, some guy (see the second comment) is thinking about building a motorcycle with a rotary¹ engine. Not rotary as in Wankel; rotary as in WW1 rotary aircraft engines, where the entire cylinder array spins around a fixed crankshaft.
And, for a different kind of cool just because it's such outrageous snake oil, check out the miracle hydrogen-power solution to the world's energy needs from the guy who's invented the "very unique¹ elecrolysis process" that turns H2O into the magic wonder-gas HHO. Just think, if he used his wonder-gas to run a generator to drive his electrolysis machine, he could have a perpetual motion machine!
(....Not.)
[1] Dammit! I used the word 'rotary' three times in this post. And each time, I consistently typo'd it as "rotaty". And somehow I only spotted ONE of the three typos each time I checked it........ each time I fixed one and glanced at the others to make sure I'd got them right, the others looked OK.
[2] Last I knew, the formal definition of "unique" was something like "there exists precisely one such". Does something that's "very unique" use a smaller than usual value of "one"?
no subject
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
1) It ain't running off water, it's running off electricity. "HHO gas" is just a way to make a conventional engine run off electricity.
2) It reduces our dependency on fossil fuel to the extent that electricity can be generated from other sources.
The *real* question is whether electrolysis/combustion is more or less efficient than charging batteries. I suspect it is much less. The electrolysis part is efficient, but the efficiency of a heat engine is easy to beat with an electric motor and battery.
(plus, where do you store the gas? I seriously doubt he is pouring water into his test car... if it runs off HHO to any great exent he's got tanks of gas, hopefully H2 and O2 in separate tanks...)
I wonder if there are different kinds of singularity, like there are different kinds of infinity...
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
(no subject)
(no subject)
Old-style rotary engines
Interestingly, a single-crankpin can be considered a two-cylinder slice of a radial engine. A few years back a guy by the name of Jim Fueling took one of the then-new Harley-Davidson Twin Cam 88 engines and modified it to accept a third cylinder. The resulting engine was called a W3 and could also be considered a 3-cylinder slice of a radial. He used to have a website (can't find it now) that had audio samples. It sure sounded interesting. The firing order was 2-1-3 where the middle cylinder would fire on the first rotation, then cylinders 1 and 3 would fire in relatively rapid succession on the second rotation.
Re: Old-style rotary engines
no subject
I suppose the Fox
hacksjournalists will just chalk it up to experience (i.e. forget it by Monday), but Senator Domenici is going to have a bothersome collection of sound- and videobytes out there for his opponents to needle him with.Mr. Klein may be blushing too when he finds out there are people in the field ahead of him: http://www.eagle-research.com/index.html
(no subject)
(no subject)