Does anyone remember this engine?

Hi folks,

A long time ago - when I was first interested in stationary engines, in the early 1990s - I remember reading about an unusual two cylinder engine. The two pistons were connected to a single crank using a V-shaped connecting rod. The cylinder heads were threaded and made non-removable by coating them with a corrosive paste. I don't remember for certain the applications for which the engine was used, but I think it may have been used in a few small vehicles.

I either read about the engine in Stationary Engine Magazine, or in a book I had about stationary engines. The book was a large green paperback, with a fabric texture on the cover, and was probably published in the 1970s or '80s. I lent my copy to someone and never got it back, and I can't remember the title. I'm pretty sure I got the book from Slepe Books, but I can't find any mention of that bookseller online.

Can anyone remember the name of this unusual engine? Also, if anyone can remember the title of that green book, please let me know. I'd like to replace my lost copy.

Best wishes,

Chris Tidy

Sounds indeed like a 2-stroke with pumping cylinders (rather than using the crankcase, as is more common nowadays). If one bank is bigger bore than the other, that's a hint.

However is it a Trojan? AFAIR the Trojan used separate rods to a shared crankpin rather than a rigid V-shaped rod. I can't think of anything with a rigid rod (and I'm not certain the geometry is even possible?), but several of this general style used articulated rods (i.e. master-slave rods, that would look like a single rod to a quick glance) Here's a 1912 example:

Also the memorable Trojan was the one with twin power cylinders per pumping cylinder (and a clever trick with slightly different phasing to boost scavenging). Did they do one that was a simple (1+1)+(1+1) as well?

Sounds indeed like a 2-stroke with pumping cylinders (rather than using the crankcase, as is more common nowadays). If one bank is bigger bore than the other, that's a hint.

However is it a Trojan? AFAIR the Trojan used separate rods to a shared crankpin rather than a rigid V-shaped rod. I can't think of anything with a rigid rod (and I'm not certain the geometry is even possible?), but several of this general style used articulated rods (i.e. master-slave rods, that would look like a single rod to a quick glance) Here's a 1912 example:

Also the memorable Trojan was the one with twin power cylinders per pumping cylinder (and a clever trick with slightly different phasing to boost scavenging). Did they do one that was a simple (1+1)+(1+1) as well?

Hi Andy, I think the Trojans con rods were in a V shape & flexed very slightly at one point of the cycle. See

The Trojan had a solid V-shaped rod carrying two pistons in separate bores.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@prepair.co.uk

ghtly at one point of the cycle.

Doh! The OP meant the rods to both power pistons, and a shallow vee, not a right angle didn't they? That's a Trojan for sure then.

For some reason I was thinking of vees as meaning 90=B0 and then thinking of pump cylinders...

Andy Dingley wrote(snip):

If the bendy con rod wasn't enough of a giveaway, then the rust bonded 'cylinder head' is the clincher.

NHH

Is that unique to Trojans? My ancient copy of Molesworths even gives a recipe for the stuff. It was almost common in steam engine practice for iron pipe connections. Things that were expected to need dismantling were flanged and gasketted, others had this rust-joint cement (iron filings and sulphur) applied.

No I don't suppoose it's unique by any means, but applied to an IC engine and in conjunction with the rest of the description, I couldn't think of anything else which 'fitted';-)

BTW, do I understand you have had some dealings with wikipedia - what a frustrating business it is. I have tried on occasions to make some kind of sense out of the Stirling engine article, but no sooner does it start to look half decent than someone else comes along and buggers it all up!

NHH

Yes, just don't ask me to explain why I bother!

You can say that again! Some of it's like Usenet: some bits work, others just don't. Trolls are a minor annoyance, but it's actually pretty resilient to vandalism. What really grates are the half- knowledgeable. Like the guy who recently deleted Donald Campbell from the Land Speed Record lists, as he'd apparently "never set a record". Some American chap on a jet motorbike went faster, earlier, and even though the FIA didn't recognise it, that means Campbell doesn't count on Wikipedia.

Articles range from:

• Those where it "just isn't going to work". Ever. These are usually the broader ones, where everyone gets to stick their twopenn'orth in. Try "Four stroke engine" 8-(

to

• Those that you create from scratch in your own userspace [[user:Andy Dingley/my created pages/]], polish to an acceptable standard there, then rename into the main articlespace as a fait accompli. This usually works quite well, so long as you can find an untouched corner that you're interested in and you can get it done before the teenage rabble stomp all over it.

Then there's the _massive_ invisible overhead of policy and narrow interpretations of rote rules, without remembering the principle of, "Does it make the encyclopedia better?" Deletion arguments are usually the best place for those.

PS - Regia's article could use some work!

I started dabbling when the annoyance of seeing inaccurate and misleading information on one of my favourite subjects (Stirling engines) became too much to bear. However, much of my input was apparently too technical for the lay reader, and got replaced again with a load of wooly verbiage which means equally little to neophyte and expert alike :-(

My favourite is that the criterion for inclusion in wikipedia is verifiability rather than truth!

NHH

Thanks for the help. I found the article and it is indeed a Trojan engine. April 1993 issue of Stationary Engine Magazine. It's an interesting article.

Rust cement seems a slightly questionable idea to me. I'm sure I would find the need to take that cylinder head plug out again.

I've had the same problem with Wikipedia. If you're keen on Stirling engines, you might be better off writing your own website on the subject.

Best wishes,

Chris

Once you've done that, you can then reference your own site as a [[WP:RS]] and put anything you like into Wikipedia...

You could I guess, but it probably isn't worth the effort. Someone else will likely argue that your site isn't a reliable source, and on it goes...

The problem is that for some subjects, reliable sources are hard to find. Sometimes an individual's knowledge and ability to explain something is better than the available books. But Wikipedia doesn't like to accept this. And now and then, a supposedly reliable source is plain wrong.

I'm not saying Wikipedia isn't useful - it is - but getting involved isn't much fun.

Best wishes,

Chris

My sites are "reliable", because I own the domains and the CSS, and they don't have "blog" anywhere in the URLs. That's the level of sophistication of their filtering.

I'm even cited on there for Usenet posts!

Christopher Tidy wrote (snip):

There is a user by the name of 'Thruxton' who is busily re-writing articles on British motorcycles based it seems mainly on the sort of glossy coffee table books you can pick up in garden centres!

NHH

Very often it's quite easy to identify a particularly good source, but it's rare or expensive enough that's it hard to lay hands on a copy of it. So those who have it, or claim to have it, get to claim that it supports any position they care to put forward and it's a nightmare to go against this. Take a look at "relational vibration" on the talk page of the four-stroke engine article (really do, it's quite funny). An intaweb crazyguy is arguing that this exists and is referenceable, from a book that's an accepted standard text. However it's an expensive book (fortunately I bought mine years ago) and the single page cited just happens to not be one of those in the Google Books freebie preview! In actuality the term just isn't there at all.

I think that much is reasonable - how else could they police it?

If you think Wikipedia is bad, take a look at Citizendium (sp?) one of the spin-offs. You have to be accredited to write content there. So I'm actively welcomed to write about a field I haven't touched in 20 years, forbidden from my current commercial expertise as it's so new that there's no certification available in it, and forbidden (as is presumably everyone) from the '30s engineering I might actually bother to write about from interest.

Mind you, Wikipedia threw a snit about me commenting on one of my own patents for lack of sourcing (don't use a patent as a ref, they've been hacked about by lawyers), then threw a real wobbly over "conflict of interest". So now the article is done by some undergrad who's studying under an old colleague of the time and doesn't really have any contextual background of why this thing was invented and the situation we needed to work in before it.

I do enjoy Wikipedia, on the grounds of the old, "To really understand something, you must teach it" principle. I've written some good content on things I knew nothing about beforehand and this has forced me to actually learn and understand it. It's interesting how often you can spot the same content (right or wrong) being re-circulated around the 'net, and how often a few "authoritative" refs can turn out to be downright contradictory. Sorting these out can be great fun.

Now who knows about clutches in Tiger tank gearboxes? (and is anyone going to the Bovington restroation lecture in mid-March?) I'm re- working the pre-selector gearbox article at the moment. Must do a decent write-up on how the Wilson gearbox worked, but all my diagrams are '50s not '30s or older so copyright is still a problem.

I don't get what the guy is talking about, unless he is somehow misrepresenting the phenomenon of resonance. You think his phenomenon has exhibited itself on some paddle steamers, though?

I don't understand what effect he is claiming the speed of the vehicle has on vibration. I can see how it can have indirect effects, but I can't see what happens when the piston speed and vehicle speed are the same. Actually, I'm not convinced that the guy has figured that the velocity of the pistons isn't constant.

Why someone would claim a reference says something it doesn't is beyond me.

Best wishes,

Chris