two stroke V8's

Detroits immediately spring to mind...especially the V6 on the tractor pulling at Welland. It literally makes the ground shake as it comes by. Lovely :-)

Quite a few manufacturers have thought so over the years: General Motors Diesel (Detroit) EMD, another offshoot of GM, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Jenbacher etc etc have all made or are still making V8 engines of two stroke persausion albeit mainly diesel although some are offered in a dual fuel configuration..

Tom

OMC made a 300 HP two stroke V8 gasoline outboard.

Here is a listing for one on ebay, gives you some idea as to how big this thing is.

There is little information available on the web on these unfortunately.

There are a couple of used ones down at a boat yard where I quite often work out of.

Very gas hungry beasts!

Regards,

Chris

Yes Detroit made the -92 series in 6V, 8V and 12V. I have had dealings with the 6 and 8Vs. The ones I dealt with in MCI buses were both supercharged and turbocharged though I understand that they were available with one or the other as well. I particularly like the sound of the 6V. They put out gobs of power for their day! They also leaked every fluid you put in them. Do not EVER run one out of fuel unless you want to experience the defenition of frustration! Regards Scott

Perhaps the enquirer was thinking about crankcase-compression gas transfer type 2-strokes such as Villiers, etc. This would become quite tricky with more than one cylinmder, probably impossible with a V8, although I have seen twin-cylinder 2-stroke Victa Lawnmower engines but these were not very popular.

Of coures, the GM Detroit range (and others) mostly use pressure scavenging from a blower etc.

JW²

You can have a multicylindered crankcase compression engine, but each cylinder needs its own crankcase, hence the array of oil seals on things like the Suzuki and Kawasaki two stroke triples of the 1970's I'm sure that Yamaha built an experimental V8 two stroke along these lines once, something to do with Formula 1.......... the fuel consumption wouldn't bear thinking about.

Regards

Philip T-E

I had a lot to do with Kawasaki triples in the '70's. They were certainly powerful and reasonably reliable, but only at the price of flinging a fair amount of oil and fuel out the exhaust port, a good deal of which would end up on the pillion passengers back! The resulting avid consumption meant that you could not drive even the 250 version from Bristol to London on the M4 as Chievely and Heston were ten miles further apart than their maximum tank capacity even if driven slowly.

With external compressor devices - like a super charger - any number of cylinders can be fed. Rolls-Royce experimented with the "Crecy",a 12 cylinder two stroke Vee 12 based on the Merlin configuration. It got into several prototype examples and showed very considerable gains in power, but could not be made reliable despite the considerable resources of the world's best engine manufacturer.

The predictable problem was that double the heat input at the piston face could not be dealt with at high speed and power, resulting in continued piston failures. The arrival of the gas turbine finally saw it off.

It was said that the characteristic wailing noise it made could be heard five miles away on a quiet night!

regards,

Kim Siddorn.

If only Kawasaki had fitted reed valves like Yamaha....but I did rather like the old flexi flyers. The major proponents of the positively scavenged two stroke as applied to motorbikes were of course DKW with their pre war racers, rumoured to be heard in Liverpool all the way from the Isle of Man. I heard one a few years ago, they are LOUD!!!! The Crecy could have been made reliable if development work had continued, but R-R had to concentrate most of their efforts on the Merlin, and after the introduction of the jet engine piston engine research took a back seat. I can strongly recommend the R-R Heritge book on the Crecy for further reading. It really is a case of 'if only'

Regards

Philip T-e

Many Fairbanks-Morse multicylinder engines from the early 1900s used crankcase scavenging, though the larger ones often used a reciprocating scavenging air pump.

-- Brian

By coincidence I am browsing through 'Classic Grand prix Cars" by Karl Ludvigsen, looking for some other info, I came across a couple of pages on two stroke Grand Prix engines.

In the 1920's there was alot of interest in these engines.

Not V8, but eight cylinder were the Delage 2 litre experiment, the Duesenberg eight 1.5 litre used piston-controlled porting with rotary valve to control timing of inlet charge. Piston crown had deflector. Was trialled for the 1926 Indy, but not raced. This engine was difficult to start - it required the blower to be spun by electric motor before the engine could be cranked. An over-running clutch then allowed the engine to take over the drive. They had problems with this blower drive, and so didn't race in 1926. In the 1930's Zoller and Trossi were both trying two strokes where two pistons shared one combustion chamber. The Trossi-Monaco had eight paired, radial cylinders, air cooled, front drive, tested but not raced. Quite a neat looking car.

Not eight cylinders, but Fiat was experimenting with a radical two stroke 1.5 litre in 1926. This was the Type 451 -an opposed piston, 6 cylinder, vertical layout with one crankshaft at top, the other at bottom. 1.5 litre, it could manange a high 6500 rpm and 150+ bhp, very noisey!

Appparently Porsche proposed something similar, but laid horizontally, for Mercedes in 1938.

So...No Grand Prix V8 for you, but some other interesting two stroke 'eights'.