Well first he has certainly not taken safety into mind when doing this project.
Look at the way he's dressed. (With no protection clothing or eyes or anything).
Look at how close he comes to the gasoline.
Look at how he's seated so he can't even get away quickly.
Look how there is no protective shield.
He doesn't even appear to have anyone else there in case of an emergency.
He has enough intelligence and curiosity to attempt this but not enough to protect himself. More or less what I would imagine from someone much younger, certainly not a grown man.
> Well first he has certainly not taken safety into mind when doing this project.
I'm sure he took the safety precautions he though were worth it. It might not be worthwhile for him to use an additional 20% of his time/money/whatever for the slightly reduced risk.
Yeah sure – when it's appropriate. I've got a RaspberryPi within armsreach that's still got the stock ARCH-ARM image with it's default login of root:root.
Yeah, I wouldn't deploy it on a public internet exposed network, or give it to someone else who wasn't aware of the implications or consequences of such an insecure machine – but in the privacy of my home network it's just fine.
I assume this guy is the same – he needs some increased safety if he wants to show this thing off in public, but in hs own shed he's got every right to accept risks for himself that are inappropriate for other people.
I've seen equally and much more "dangerous" projects at Burningman – hell, if he gets this running with any sort of reliability, attaching it to a bicycle and riding it around at Burningman would be a _fabulous_ idea!
You've never run a motor with the airfilter off, right?
My motorcycle motor produces a beautiful cloud of gasoline droplets standing maybe 4 or 5 inches tall above the carburetor throats when you crack the throttle open.
There's thousands of car/bike enthusiasts who see that in their garages every weekend. They're not dying in catastrophic accidents all the time.
Meh. You folks should have misspent more of your youth burning shit down. Gasoline is highly flammable, but it doesn't light without a spark. Also, the small amount of gasoline he's got in his carb will only produce so much flame. I'm glad he appears to be running this outside. I probably would have worn safety glasses, but then I only have one eye.
FYI it's an aerosol can of ether starter fluid, which its intended purpose is to be sprayed into carbs to get engines to start. There is literally no way to do this other than how the guy in the video is doing it.
Your concern for safety is rather laughable for the size of the engine he's doing this with. Ether if improperly stored is the most dangerous thing as a can of 50% either having crystallized is a good few grams of TNT equivalent, which would make it a small hand grenade. (however an aerosol can with peroxide inhibitors in is extremely low risk if its new)
Talk to anyone who has worked in a mechanics garage and this video is extremely weak tea. Try being near a V12 when you've just filled every spark plug with ether and you're spraying it into the air intake. Now that'll give you an uneasy feeling like you've just made a potential bomb, but the fact of the matter is that the failure points in engines are valves and gaskets long before any metal part fatigues and becomes dangerous.
His piston chamber appears to copper piping, which don't fragment they split, so there's really no risk there. Think bronze cannon over cast iron.
No rev limiter (at least not that I saw), at least one potentially peaky (high-RPM biased) timing parameter (intake valve), lots of parts that aren't built to take high RPM, and a lightweight flywheel. If it were to suddenly start working properly, it could go flying apart with lots of force in very short order.
To be fair, it would take lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) ignition timings, since with that system they're all over the place.
FWIW, I regularly expose myself to pretty much exactly the same danger he's choosing to expose himself to - just because the engines I work on in my garage are made by Ducati or Mazda, it doesn't make my sitting down in non-protective clothing with open containers of gasoline and no eye protection noticeably "safer". (In fact my jeans still smell slightly of the gasoline I spilled on them on Saturday…)
I think you'll find a vast number of "grown men" who'd recognise the risks you identify here, and say "Yeah, it's not as safe as sitting on the couch watching TV. Grab a beer and stand back in case this explodes…"
And while you might question their intelligence – they'll just as incorrectly question your manhood for doing so…
It's kind of fascinating, to me, that internal combustion engines won the car war for so long. Electric motors are so much simpler to build, and so much more efficient from an energy usage perspective. I understand why electric lost out (energy storage, range of vehicle), but I think it could have gone a different way had there been just a couple of nudges in the electric direction at the right time. And, what a different world we'd live in, if those nudges had happened...
Once I plugged a toy race track to the outlet (in portuguese we call it "Autorama" I dunno the name in english), I knew enough of physics to expect it to burst in flame...
But instead the car got REALLY, REALLY, REALLY fast, shoot out of the track and smashed into the wall.
Of course, I happily put a second car on it, and changed the track so that the car does not end smashed, and indeed, I could launch cars all over the place. Also as the car raced, sparks came out of the contacts with the track.
Now that I am older and know even more physics, I have no fucking idea on how I made a DC motor work only forward with a AC current.
Assuming the track was designed so the cars go forward no matter which direction you place them, the cars likely had a small diode-based circuit to always feed the current into the motor with the same polarity. When you fed an AC current into the track, that circuit in the cars would have acted like a rectifier, turning the AC into poor-quality, high-voltage DC.
The sparks would come from feeding way too much voltage in, enough to jump the gaps caused by momentary losses of contact between the track and a fast-moving car.
I'm guessing your mains supply would've been 230v/5A - in which case I have to say I'm surprised that it didn't blow the diodes out :) I remember plugging a 1N2001 (or similar) into a wall socket, and turning the switch on to watch the diode blow out as a schoolboy.
As a sibling comment mentioned, it's possible there was a diode somewhere in the system.
Another possibility is that the motors in the slot cars had electromagnets for the stationary field instead of permanent magnets. That's what an ordinary power drill, especially one without electronic speed control, has. Such a motor will run pretty much the same on AC or DC. When running on AC, the rotor and stator both change their magnetic fields in perfect sync so the net effect is substantially the same as running to same motor on DC.
Wikipedia has an article on "Brushed DC electric motor" with a section on "wound stator". It doesn't specifically mention running the motor on AC, but there's enough there to show you what's going on.
That's not a fair comparison at all. Building a hobby V12 like that is like building a modern brushless high-efficiency electric motor, not like building the toy you mention.
The combustion engine equivalent to the toy electric motor would be a simple stirling engine or even a Hero engine. These can be very easy to build.
Building a high-efficiency brushless motor isn't particularly hard - especially if you're happy to consider "reusing/repurposing components from readily available 'junk'", or buying kits like this:
(I've built both kit versions and "from scratch" motors built with parts ratted from cd rom drive motors with a few bucks worth of rare-earth magnets.)
Building your own controller for it is somewhat more challenging…
There is an open source project called Open-BLDC, I really like the project and use it to help me make a regular Brushed DC motor controller, eventually I'll want to play with BLDCs and there is some fine work done by the author of the boards and code esden.
Small two-stroke engines used in lawn mowers and the like were incredibly simple. Perhaps a dozen parts for the entire engine. Of course, such things are now banned in California.
Yeah. It's worth noting that for engines in stationary devices like fabrication tools and machinery, electric totally won. So what made the difference with cars wasn't just the engines themselves, but rather the energy storage/distribution network. Now that we have batteries that are good enough at a cheap enough price, electric is gaining fast despite a lot of cultural opposition.
It took hundreds of years to go from belt drive in factories to individual electric motors which probably didn't get installed in large numbers until post WW1
Even in the late 70's the mechanical technician courses in the UK required you to be able to design an old school belt drive.
Yup. I am quite familiar. My great grandfather made a minor fortune in the 20's with a service company that would refinish the bearings used in shops with overhead drive shafts, etc.
I'm not sure about totally won - here is a demonstration of a gasoline-powered flashlight, which might create a resurgence of this method for power tools. At 0:30 he expounds on the advantages of the device.
And let's not forget compressed air, which is still a very popular way to run power tools. Electric vastly outnumbers it, of course, but compressed air is still used in a significant portion of tools.
There was a french company that built compressed-air vehicles, and they were supposed to be much more efficient. The comment you replied to is tongue-in-cheek though.
> but I think it could have gone a different way had there been just a couple of nudges in the electric direction at the right time
Gasoline cars were popularized before electric power generation was widespread. It would be decades before the power grid could possibly have supported electric cars.
The Model-T started in 1908 (and there were of course cars before that), the War of the Currents was in the late 1880's. The Model-T represents cars becoming popular, but the War of the Currents was just the beginning of the electric grid.
The first Gasoline car was also around the 1880's (must have been an amazing time to be alive with all those inventions).
It was not until the late 1940's that electricity was widespread, i.e. rural areas which are of course important for long distance travel.
So the electric car would not have been practical until then, and by then of course gasoline was completely entrenched.
When Henry Ford finally made it big with his Model T, his wife Clara made him buy her a fancy car: a 1914 Detroit Electric.
Electric cars were the 'good' cars, easier to run, not as dirty or hard to start, more luxurious. But they were an expensive luxury. The Model T was cheap, easy to fix, and adaptable to many other uses (like hooking a wheel to a belt and running a saw to cut wood.) The Model T was a classic disruptive invention: less good but much, much cheaper; it created an entirely new market of car buyers.
It may be that that electric is a better option now: oil is expensive and non-renewable, and burning fuel pollutes. But neither of these reasons were very compelling a century ago.
Electric cars needed far more than a "nudge" and still do. Even with today's state-of-the-art battery technology the range, recharge time, and cost equation still doesn't work for most people. With the lead-acid technology of the day, it was never even close compared to internal combustion.
I don't know -- while I admire what he's trying to do here, it's just a little too cargo cultish.
There's a lot of engineering in internal combustions engines and all that info is readily available. Things like compression ratios, spark timing, and fuel-air mixture ratios; all very important but it seems he didn't give any thought at all to this before jumping in.
A little thinking ahead of time could have saved him a lot of time and money I think.
I'd suggest the author spend a bit of time looking at the designs of the Wright Flyer engine and that in the original Model T and going from there. These two engines are of very simple design and worked reasonably well. And there's a ton of technical information out there on these, too.
Oh, and some fabrication skills with a lathe and mill could be handy, too. I'm always amazed at the length some folks will go to with building stuff from hardware store stock. A community college class in machining and a cheap lathe and mill opens up a whole new world for any maker.
I agree that he should have done more research before jumping in. A quick Google search for animations of simple two-stroke engines would probably help him get that working in fairly short order.
I disagree, though, about needing to go crazy with the craftsmanship. I mean, if the purpose of this is to build something experimental, or something that could be used to illustrate to kids how an engine works, having it NOT be craftsman-like might help demystify the whole thing.
I really like that he has built it onto a piece of plywood. It reminds me of those old electronics builder kits you could buy at radioshack. Would you want to actually use one of those as a real radio? No. But building a simple radio that actually functions where you can see all the pieces really helps to make it real.
So, from an educational perspective, I think the simplicity of it is helpful.
It's a matter of context. In the broadest sense, nuclear reactions are an energy source. In general, I agree with you, but it's easy to see the difference between electricity and compressed air. Compressed air is an intermediary in the sense that wire-transmitted electricity is, but it's used in very limited contexts.
I don't understand the distinction you're drawing between electricity and compressed air. Aside from the fact that compressed air is much less efficient and much more difficult to run over long distances, they look pretty much identical to me: they are both ways of transmitting energy.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadLook at the way he's dressed. (With no protection clothing or eyes or anything).
Look at how close he comes to the gasoline.
Look at how he's seated so he can't even get away quickly.
Look how there is no protective shield.
He doesn't even appear to have anyone else there in case of an emergency.
He has enough intelligence and curiosity to attempt this but not enough to protect himself. More or less what I would imagine from someone much younger, certainly not a grown man.
I'm sure he took the safety precautions he though were worth it. It might not be worthwhile for him to use an additional 20% of his time/money/whatever for the slightly reduced risk.
Though seriously, when was HN ever about health and safety?
The computer version of safety is called security. And HN cares a lot about computer security.
Yeah, I wouldn't deploy it on a public internet exposed network, or give it to someone else who wasn't aware of the implications or consequences of such an insecure machine – but in the privacy of my home network it's just fine.
I assume this guy is the same – he needs some increased safety if he wants to show this thing off in public, but in hs own shed he's got every right to accept risks for himself that are inappropriate for other people.
I've seen equally and much more "dangerous" projects at Burningman – hell, if he gets this running with any sort of reliability, attaching it to a bicycle and riding it around at Burningman would be a _fabulous_ idea!
My motorcycle motor produces a beautiful cloud of gasoline droplets standing maybe 4 or 5 inches tall above the carburetor throats when you crack the throttle open.
There's thousands of car/bike enthusiasts who see that in their garages every weekend. They're not dying in catastrophic accidents all the time.
Your concern for safety is rather laughable for the size of the engine he's doing this with. Ether if improperly stored is the most dangerous thing as a can of 50% either having crystallized is a good few grams of TNT equivalent, which would make it a small hand grenade. (however an aerosol can with peroxide inhibitors in is extremely low risk if its new)
Talk to anyone who has worked in a mechanics garage and this video is extremely weak tea. Try being near a V12 when you've just filled every spark plug with ether and you're spraying it into the air intake. Now that'll give you an uneasy feeling like you've just made a potential bomb, but the fact of the matter is that the failure points in engines are valves and gaskets long before any metal part fatigues and becomes dangerous.
His piston chamber appears to copper piping, which don't fragment they split, so there's really no risk there. Think bronze cannon over cast iron.
To be fair, it would take lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) ignition timings, since with that system they're all over the place.
He could have built an enclosure and put this on a table similar to what is used in lab experiments.
But please tell me what this has to do with whether I have personally tried to build, in particular, engines?
I think you'll find a vast number of "grown men" who'd recognise the risks you identify here, and say "Yeah, it's not as safe as sitting on the couch watching TV. Grab a beer and stand back in case this explodes…"
And while you might question their intelligence – they'll just as incorrectly question your manhood for doing so…
While some people do make tiny internal combustion engines the work involved in incredible.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLn7xG8vuPQ)
World's smallest V12 engine: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3KdpzL3Hkk)
Making model IC Engine valves: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nofj1CGSCM4)
But, being a boy, I wanted it to work better. So I replaced the battery with a lamp cord and plugged it in. It promptly burst into flames. Awesome!
But instead the car got REALLY, REALLY, REALLY fast, shoot out of the track and smashed into the wall.
Of course, I happily put a second car on it, and changed the track so that the car does not end smashed, and indeed, I could launch cars all over the place. Also as the car raced, sparks came out of the contacts with the track.
Now that I am older and know even more physics, I have no fucking idea on how I made a DC motor work only forward with a AC current.
The sparks would come from feeding way too much voltage in, enough to jump the gaps caused by momentary losses of contact between the track and a fast-moving car.
Another possibility is that the motors in the slot cars had electromagnets for the stationary field instead of permanent magnets. That's what an ordinary power drill, especially one without electronic speed control, has. Such a motor will run pretty much the same on AC or DC. When running on AC, the rotor and stator both change their magnetic fields in perfect sync so the net effect is substantially the same as running to same motor on DC.
Wikipedia has an article on "Brushed DC electric motor" with a section on "wound stator". It doesn't specifically mention running the motor on AC, but there's enough there to show you what's going on.
The combustion engine equivalent to the toy electric motor would be a simple stirling engine or even a Hero engine. These can be very easy to build.
http://www.customcdr.com/cgi-bin/ccp51/cp-app.cgi?usr=51H817...
(I've built both kit versions and "from scratch" motors built with parts ratted from cd rom drive motors with a few bucks worth of rare-earth magnets.)
Building your own controller for it is somewhat more challenging…
http://esden.net/2010/09/19/open-bldc-v0-3-hardware-based-cl...
Even in the late 70's the mechanical technician courses in the UK required you to be able to design an old school belt drive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcdVaslktBE
Gasoline cars were popularized before electric power generation was widespread. It would be decades before the power grid could possibly have supported electric cars.
The Model-T started in 1908 (and there were of course cars before that), the War of the Currents was in the late 1880's. The Model-T represents cars becoming popular, but the War of the Currents was just the beginning of the electric grid.
The first Gasoline car was also around the 1880's (must have been an amazing time to be alive with all those inventions).
It was not until the late 1940's that electricity was widespread, i.e. rural areas which are of course important for long distance travel.
So the electric car would not have been practical until then, and by then of course gasoline was completely entrenched.
Electric cars were the 'good' cars, easier to run, not as dirty or hard to start, more luxurious. But they were an expensive luxury. The Model T was cheap, easy to fix, and adaptable to many other uses (like hooking a wheel to a belt and running a saw to cut wood.) The Model T was a classic disruptive invention: less good but much, much cheaper; it created an entirely new market of car buyers.
It may be that that electric is a better option now: oil is expensive and non-renewable, and burning fuel pollutes. But neither of these reasons were very compelling a century ago.
There's a lot of engineering in internal combustions engines and all that info is readily available. Things like compression ratios, spark timing, and fuel-air mixture ratios; all very important but it seems he didn't give any thought at all to this before jumping in.
A little thinking ahead of time could have saved him a lot of time and money I think.
I'd suggest the author spend a bit of time looking at the designs of the Wright Flyer engine and that in the original Model T and going from there. These two engines are of very simple design and worked reasonably well. And there's a ton of technical information out there on these, too.
Oh, and some fabrication skills with a lathe and mill could be handy, too. I'm always amazed at the length some folks will go to with building stuff from hardware store stock. A community college class in machining and a cheap lathe and mill opens up a whole new world for any maker.
I disagree, though, about needing to go crazy with the craftsmanship. I mean, if the purpose of this is to build something experimental, or something that could be used to illustrate to kids how an engine works, having it NOT be craftsman-like might help demystify the whole thing.
I really like that he has built it onto a piece of plywood. It reminds me of those old electronics builder kits you could buy at radioshack. Would you want to actually use one of those as a real radio? No. But building a simple radio that actually functions where you can see all the pieces really helps to make it real.
So, from an educational perspective, I think the simplicity of it is helpful.