AviationBanter - View Single Post - DIY Two-Stroke Engine

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On Sat, 6 Mar 2010 17:45:22 -0800 (PST), wrote:

On Mar 5, 6:56Â*pm, durabol wrote:
For the last few years I have toyed with the idea of building a
homemade two-stroke engine for UL use. What keyed my interest was
reading about homemade model aircraft engines and reading and watching
a re-enactment of the Wright brother's first flight with a replica
engine (not a two-stroke engine).

Has anyone made a 2-stroke engine from scratch? One may need to cast
aluminium, may need a lathe and milling machine with boring head and
hone or perhaps the boring and honing of the cylinder and bearing
journals could be farmed out. A commercial carburetor and piston could
be used. Two-stroke engines seem simple enough that home construction
may be possible, if not practical.

A direct drive engine will be that much heavier when you take into
account the weight of the drive reduction system. I have calculated
the weight of an 80x80mm bore and stroke 2 cylinder opposed engine and
it was a bit under 40lbs which should give about 1hp/lbs. I used 10mm
cylinder and crankcase wall thickness and a 1.25" dia crank.

I have got some idea of port-time-area from the freeware computer
program called "BiMotion". I'm not sure how good the data is for
lowish speed engines but I guess it is a start. I have also worked up
a spreadsheet for similar information.

I don't think a reed valve system is needed for this engine since it
is only going to operate at a fairly narrow rpm range and the port
timing isn't critical. Piston ported valves offer similar performance
to other induction types but only over a narrow rpm range which is
what I have planned for the engine. I plan to build an engine with a
restrictive exhaust to ensure no fuel escapes. I have heard that
piston ported engines can spit some fuel out of the carb at idle but
this doesn't seem like a major problem. Rotary valves via crank shaft
induction (disk or drum valves as well) is an interesting idea but I
don't think I need the critical timing they provide.

I was planning on using the largest two-stroke piston (not a diesel
piston) I could find and using the largest stoke that was reasonable,
something like 90x105mm

Brock

There's any amount of engineering info out there on two-strokes,
books have been written. They were a staple project in The Model
Engineer magazine for years, should you want to look that up. What's
UL use?

I believe he's talking UltraLight Aircraft.

Why a two stroke? The commercially available ones are bad enough. I
hate even taking my chainsaw up a ladder - why would I want to fly
behind one???
A good, small, light supercharged 4 stroke or diesel??? Now that's
something completely different!!!

You'd be basically recreating a commodity item. Resurrect one from a
defunct snowblower, weed-whacker or Lawnboy and spend more time on
figuring out the project you want to drive. The engineering's done,
you aren't likely to improve on what's already been built. Want
overhead valves? Been done. Rotary valves, ditto. Fuel injection,
same. Separate lube system, been done. Opposed twins, flat fours,
square fours, Vs, Xs, Ws, all been done. Separate forced air pumping,
too. They basically suck thermodynamically except the one feature
they've got going is power-to-weight ratio, the small ones pump out a
lot of horsepower, usually at high RPM, for their size. For that you
can go with an existing engine and spend more time on the rest of the
project.

Stan