Word: crankshafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...series (Speedway and De Luxe) this year with deep-skirted front fenders, a beltline chrome strip from front to back. All by itself in the ultra-low field, Willys has dropped its prices 12% to $495 to $620. Improvements: New-type soft springs with rubber-lined clips, counterweight crankshaft, automatic carburetor...
Ever since Colonel Lindbergh flew one across the Atlantic in 1927, most U. S. aeronautical engineers have been developing air-cooled, radial engines with cylinders raying out like huge wheel-spokes around a short, chunky crankshaft. But as power was increased, radial engines grew so bulky that they dragged on high-speed planes...
...cylinder, 1,200-h.p. Twin-Wasp motor but had four more cylinders, some 50% more horsepower, about the same dimensions. Secret-of-success: through trial & error engineers had learned to cool high-powered air-cooled engines more efficiently, thus were able to clump more cylinders around a single crankshaft. Better cooling also made it possible to increase cylinder pressures, step up speed of piston strokes...
...plugged away for years on the development of the air-cooled radial engine, now close to perfection, German designers have worked at the liquid-cooled, in-line power plant. Result for the U. S.: the radial engine, with cylinders ranged like the spokes of a wheel around a short crankshaft, has grown to such size that its drag on the high-speed airplane is now of alarming proportions. (Head resistance increases as the square of the speed, e.g., if speed is tripled, drag becomes nine times as great.) Results for German designers: the in-line engine, now cooled with ethylene...
Reader Schrankel, accustomed to the ordinary type of aircraft engine in which the propeller shaft is also the crankshaft, has not realized that in the Hispano-Suiza moteur canon the crankshaft drives through gears an entirely separate propeller shaft. This straight shaft is hollow. The superiority of the new moteur canon lies precisely in that it does not have to be "synchronized" to fire between the spinning propeller blades, as in the old-fashioned arrangement with which Reader Schrankel is familiar, but sends a stream of shells straight out through the hollow axis of the propeller...