peugeot man

Peogeot man -- I'd like to help. I worked as a test engineer on that project at the Thiokol Lake Denmark test site in 1968 and am intimitely knowledgeable about the design. I have buried in my files some literature with pics and have in my posession one of the early design cylinder assemblies and a scavenge blower impeller that came from the scrap pile when the project was winding down. Will go digging for that stuff tomorrow.

Ed Weldon

Hi Ed

That would be great if you could find the pictures I want. I think I saw somewhere a picture of this engine but now of course I cannot find it when I need it.

It is in my listing of unusual engines which I have compiled but no picture!

I have been compiling info on U,V,W,X and Y type engines for years now and have about 4,000 references in my data base plus unusual engines and some marine engines too

Cheers for now and thanks very much for your interest i will acknowledge your effort

Denis- peugeot man

Nearest thing I could find:

This is the Puch (pronounced "puke") Twingle. I was told this design was able to use lower octane fuels more efficiently.

I had a lot of fun on the few I owned.

I just noticed the cutaway view is confusing, with intake and exhaust ports on the same plane.

Hi Unredundant

I am familiar with the Puch motorcycle as years ago a friend had one of these cream in colour as I remember it and also EMC made a similar machine the cylinder block on the EMC was square on the fins.

What I want is a picture or drawing of the Thiokol Dynastar engine which is like a radial but shaped more like a cross - X shape if you like

Cheers for now

Peugeot man

Try this link: http://books.google.com/books?id=79MDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=dynastar+engine&source=bl&ots=ng6mAdvq2L&sig=s3GKeBiI5TQjZYUBa8TYO8x84l4&hl=en&ei=qLpDS4XYJYvmM4qFhYAJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CBkQ6AEwCDgU#v=onepage&q=dynastar%20engine&f=false

I hope this works!

Amazing engine.

Great find, Unredundant! Nicely done.

The link takes me to page 128... just scroll down to page 132 for the Thiokol engine article.

Hi Unredundant

Thank you for the link to the Dynastar but I cannot free the picture from the article is there a way you can get just a picture to me please which is all I really need for my article

Cheers for now

Peugeot man

Well, peugeot man, I guess Ed Weldon really is your guy. I was sort of bored and sifted through a lot of internet stuff... I could only find ONE reference to the Thiokol Dynastar engine, a comment placed in a discussion forum by a member named EdWeldon...

I, too, await input from Ed Weldon; would like to see more.

Hi

Thank you to all who have answered my query about Thiokol Dynastar engines I would like more pictures and info to choose from if possible. How does the engine work? for instance does it have a turbo or supercharger as I cannot see it as a crankcase compression engine

I have managed to extract a picture from the replies and could use it in my article but I am waiting to see what Ed Weldon comes up with

Cheers for now

peugeot man

Here's the best I could do with the pic

Thanks, Garthh for steering me to this thread. I had a blast reading through the old Popular Mechanics. New electric car batteries... new prototype electric vehicles from Detroit... concerns about pollution... history repeats.

The Puch twingle: the disadvantages of a single (such as vibration and infrequent power pulses) with the complexity of a twin. Allstate! All the motorcycle anyone should really need, right at your local Sears and Roebucks.

The popular mechanics article is pretty legitimate although filtered as might be expected from corporate PR types. The guy standing next to the 50hp engine in the photo is some drone with a good looking face. Far as I can remember he wasn't part of the development team. Most of the engineering crew worked in the office downtown (Denville, I think) so I didn't know everyone.

Only two prototypes of the 50 hp were assembled. One was gas powered and put out around 125 hp. One of them, the gas powered one I suspect was adapted to a lower unit and actually tested in the water. Hence the enthusiasm of PM for the outboard application.

By the time I went to work there the small diesel was superceded by a similar but larger 225 cubic inch diesel. That is what you see in the other photo of the cutaway block. This one was designed to produce 100 hp at 3600 rpm and could be tweaked up(I was one of the "tweakers) about 5% above that.

The small engine was pretty much abandoned as were otto cycle versions. A stated reason for this was that the newly emerging science surrounding air pollution was suggesting that combustion chambers with large surface area were inherently worse polluters. There were other more prosaic reasons one of which had to do with where marketing folks were drumming up interest in the design and corporate politics. The dynastar guys had come from the Curtis Wright Wankel program and Thiokol was a pretty important defense contractor who had absorbed the liquid fuel rocket manufacturer Reaction Motors. Places like this were fertile ground for corporate politics. What I do know was that the Coast Guard was very interested in these engines for use in their small patrol boats that were enjoying somewhat of a design renaissance at the time.......More of this later.

What peugeot man is interested in right now is pictures. To that end my search has been unsuccessful save finding a somewhat oxidized blower impeller and an old crankcase scavenge pump that had been worn out on one of the single cylinder (well, two cylinders, single block) test stands. I know I have the sales brochure because I saw it a couple of months ago when I was sorting some files. As for the block assembly (one of the 4 that were attached to a common crankcase)?? It wasn't where I thought it was. I fear it is buried under a small mountain of antique Ford hot rod parts in the crawl space part of my basement. So that'll have to wait as I search for the paper. Meantime anyone interested in more details on this critter will likely get additional commentary from me in this forum. This is as good a chance as any to do a useful data dump before my body wears out, the memory gets erased and it all has to be thrown into an unnecessarily pricey recycling process.

Ed Weldon

Ed,

I have been staring at the cut-away and am intrigued by the "box" arraignment for the linked connecting rods, and no less by what appears to be two main crankshaft pins.

I hope you continue to post here.

Thank you!

I don't know if this is any better than Garthh's or not -- it was scaled up in Google's viewer, from the Popular Mechanics article.

You might be able to play around with copying it from the Google viewer (using Windows screen capture) and then saving it as a BMP, which would be less lossy than the JPG here.

Hi

Can somebody tell me what engine Tucker used in his car and could you supply a picture or line drawing please, and was it an air cooled Franklin HO6 ??

Cheers for now

Peugeot man

Here's one pic:

It is available full sized.

There are many other pictures that can be found by searching Google images. It was water cooled.

Have you actually spent any time reading threads on this forum?

We're doing your homework, we answered the question.

If you or your friend have more homework to do start a new thread.

This site is populated by mostly old guys who know stuff & like to reminisce

Of course i have read the threads why do you think I posted my comments!! I think they are definitely OFF topic if you want to talk about bikes and whizzers start a new topic for them

And yes I have taken note of the replies and I am grateful for all the comments and the pictures

Cheers for now

peugeot man in Adelaide South Australia

So you didn't notice everyone except the 2 of us marked themselves off topic?

Strictly speaking your post #18 & blinks #19 reply are off topic. your original question was about the Thiokol Dynastar, not the Tucker.

You can change the setting on your profile, if the OTP's [off topic posts] bother you that much

The comments don't bother me as much as they seem to bother you!

The Tucker query is also in Automotive too

Cheers for now

Peugeot man

You appear unfamiliar with the system here. You can set your display of posts to be threaded or chronological, and in your profile, you can set off-topic posts to be minimized -- which I think is the default. Then avoiding them is simply a matter of not enlarging them. Then, if you feel you are wasting your time enlarging them and reading them... don't. What could be simpler?

The ability to vote one's own post off-topic is a strength of this forum. It is not uncommon that the off-topic posts are more interesting than the on-topic ones -- the basic topic may have run its course, but prompts related thinking, which prompts more, etc. There is at least one thread here that has many thousands of posts, most off topic.

I finally found what I thought was a sales brochure for the Dynastar engine. It wasn't.

But what I found was even better. It was a copy of an SAE paper, #770A, presented at the SAE National Powerplant Meeting in Chicago, IL on Oct.14-17, 1963, by W.G. Lundquist, the inventor of record. The exact title of the 16 page paper is:

The "Dyna-Star" Powerplant Concept for Compact Diesel and Spark Ignition Engines

Some Google searching only turned up a couple of references to the paper; but no actual content. The SAE no longer has copies of the paper available. So the best bet will probably a large university library where there is an engineering school located.

Or you can ask me. I'm going to scan the pages and can furnish either high resolution files that will choke your email or low res that ought to be readable. There are 20 small BW photos and a number of diagrams and test curves in the paper.

I haven't had a chance to go look for W.G. Lundquist's patents. If any of you guys out there have the inclination I'd appreciate your posting the US patent number here if you find it.

Ed Weldon

GA Blink. Real info. Many thanks. The link to the patent will be useful for both peugeot man and myself. I want to chew a bit on the claims and compare them with the other 4 referenced earlier patents. I haven't gotten to the printer/scanner yet this evening. My wife has a project going there. She isn't up to working her hobby projects very often these days; so I don't want to interrupt her. Looks like tomorrow morning when I'll try to post some pics from the SAE paper.

Ed Weldon

Hi Ed

Those pictures are great. Was the engine fitted with a scavenge blower of some sort.and did it ever get into any sort of vehicle for testing etc.

Was that fan brake used without any sort of cage or shroud! looks a bit dangerous like that but of course we are used to everything having to be over protected these days

In the previous comment about the patent I cannot open it with my Apple computer i don't know if it is me or the system but I just don't get anywhere with it ! can somebody please post the patent for me

Cheers for now

peugeot man

I use foxfire & foxit reader [smaller memory usage than adobe] which you can run instead of safari..

try this

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2989022.pdf

Peugeot man -- I've been pretty busy today and am about ready to crash. I'll post more pics tomorrow including a "test vehicle". Did you get my message via Yahoo? Please reply so we can open up a separate channel of communication to send you files.

There was a scavenge blower. I'll post the details as soon as I get a couple of pictures together

That fan brake was pretty hokey. When the test program got serious they got hold of three very nice GE electric dynamometers and built some serious test cells.

But you've gotta understand that these were aerospace guys. They all had a tendency to "let it hang out" a bit. Most of the guys in the test crew were Reaction Motors guys. An interesting summary of one story they told follows:

Working in the test cell he accidentally spilled some hydrazine on the front of his trousers. A flash; he felt almost nothing and his pants were gone…….EW anecdote from Reaction Motors test site.

--- Ed Weldon

Great stuff, Ed.

Gotta go do some real work this morning so the additional picture scanning will wait til later. Meantime below is the description text and 3 figures out of the first three pages of the SAE 770A paper for anyone interested in wading through the basics of how the dynastar design works. .........Ed Weldon

DESCRIPTION

The Dyna -Star engine is a two-stroke cycle engine designed to provide uniflow scavenging and charging with unsymmetrical port timing by means of a unique arrangement of "U" type cylinders in a simple practical configuration without employing any unconventional mechanical contrivances. Stated differently. this engine is designed to provide the advantages of the opposed piston type in a simpler, more compact package. The basic design concept is applicable to either spark ignition or diesel engines.

Basic Design - Fig1 shows the basic design concept. In the version shown by this figure. the engine consists of four pairs of "U" type cylinders in one plane. The cylinders of each pair are oriented to each other at an angle selected to give a desirable geometrically phased exhaust port opening lead compared to inlet port opening. The term "geometrically phased" is defined as the phase relation of events that is established by the geometry of the engine, exclusive of valve port size or location. Additional geometric phase difference may be provided by varying the distance between the knuckle pins of each cylinder pair, as will be described later. Further port timing control maybe obtained by positioning the timing edge of the inlet and exhaust ports differently along bores in the conventional manner.

The pistons of each pair of cylinders are connected to a "true-motion" frame by individual connecting rods. The true motion frame rides on the crankpins of two single throw crankshafts. The frame links the crankshafts together so that they rotate in phase and any point on the frame describes a true circle whose radius is equal to the crankthrow.

The inboard ends of the connecting rods are connected to the frame by conventional knuckle pins. Each knuckle pin, being journaled in the frame, travels in a true circle of crankthrow radius, thereby imparting identical motion to all pistons when all the connecting rods are the same length and the knuckle pin orbital centers are on their respective cylinder centerlines. This provides perfect dynamic balance by simple counterweighting of the crankshafts.

A typical valve port timing diagram is shown in Fig. 2. Note that the exhaust ports open 18 deg before the inlet ports and close 2 deg after the inlet ports. A wide selection of diagrams is possible by various combinations of cylinder angle. knuckle pin position, and port height.

As shown by Fig. 3, the two single throw crankshafts may be geared to a common output shaft, if desired. With the two crankshaft configurations, the geared arrangement is usually preferable because, at cranking or low idle speeds a synchronizing gear between the crankshafts helps to carry the frame and crankshafts smoothly through the momentary unstable position that occurs when the crankthrows are exactly in the same plane, and this gear can very conveniently be the output gear. At higher operating speeds the inertia of the moving parts provides the required continuity. No unstable positions exist if three or more crankshafts are used.

The geared output shaft has the additional advantage of providing a wide selection of output shaft speeds and locations, as will be noted later.

Hi Ed

I note that in the cutaway drawing the cylinders are at a V but I thought they were parallel to one another! or were some engines V's and some not??

Cheers for now

Peugeot man

Hi Garthh

My adobe has at last decided to upgrade so now I have the patent documents to read as well as all of Ed's postings. Soon I will be able to write an article on this engine alone ( I will have so much info ) as well as including it in my article on W's, X's and Y's

Cheers for now it is 43deg.C here today probably a good deal hotter than some parts of USA and Europe but we don't ever get that cold.

peugeot man in Adelaide South Australia