The trouble with advancing years, or so I was always told, was that you can always remember how it used to be. In the dim and distant past, it seemed to be much more fun (even though it probably wasn’t) and if the job couldn’t be precise then we always made it as accurate as we could somehow adapting the product to the limitations of the manufacturing process.
A typical case of this, I was reminded recently, was in the casting of cylinder heads and crankcases. In those days and I am only talking about the 1960s here Read more…
I think it was the great Liverpool F. C. manager Bill Shankly who once professed that football wasn’t a matter of life and death – it was more important than that. But strangely enough, the words – ‘football’, ‘life’, and ‘oils’ have all come together recently making substantial improvements to gearbox durability especially those with sequential changes.
In the recent Race Engine Technology magazine article on the subject of fasteners, 
For those of you following the ‘Focus’ articles in Race Engine Technology magazine, it is clear that recent changes and improvements in manufacturing technology have improved the products being examined, and this is undoubtedly true for most machined parts, and also for parts produced by casting and forging too. Clearly the CNC revolution has not left the world of fabrication untouched with many operations controlled by computer being more accurate than the average man could ever be. We will not include those who make motorsport exhausts as ‘the average man’. Thankfully, we are a long way from being able to replace these craftsmen by robots. 
The news that the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva in Switzerland is back in commission, is to be greeted with relief by all who have a genuine interest in particle physics. Designed to answer fundamental questions about the Universe by accelerating beams of high energy particles creating proton-to-proton collisions, the results, it is hoped, should provide explanations to some of the most basic of laws surrounding the most elementary of objects in space and time. And from all this we might just gain a further understanding of our Universe and its beginning, starting with the Big Bang. 
With the ban on in-season testing, one of the greatest increase in uses of any other testing equipment is that of the power train transient dynamometer. Costing millions of pounds to buy and even more to run, these are used to simulate precisely the events experienced by the engine and transmission as if it were installed in a vehicle circulating around the track. Controlling not only the engine speed and load but just about every other parameter you can think of – air temperature and humidity, oil temperature, fuel temperature, not to mention the shock loading directly as a result of changing gears, the dynamometer system also tries to simulate 
The humble rotating shaft seal may be an afterthought for many a designer but its history is certainly never lacking in acronyms!
A motorcycle engine, indeed any engine running at over 10,000 rpm, presents a particularly difficult challenge to the surface of its cylinder bore. The amount of heat flux and the limited time to dissipate it through the cylinder wall and into the coolant, will inevitably lead to high running temperatures and all of its associated problems. Although lightweight aluminium cylinders have been used to assist with the heat transfer, to minimise durability issues, thin steel liners have often been inserted against the inner wall to reduce the piston ring friction, give some level of acceptable durability and avoid engine seizure.
In previous articles on the subject of crankshaft materials and hardening, we have made reference to the benefits of having residual compressive stress at the surface of the component. With the nitride hardening treatment used extensively on crankshafts, we not only make the crankshaft more wear resistant, but the change to the composition of the surface also imparts compressive residual stress. There are other methods of achieving this other than by nitriding the crankshaft, and we shall begin to look at these after examining a simple case to show the benefits of residual compressive stress. 
It always surprises me how often people approach a recognised expert in a particular subject and yet fail to act on their advice. We can all think of occasions when say, consulting a solicitor or lawyer, since theirs is a world of uncertainty and risk, it might be reasonable to seek alternate council. But in seeking advice from a reputable camshaft supplier it seems silly to ignore their advice and go for a completely different cam to that suggested. And yet, I am told, it still happens.
