So far in Race Engine Technology’s coverage on valves, there have been a number of articles on valve materials for the more extreme applications, specifically pieces on Inconel valves and Nimonic materials used for turbocharged endurance applications. There have also been articles on the lightweight valves, made from low-density materials such as titanium and titanium aluminide.
Valves made from these materials are expensive for various reasons, some to do with the price of the raw material, some due to the immaturity of the technology and some due to the extra processing time required to produce the valves. While it is always interesting to take note of the latest materials technology, there are many people in our sport who can afford neither the cost nor the risk of running these materials, and would derive little real benefit from doing so anyway. Read more…
Esslinger Engineering of South El Monte, California, is primarily in the business of building midget engines based on Ford internals. The company has been in this line of work since 1990.
For those of you with a high boredom threshold, a constantly recurring theme in my articles for RET-Monitor and Race Engine Technology is to stress the importance of compressive residual stresses at the surface of components which are cyclically stressed. The compressive stress is extremely effective in improving the fatigue strength of engine components, and there are a number of ways of achieving this; some of these have been discussed before in RET-Monitor. 
Time was when the application of the white of a single egg - be that free range or battery, it didn’t seem to matter which - was enough to cure that annoying little water leak. Dropped into the top of the radiator, the action of the engine being progressively warmed was sufficient to denature the protein in the albumin and form a thick white mass, sealing the leak or at least sealing it enough to get you home. But with modern critically cooled engines, narrow cooling passageways using minimal amounts of transfer fluid, such practices are best consigned to the memories of old men and heroic tales from the past. 
Lest you think Fig. 1 here is the remnant of some form of horrific engine blow-up, let me explain that what you are looking at is a ductile iron piston ring. Twisted and bent to all manner of shapes the resulting contortion demonstrates vividly how flexible the material can be.
In the pushrod section of RET-Monitor the reader has been given an insight into the different aspects of pushrod design. Much information has been shared on the specifics of the pushrod concerning its shape, material and contact area of cup and/or bowl.
Dan Esslinger, President of Esslinger Engineering has been building Midget engines since 1990 - “So I guess we’re 20-ish years into this thing,” he says. In that time, Esslinger Engineering has gone through perhaps 30 iterations of pistons, “That’s been due to bore size change, different strokes, different rod lengths, valve locations, things of that ilk,” he says. “If you change one, it all changes.
I suppose it’s the mechanical engineer in me but ever since I can remember I have always been fascinated by complex curves. It may have been the Spirograph I received as a child, rolling one circle around another to produced a series of intriguing spirals. Or it could have been the Lissajous figures describing complex harmonic motion later on at university. Either way, the complex geometries produced in such a simple way left a major impression.
In the 
When it comes to liner technology, the temptation is always to think in terms of cast iron - whether it be grey cast iron or one of the more recent ductile - or aluminium. Each takes its lead from the cylinder block supporting them and therefore, for reasons of thermal expansion, sound engineering sense seems to suggest that we stick to the same generic material.
