1148 La Casa Avenue, Yuba City, California 95991
Some time ago, after having finished restoring an engine, after
much hard work and fussing in the hope of getting everything just
right, I was talking to one of our club members at one of our
gas-ups.
He was showing a beautifully restored engine with every detail
finished to perfection and mounted on varnished beams and a nice
set of wheels.
However, he did not seem to be as happy with his project as you
would expect, and he went on to tell me that he had worked so hard
and worried so much about getting everything just right that he had
burned himself out and he was not going to restore any more
engines.
Hearing that, and considering my own feelings about some of my
projects, made me wonder if some of us might take it all too
seriously and maybe it was time to lighten up and have some fun
with it.
And that was the inspiration for the Nori Parcs Engine. Nori
Parcs read backwards reads ‘scrap iron,’ and that is what I
built, an engine from the scrap and junk that was lying around the
place.
I started with a rusty piece of 2’x2’x?’ angle iron
about 15′ long. On the edge and near the end of this I welded a
5′ length of 1? pipe at a 90 degree angle and braced it solid.
Into each end of this I drove a roller bearing that accepted a
?’ shaft. This is the crankshaft.
The flywheel is an 8′ diameter x
7/8‘ thick piece of solid steel that was
scrap from a steel fabricating plant. I mounted this on the
faceplate of the lathe and trued it up and drilled the center hole
to be a tight drive in fit for the ?’ shaft.
I locked the shaft and flywheel together by drilling and tapping
a 3/8‘ hole at the edge of the shaft and
screwing in an Allen head set screw.
The cylinder is a 1?’ pipe 6′ long with a ?’ tee
welded on the end. The tee has the side cut out to open it up to
the cylinder.
The valve units are made up on ?’ pipe tees and the valves
are turned down from Briggs & Stratton valves.
There is an angle iron about 3′ long welded on edge to the
bottom of the cylinder. This in turn is welded to the 2’x2′
angle iron in such a way as to properly align it with the
flywheel.
All welding on the cylinder had to be done before boring and
honing to avoid distortion.
The piston is from an old air compressor turned down to fit and
with a lot of excess metal removed to lighten.
The conrod is a piece of ?’ thin wall conduit with the wrist
pin end of the original conrod brazed to one end, and a ring which
is a drive in fit for the crankpin ball bearing brazed to the other
end.
The crankpin is drilled and tapped into the flywheel in position
to give the correct stroke.
There are four ?’ holes drilled in the flywheel near the
crankpin to counterbalance the weight of the crankpin and
conrod.
The mixer is a 2?’ long piece of 3/8
brass pipe with a throttle butterfly and venturi and a mixing
valve.
The most interesting feature of this engine is that it is a
gearless four cycle. I got the idea for this from the book,
Internal Fire, by Lyle Cummings.
In his book Mr. Cummings tells how in 1885, in Germany, the
engineers Daimler and Maybach used this system on the first
motorcycle engine.
I bolted a 7′ dia. x 5/8 thick piece
of nylon to the inside face of the flywheel, then I laid out the
path of the groove and free-handed it out with my router.
The follower will alternately take first the inside track and
then cross over to the outside track.
When the follower crosses over to the outside track near the end
of the power stroke it pulls on the rod to open the exhaust valve
and then starts back inward in time to close the valve at the
beginning of the intake stroke.
The ignition system consists of a piece of hardwood bolted to
the 2’x2′ angle iron close to and in alignment with the
nylon wheel.
There is a small brass screw through the block near the top,
with the head toward the nylon wheel, and there is a wire lead on
the other end going to a battery.
There is another brass screw near the bottom of the block which
holds a brass leaf spring that reaches up high enough to make
contact with the upper screw head but normally stands about an
1/8‘ away.
There is an iron lug screwed to the nylon wheel in position to
brush the brass leaf spring and close the circuit to fire the
engine. The bottom screw has a lead going to the battery terminal
of a buzz coil.
This is probably about the ugliest piece of junk that ever
showed up at anybody’s gas-up, and it has been interesting to
see people’s reaction when they ask me if it will really run
and I start it up for them.
I would not say that it runs real great, but I have found that
if I wear a glove on my left hand and hold it against the flywheel
to put a fair load on it, it will steady down and chug along quite
well.