# Gearless hit and miss engine of my own design



## Chicken

Hi!

Today I fired up my new gearless hit and miss engine for the first time and to my surprise it startet and ran very well right from the beginning!
I aquired some cast iron parts, the rest is entirely my own design.







It's running using a petrol vapour carburetor similar to the design of Jan Ridders, just scaled it up a bit so it suits for this engine.
It has a 46 mm bore and a 60 mm stroke which makes 100 cm³
The Flywheel is almost 30 cm in diameter and weights 10 kg.

I've built a small belt driven fly ball governor which controls the speed.
As it is the first run and some things are still a little tight, it is still fireing quite often, but I think after some tuning it should have more miss cycles.

Here is a short video of the first run! I don't have a water pump yet so I had to stop it after about 5 Minutes as it was getting warm.


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfHVVReyi1U[/ame]

I hope you like it!

Best regards,
Alex


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## Mbusha

Very nice indeed. Congrats on a great first run. Just curious, did you design with CAD or figure out all those bits on paper? Someday, I wish to do that.

Anyway, once again, very nice.

--Mark


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## vcutajar

Good runner Alex.  Congrats.

Vince


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## OrangeAlpine

I like it !

Bill


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## Rivergypsy

Very nice indeed - well done!!


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## Brian Rupnow

Very, very nice. Congratulations sir!!! A very innovative and well thought out design.---Brian Rupnow


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## nemoc

Beautiful engine!  I love the way it sounds.  Thm:

Craig


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## OrangeAlpine

Could you give us some detail, either drawings or photos, of the governor and valve mechanism?

Bill


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## cfellows

Nice looking engine, runs good too.  That's quite a quite a horse, with almost a 2" bore.  

Chuck


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## Chicken

Thank you very much for your nice comments. Unfortunately I don't have any plans, just a few rough scribblings on paper for some critical parts like the timing wheel  for the valve mechanism where I used my indexing table.
The rest basically was built just right out of my head without really thinking about it. Of course sometimes I ran into trouble as I did not think far enough 
For example I was planning to raise the exhaust straight up, but then it would collide with the fly-ball governor, so I had to add another 90 ° bow and some other similar things. But in the end it all worked out somehow.
I built the valve control according to this video:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXklWMClxrM[/ame]

As I didn't have any plans it's my own design. I also use a different indexing than shown in the video. My timing wheel has 4 bumps and 4 grooves, so I have to turn the timing wheel by 45° during each stroke of the eccentric.
The exhaust valve has a stroke of 8 mm, so I thought the eccentric stroke must be double this value. This opens and closes the valve within half a turn of the engine. I decided to use 15 mm stroke of the eccentric so the exhaust valve opens just before bottom dead center and closes just after top dead center. It turned out to work very well. The excessive stroke of 7 mm is used to turn the timing wheel when the valve eccentric is close to its bottom dead center.

The fly ball governor was built by looking at the picture from Find Hansen:





My governor is basically the same design, of course much larger to fit my engine. It just catches the exhaust valve push rod and holds the valve open. Very simple actually.

Best regards,
Alex


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## AussieJimG

Nice engine and good design. Runs and sounds good too.

Jim


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## Chicken

Hi!

I've optimized it a bit and rechecked some high friction bearings.
It's now missing a lot more cycles!

Enjoy 


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLPtLT2ssOw[/ame]

best regards,
Alex


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## Rivergypsy

That governor looks tidy - nice work.


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## Eoin

Congratulations on a great job.
The sound was great and took me back many years to when I heard full size engines working.


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## danstir

Very nice engine, thanks for sharing it.


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## CallMeAL

I like this! Nice work. I like the idea of a gear less engine and may have to try to build one also.

Thanks for showing this.


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## Chicken

Hi!

Thank you for your nice comments!
After about 2 hours of running now the engine turns with even less friction and is missing even more strokes now. It turned out that this is the most economical engine I have in my collection. It will run more than 20 minutes with only 10 mL of fuel 
When running without load no cooling is required anymore.
Still I need a small water pump for periods of higher load.
I want to build a pump as compact as possible. Has someone ever built a small rotary vane pump? I think this should be the most compact pump possible?

best regards,
Alex


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## dalem9

Really nice work . Are you going to make the plans avilable for sale. Dale


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## Chicken

Hi!

As mentioned before, this engine is built mainly straight out of my head. I don't have any plans, just a few rough scribblings for some critical parts like the timing wheel for the gearless valve control.

This for example looks like this:





After machining it looked like this:






For most other parts, I did not create any scribblings and just started building.
The cylinder also is not made from one part, it's made from two steel tubes and two steel rings on each side and then glued together with loctite super strength

The valves and valve cages were made from bronze. The valve head was silver soldered onto a drill rod bar. which looks like this in detail:





The connecting rod was also made from several parts and bolted together. For the crankshaft side, I used a massive cast iron bearing. This works surprisingly well without any wear.






As an ignition source, I use a "Blokker" type ignition as described by Jan Ridders, just modified it a bit so I don't need a reed switch or so, I just have a simple contact on the crankshaft and I use the engine mass as second contact.
I put the ignition into a small wooden box:






So I'm sorry that I can't supply detailed plans as I don't have any. But of course I can answer any questions about dimensions and also supply many detailed images if one is interested.
As I'm from Germany, all dimensions are metric!

Best regards,
Alex


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## AussieJimG

Yea! Let's hear it for metric!!!

Jim


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## xander janssen

Hi,

Very nice engine, especially the gear-less part.

In this month's issue of the German magazine "maschinen-im-modellbau" there is  nice rotary vane pump (30 mm) in diameter.

www.vth.de/maschinen-im-modellbau/1...us-wenigen-teilen-gebaut-mit-bauplan-im-heft/

The plans are in the magazine, but they are under copyright so I won't post them here.

Xander


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## BronxFigs

Very interesting.  Through my amateur eyes it reminds me of the Olds Vertical Gearless that DeBolt Machine Inc. sold as a casting kit.  This engine is horizontal, but the valve mechanism looks similar to the Olds concept.

It would be nice to see some measured drawings for just the gearless valve control mechanism.

Frank


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## BronxFigs

Can anyone explain the gearless/ratchet mechanism that works the valve timing on this engine.  The video shows a horizontal engine with a 10 tooth ratchet and a 5-lobe "cam"  The drawing of the ratchet shows 8 teeth, and a 4-lobe "cam" that's used with the engine mentioned in this thread.  I believe that the Olds Vertical gearless uses a very similar mechanism.

I would like to use this indexing mechanism on a future engine build, but I am not that clever...I need some measured drawings, or detailed photos, or sketches, or explanations of how this all works.  Drawings always help me envision how things go together.

Anybody?  Help!

Frank


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## xander janssen

Hi Frank,

The absolute number of lobs and ratchet theet does not matter as long as the number of lobs is half the number of theet (4/8 or 5/10 or ... or N/2*N)

This means that the ratchet needs 2*N "actutations" by the *cam on the crankshaft* for the ratchet to make one full rotation. In the same rotation of the ratchet, the lobs actuates the outlet valve N times i.e. half the number of crankshaft rotations as necessary for the 4 stroke engine.

In non-gearless engine, this factor 1/2 is reached by using gears with N and 2*N number of teeth between the crankshaft and the camshaft.

In these you-tube movie you see a close-up of the principle including the hit and miss action.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z73pewvI4vg[/ame]
 [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyFFyTHYdZs[/ame]
Hope this will help you understanding,

Xander


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## BronxFigs

Thanks for the videos.  The ratchet mechanism is very easy to see working its magic.  

Probably can be adapted to many scratch-built engines.

Frank


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## Chicken

Hi!

A small update from my side! The engine setup is now 100 % complete. A belt driven rotary vane pump of my own design was added for the cooling water. The engine will now just sit there and run for hours. Although it is a fairly large engine with 100 ccm, it only consumes about 30 mL of fuel per hour when running without load.
I won't paint the engine as I really like the looks of the bare metal and the rusty look of the cast iron parts. I'll keep it covered with some WD40 to avoid corrosion of the steel parts.

Please enjoy the final video. It includes the engine startup so maybe you get a feeling for the size!

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP1yfUAUezI[/ame]

best regards,
Alex


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## Lawijt

Great & beautifull engine.


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## OregonBill

Alex, what a wonderful creation you have given birth to. It must be very satisfying to have so much talent. Can I borrow some?


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## dalem9

That is so cool. Great job.  Dale


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## BronxFigs

Hello members...

This original thread posted by Alex, shows videos of the gearless, star-ratchet mechanism that Brian Rupnow is using on his vertical engine design.  In concept, I believe these two mechanisms are very similar.

I enjoyed reading through both threads and builds.  Thanks, gents, for the interesting information.

Frank


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## Brian Rupnow

This engine and it's star wheel mechanism provided a lot of the information for the thread I am currently posting. I also gained a lot of information from the Philip Duclos gearless engine.  However, seeing them work and designing your own working mechanism are not quite the same thing, as I am sure many of you have discovered.--As a matter of interest, Frank, what have you built lately??-Brian Rupnow


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## gus

Brian.
Congrats.Another Great Engine. Its the General Election now and distracted from real engine work. Distracted by the forums.


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## Eoin

I've followed this thread with much interest and, may I add, great work.

Eoin.


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