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Glow engines should run just fine without the battery. It's part of their utility in models. There's a lot of reasons why a glow engine may not run without power to the plugs -- the two main causes (assuming a good piston seal) is that the thing is undercompressed for the fuel, or that the...

I can't say I won't burn down my shop someday, but any time I turn on something with a heating element in it, I ask "Are there any flammables around? If I leave the house for a week with this plugged in, will all be safe?"

The first time my wife saw me heading down to the basement with tools to work on the oil furnace she freaked out 'cuz her dad never worked on oil furnaces. "Shouldn't we get a professional to do that?" "Why should I pay a professional to screw it up when I can screw it up quite thoroughly...

MSC Industrial has a very good selection of O-rings, too. If they're not better than McMaster, they're just as good, and the price is way lower.

I'm trying to remember how I did this -- I think I put epoxy in the groove in my bobbin and then just wound the coil -- enough epoxy got squeezed out at each step that it glued the next layer down. Obviously it was very messy, but it worked. If you want to buy wire by the pound, you can get...

I suspect this is a partly-right and partly-wrong method, but I've always made O-rings fit by selecting a ring that's a bit undersized, then making a groove into which the thing fits while a bit stretched. Then I tune the depth of the groove to tune the O-ring OD. I suspect one could even...

I should have said phenolic. You can get rods of bakelite, from artsy types if nothing else, but phenolic-linen would have better mechanical properties. (It's actually a fun web search -- there's a lot of interesting phenolic plastics out there. If I had a project that needed artsy knobs &...

I know you're probably not going to go there, but I had a thought. I just realized that if you wrap some varnished iron wire around a form and bake it into shape somehow, you'll get the magnetic conductivity you need while breaking up the available path for eddy currents. Assuming I could find...

You should get one cycle per pair of magnetic poles per revolution. So, (16 / 2) * 1000 RPM * / (RPM / 60Hz) = 133Hz. More faster is more better, though.

Next to copper, aluminum is about the worst stuff that you can use for efficiency. Just consider that magnetic brakes are, essentially, magnets held up to a good conductor that's moving. Back irons behind the magnets and the coils will significantly increase efficiency, and far more so if you...

Well, yes. OTOH, there's a pretty large cadre of young adults out there custom-building scorching-fast PCs, doing all sorts of tricks to speed them up for gaming, etc. They go on to be engineers doing cutting-edge work in industry (I work with a couple of them), or being the whiz-kid at...

Oh, now what could possibly go wrong with filling an electrical device full of metal powder?

I think you probably don't want to go there, but that's a guess. If it isn't already clear, I only know about making piston rings from reading about them. Here's the end of the string to find out what I've read: http://www.modelenginenews.org/techniques/piston_rings.

If this is the style of making a ring where you compress the ring, clamp it into the mandrel, and then turn it round, I have two guesses on what's happening: Just the action of compressing it into the mandrel could be doing it. You can test this yourself by compressing it onto a mandrel then...

Unless you're sticking on wanting exactly 1750 RPM, that should be almost as common as dirt. What you're really looking for is "a bit slower than 1800 RPM", because that's how those induction machines work. You probably want to settle for a nameplate RPM anywhere between 1700 and 1800. Granger...

My question, which was sorta kinda touched on a bit above here, but only qualitatively, is how long will O-rings last vs. cast iron rings? In the event that I wanted to bolt it to a model airplane and go fly it, how many hours can I put on an O-ring engine vs. how many hours on a cast-iron...

If enough people got tired of the madness, the project could be forked. Open source software is a participatory sport. It could even possibly be done with fewer software engineers, if someone wanted to trade off slower development for the documentation and teaching materials keeping up to...

I'm just guessing from general engine technology here, but if it's just getting warm enough to gently simmer the water in the hopper, then it shouldn't be seizing up. (Come to think of it, antifreeze would make things worse, by raising the water's boiling temperature. Hmm.) I don't know what...

Three questions that come to mind, to sort out where @Engine maker is going: when it's running does it fire every other revolution? Does it go like a bat out of hell (fragments of flywheel stuck in the wall is an indication that the answer is "yes")? Are you running it under load (generator...

Because it's the text equivalent of shouting, or at least talking really loud. If we're in some comfortable quiet space, you wouldn't want me making ordinary conversation in a shout; it's the same for bold. If you need help seeing, there's ways to customize the font on your web browser...