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that is not even remotely analogous to building a miniaturized V-10 Engine.
The point is that the US automotive industry chose to go the dirt-cheap/stoneage-simple route for a very long time. It’s only recently that the purported ‘sports car’ corvette got suspension any more advanced than the Flintstone-mobile shown above. Reciprocating Infernal Confusion engines are a bad enough idea as it is, without sticking to pre-Cambrian design ideals.
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Why not? A hobby/interest is just that. What is it that you don’t understand about why this guy wanted to build a small engine?
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Maybe to further develop, and celebrate, the skills he has?
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To use in a top fuel dragster for his cat?
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Yup. 10 cylinder engines are definitely a thing, mostly on sports cars and heavy duty trucks. 12 cylinder engines are used in some high end luxury sedans and sports cars. You can even find an occasional 16 cylinder engine here and there (like on the Bugatti Veyron which uses a W16 – basically two V8s joined horizontally).
(Note that I’m speaking strictly in automotive terms. When it comes to things like marine and industrial applications, there’s all kinds of bizarre engines.)
Enjoyment. Something the builder enjoyed doing.
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An entire 1/3 scale 312PB. This guy didn’t stop with the engine:
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I’ll just leave this here. http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/Tomlinson.htm
Not sure that or the version of the Gnome Monosuopape that had counter-weighted valves within the piston is weirder, though.
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Probably the most likely way for an american to see one is in the dodge viper (“only” a 100k vehicle).
Inline 5 cylinder engines are a lot more common with European manufacturers – VW, Mercedes, and Volvo have all used them heavily in the recent past. Put 2 of them together and you get a V10.
The viper was originally made when Mercedes owned Chrysler, and I think was influenced by their European overlords.
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The company for which I worked in the early 1980s tried to sell aluminium engine technology in the US - we had a very good relationship with a very large US company that sounds a bit like the larval stage of a butterfly, a senior team of engineers was sent out to talk to companies who we will call, purely fictionally, Ford and GM.
They gave up. Cast iron was Good Enough, even though the SAE 4 hour rating of some “200HP” engines was actually around 55BHP because distortion and rapid wear set in at consistent moderate power and rpm. At the time, a 140HP Mercedes engine would have been around 100BHP on the SAE 4 hour rating.
The US has made many excellent engines but they tend to power aircraft, locomotives and earth moving equipment, where defects are rather expensively noticeable. As for US motorcycle engines…in the 1930s they were allowed to go up to 750cc to race against European 500cc designs. They still were not competitive.
Because? They have proven to work better than external combustion engines, and turbines don’t work well at small vehicle power levels. Even on 170kt gross container ships, Diesels have replaced steam turbines.
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V-10s are even more common than that, though still small in number. '97 to present heavy duty Ford pickups (F-250 to F-450) and the last heavy duty vans E-350 & E-450 could be had Triton 6.8L V-10s. That said I’ve heard they have issues destroying spark plugs/threads due to poor metallurgy in early cylinder heads.
V10s aren’t uncommon in heavy duty trucks from Ford and Dodge.
The Viper predates the Daimler merger by some 6 years.
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While the pushrod V-8 continued on for decades, Corvettes have had full independent rear suspension since 1963.
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Well, in addition to familiarity I’ve heard part of the reason pushrod V8s have stuck around so long is the comparatively small volume of real estate the engine requires compared to DOHC V8s. GM LSx engines are routinely swapped into Miatas because the V8 doesn’t take up much more room that the original I4.
As far as the US auto industry goes it’s weird that there was a whole bunch of experiments and unusual designs put to market in the 60s (Chevrolet Corvair with rear engine flat 6; Buick had a small aluminium V8; Oldmobile had a turbocharged, manganese-injected V8; the Chysler Slant-Six was originally to be cast of aluminium but due to porosity issues was in cast iron, leading to it’s legendary indestructibity; the gas turbine, etc).
Come the 70s and the gas crisis the corporate old guard was more than happy to churn out largely the same familiar but long-in-the-tooth designs and processes rather than innovate. Cue foreign manufacturers proceeding to eat their lunch and the decades long scramble to try and catch up.
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Yeah, apparently I got that totally backwards. According to wikipedia, chrysler owned Lamborghini at the time, and that is where they got the V10 for the viper.
Not exactly. The V10 was adapted from the Magnum 5.9 V8 – it wasn’t a Lamborghini V10. Lamborghini engineers were indeed involved in the creation process (they were responsible for re-casting it in aluminum and various fine tuning) but the engineering and parts were all Dodge.
(It’s an interesting footnote in automotive history that the humble Dodge Intrepid started out its life as a Lamborghini concept car.)
It is worth noting that these days Lamborghini and Audi do share some engines between cars.
Basically, he’s a modelmaker, and people have been making models of things for centuries. Perhaps a better analogy would be a model ship, car, or train maker. But it’s for the fun of it, to increase one’s skills, to learn, etc. All good!
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Less cylinders and ugly as hell, but…
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