Our best experimental mods all in one engine - what will happen?
Garage 54
These guys are always doing weird stuff, like putting wooden pistons in an engine. I have to give them credit for trying things. This one is a little more conventional, mostly just cleaning and rebuilding an engine. I'm not sure lightening the crank and flywheel really gained them anything, we aren't building a race car here, and I wonder what became of the crankshaft's balance. Whatever, it didn't seem to affect the engine that much. But the modifications to the camshaft (7:40 mark) is some real third world shit, like something you would see on MacGyver.
I can't listen to the audio, it's dubbed and it just grates. I turn off the audio and read the subtitles. There's a lot of filler, so I tend to skip ahead ten seconds at a time by using the right arrow key.
I don't know what's going on with me today. Usually I don't have the patience to watch a video that's longer than a couple-three minutes, but this is the third long one today. Maybe they are more interesting than most, or maybe I am just calmer. Hard to say.
This video, along with being entertaining, has a couple of interesting bits. My friend Jack was been working on making a right angle adapter for his milling machine. This project involves a fair bit of machining, cutting and welding. Along the way he has found that several of his tools that he thought were properly aligned were in fact not, which meant hours spent making them right. The bit about hole saw at the five minute mark in the above video provides a good illustration. Welding is tricky. Our two characters have something to say about it just after the 17 minute mark.
I've seen several episodes of Veritasium, and Derek Muller, our host, passes muster. When he speaks, he is transmitting information, he is not just bloviating. While bloviating is a more popular speech mode, it has a much lower informational content.
Kennedy Space Center, Florida, Feb. 2, 2015. Charles Bolden delivers a “state of the agency” address. Left to right, the three spacecraft on display are the Boeing CST-100, NASA's Orion and the SpaceX Dragon. Photo: NASA/Amber Watson
Typical NASA, the didn't identify the spacecraft in their photo. I had to figure that for myself. Stack Exchange provided an answer. The Dragon and Orion have both been to space, though not with any passengers.
This diagram shows the seven pieces of Orion’s primary structure and the order in which they are welded together. Credits: NASA
I came across this photo while I was reading about the welding operation NASA was using to build the Orion. The are going to a great deal of trouble, building one complete shell structure just to check their tools and procedures. A spacecraft is a pressure vessel, and while the pressure is not that high, the spacecraft itself is rather large. I have an air compressor in my garage that holds 100 PSI, but it's only about a foot in diameter. These craft are considerable larger, and while the pressure is lower, when multiplied by the area it gets big, as in tons of force. The shell has to be able to withstand the strain, and it probably doesn't weigh any more than my air compressor.
Robotic Friction Stir Welding Automation - Courtesy of CRIQ
To my surprise, I found they are using friction stir welding, which is kind of a bizarre technique. Watching the way aluminum will gum up a file or a grindstone might give you some idea of why it works.
Update: Jack provided this snippet from a different Wikipedia article:
Friction welding (FRW) is a solid-state welding process that generates heat through mechanical friction between work pieces in relative motion to one another, with the addition of a lateral force called "upset" to plastically displace and fuse the materials. Technically, because no melt occurs, friction welding is not actually a welding process in the traditional sense, but a forging technique
