Adventures in Mechanista, Siberian Edition

 

Ladzilla by Garage 54
Yes, that's a turbocharger growing out of the top of the engine.

These guys have a bunch of videos up on YouTube where they record their very silly mechanical experiments. If you have ever wondered what would happen if, for instance, you added a second engine to your car, this is where you need to go.

Ladzilla is a project they've been working on for a while. In most every episode the guys will do something so ridiculous that it makes me laugh out loud.

Garage 54 is in Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia. It is the third-most populous city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg). It was founded in 1893 on the Ob River crossing point of the future Trans-Siberian Railway.

Previous Garage 54 post.

Via Bustednuckles

Su-57

Su-57 -  Boris Semyonov

Best part of the story is that the photo was taken in Novosibirsk, Siberia.

Novosibirsk, Siberia

Novosibirsk is also the home of Garage 54.

Camaro at Le Mans

How NASCAR was FASTER than Ferrari at Le Mans
Driver61

This video is a year old. This year's race will be next month. I used to think Le Mans was the coolest race in the world and then Ford won it in a spectacular manner with the GT-40. No way you could top that, so I stopped paying attention. Now NASCAR is giving it a shot. I hope they have some success.

So the Camaro was run by Garage56. Huh, that sounds a whole lot like Garage 54, the YouTube channel from the crazed mechanics in Siberia.

Oscillating Parasites

Hacking off the crankshaft webbing: how’ll that affect engine operation?
This video was on my mind while I was working on my previous post on the subject, but I ran out of steam, so I called it good and went to bed. But now I've had a day to think about it, and I've decided it needs to be here.

I've watched a few other Garage 54 videos. They are mostly pretty silly, but sometimes they have a kernel of real information. I suspect they are somewhere in Russia, the Lada is a Russian car and they seem to have an endless supply of them.

I'm surprised the engine ran as well as it did. Balancing the crank has been an item of religious devotion among car guys since forever, and here it looks like it is nonsense. Of course, you can't really tell what kind of vibration you are getting from the video, and we don't know how long the engine will last without the counterweights, but I have to give the guys credit for even attempting this.

I was thinking about the bit about "parallel twins with crankpins not at the traditional 360 degrees, but separated by 76 degrees". That would be optimum for one case, but each piston comes to a stop twice in every rotation. Each time it reaches the top or bottom of a stroke it stops, just instantaneously, but it stops. To minimize the transfer of momentum you would want to space the crank pins 90 degrees apart. It wouldn't be optimum for that one case, but it would apply equally to the four times pistons would stop. That should help smooth out the crankshaft's rate of rotation. It might make the idle a little lumpy, and who knows what would happen at speed. Someone should try it.

Then I thought a little more and I realized any engine with an even number of cylinders is going to have this same 'transfer of momentum' problem, so an odd number of cylinders might be a solution. There have been a number of three cylinder engines like the Kawasaki 500 two-stroke, Triumph motorcycles and Geo Metro cars. Audi even had a five cylinder engine. I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to measure the variation in crankshaft rotational speed as an engine completes a single cycle. Who am I kidding? Of course they have, it just hasn't found its way to my computer screen.

Our best experimental mods all in one engine - what will happen?

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.

Amphibious Cars

Amphibious Car Challenge / Like in Top Gear
ILYA STREKAL
If you remember the old Top Gear, you might remember that interspersed with their tests of exotic over-powered mobiles, they would occasionally throw in one of their do-it-yourself projects that were just a comedy of errors. The above video is more like the second kind. And since they are Russians, they remind me of Garage 54.

Detroit Steve got me started with a link to a history of the original Amphicar, which reminded me that I had posted a video of a much better and much faster amphibious car. That one is from 2009. The builder has kept working on it and now has a production model they are offering for sale. I don't want to know how much it costs, probably just like every other exotic mobile which means it costs as much as a house.

If you ask Google or YouTube there seem to be an endless number of people building their own version.