Internal Combustion

Have you ever opened the hood of your car and wondered what was going on in there? Well I have, and that's why I have been so interested in cars. Internal combustion engines have been getting us around since the 1800's. A car engine can look like a big confusing jumble of metal, tubes and wires to the uninitiated, but if you want to get down in the dirt they really work in a simple way. You might want to know to, because it is something that you use everyday of your life.

I have been interested in cars and motors since I was a little kid, but recently within the past 5 years I have really gotten into the engine them selves and seeing how they work. I first got into them by hanging out with friends, and us wanting to make things go faster. It did help that we had my friends dad, that has been drag racing cars since he was a little kid. So he knew a lot about making things go fast. One of the first things that we did was build a go-cart, and there are kids that have normal go-carts that can go 15 mph not us though we had to make ours the fastest. We built that go-cart out of an old frame, and took a chainsaw motor out of one of his dads chainsaws. We ran the go-cart on gas first, and it probably did around 50 mph. After a while we got board and thought it went to slow. So we went into the race car trailer and took some of his dads race gas(nitro). Which is a very combustable fuel. Then the go-cart went about 70 mph, and we got to ride it for about 30 minutes and then the motor blew up. That is what happens when you use a fuel like nitro in a little chainsaw motor it eats away at the caburator and the cylinder walls.

Motors have been around for hundreds of years. The first self powered road vehicle was powered by a steam engine that was built by Nicolas Joseph Cugnot of France in 1769. It was recognized by the British Royal Automobile Club as the first vehicle to power it self, and it went 2 miles per hour and weighed about 8000 lbs. It looked like a frame with wheels. It had a bench seat with a steering wheel in front with a big steam engine hung over the front of the vehicle. The wheels in the rear were twice as big as the front wheels. It also had a ladder to step onto the vehicle. In 1771 his vehicle crashed into a brick wall, the first known automobile accident.

There is so many different stories about who invented the first automobile with a motor and four wheels. Some people say that the first automobile was invented by Gottlieb Daimler. It had four wheels and used gas as its fuel and was injected through carburetion, and others say that Karl Benz invented the first practical automobile to be powered by an internal combustion engine he also received the first patent for a gas fueled car. It also only had three wheels, but then later built a four wheeled car. He then later became the world's largest manufacturer of automobiles, that consisted of a internal combustion engine, and a chassis like our modern day vehicles.

These motors and the new motors all work in the same basic way buy burning fuel inside the engine unlike the steam engine, which burns its fuel outside. The most common internal combustion engine is called a 4 stroke and is fueled by gasoline. There are many other types of fuels and engines that are used to power vehicles. In a four stroke gasoline engine, a mixture of gasoline and air is sprayed into a cylinder. This is then compressed by a piston and at the peak point in the compression stroke, a spark plug creates an electrical spark that ignites the fuel. The combustion of the fuel results in generation of heat, and the hot gases that are in the cylinder escape through the exhaust port. The explosition of the gas drives the piston back down the cylinder. Then starts the second stroke.

There are many different parts to a 4 stroke engine that make it work so effientiantly. The engine is enclosed in a block which harnesses all the rotating parts. The cylinder