Barry,
At 12:07 12/03/98 -0800, you wrote:
>... Also pistons are oval to allow for the
>same expansion in the area of the piston that is not cooled by contact of
>the piston pin and the forces exerted on them by the combustion process
>itself. If they were not oval, then you would be scraping the sides of the
>piston on the cylinder walls at 90 deg from the piston pin. And you
>thought they were just round :-). At the operating temperature that the
>piston is designed for they are round.
A few years back, Honda produced a bike with extremely oval pistons, and 2
con-rods per! The top speed was over 300 km/h. No idea how they held up in
service, though.
Allen Nugent
Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering
University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052 Australia
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