Custom 7.7cc DOHC 4-stroke single cylinder engine.

Briefly, this project is a single cylinder glow engine to power my 1/8 scale desert buggy.  The target performance is over 25,000 RPM, 1.5HP.  This is by far the most challenging project I have undertaken and is one of the things I have been building up to over the time I have been doing model engineering - about 10 years.

For years now I have been wanting to develop my own 4-stroke engine for car use.  There are a number of reasons, not least because I believe they will become much more common in the future.  They are much cheaper to run and can be a lot quieter which have major advantages nowadays.  More importantly to me, they are more suited to forced induction and multi-cylinder configurations, and have a greater scale appeal with superior sound and appearance.
What I really want to do is build a 'modern' multi-cylinder engine for use in a large RC car - something like a 1/5 scale vehicle.  By modern, I mean not an American style V8 from the 1950s.  Now I don't want to take anything away from the guys who model these engines, there are some incredible craftsmen out there doing just that.  These are the very people I have learnt a massive amount from.  They model the engines they loved when they were younger, I wish to do the same.  Where they had large displacement, hemi heads, crossplane cranks and pushrods, the engines that spark my enthusiasm have more electronic control, turbos, variable valve timing and high rev capability.  Why not try to bring some more modern technology to the RC car scene?  After all, a car engine right now is not much different from a common 2-stroke aero engine.  The requirements from the engine could not be more different, yet the engines are really very similar.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION 18-4-2011