How to Make a Piston Engine for Survival! (Scrap Mechanic Tutorial) 

You know kAN's spent a lot of time in survival when he doesn't paint his bearings anymore in creative.

I'm getting Minecraft redstone tutorial flashbacks because of this

You posted this two days after I figured out how to make it myself. It took a few hours of agony and watching clips in slow motion, but it paid off. 10/10 would do again

I don't understand why anyone would dislike this video. It's brief, and super informative. Thanks Kan!

Awesome. I've wanted to find a simple piston engine tutorial even before survival came out :)

Perfect design, using real combustion engine principles such as an even firing interval, given this is a three cylinder they fire 120 degrees apart and a four cylinder would every 90 along with how you talk about the secondary forces where the pistons if unbalanced will shake a lot making it 6 cylinders where it is the 3 cylinder but mirrored.Thank you so much I’m getting this game for this alone

Thank you so much for making a tutorial I was trying to slow down your video and copy your piston engine from the survival series

Dude massive thanks, this is awesome. modified yours into a 2 cyl design, similar but works better for my applications. You know its a good tutorial when someone whos bad at the game can make a modification of the design you showed in said tutorial. :)

Tip for people building: upgrade the controller to level 3 and connect the forwards piston to it, now set the piston to go 1 block when the controller is on and make sure the controller is set to repeat. After that connect the controller to your seat and now when you hold W you will go forwards!

Really appreciate this build tutorial. Just got into Scrap Mechanic for survival and don't have any prior build experience. This really helps.

I followed your tutorial and made myself a little 1 drill bit mining car, to get started with, works a treat, I put a off-road suspension I found in a box between the drill bit and the front of the car, and it really helped reduce recoil. I then decided to try to package up and deliver crates of veggies, and omg this thing will carry a load. Reminds me of my old Mule lol, slow but just keeps on goin', up hill down hill, around hills lol I know you said there were better engines out there, but for a starter car this thing is awesome. =)

*THANK YOU* I've been wondering how to make piston engines for so long and all of mine have locked up before this lol

I've been watching your videos for a long time, together with scrapman and moonbo ... I've never had scrap mechanic ... survival comes out, the hype rises, steam offers it and of course I buy it ... I start survival and I seem to be 2 years old and playing with cubes with letters, my constructions are an abomination ... I see your video on the piston engine and I take an intensive course to understand how they work, how to build them but above all how they use the controls, I don't even know how to weld and it all farlo off in pieces every time ... I can finally understand after 6 hours how to do it... AND ONLY AFTER YOU PUBLISH THIS VIDEO ... lol

thank you so much kan, i currently having a oil shortage on my survival world because there are no oil ponds nearby. so this design helped a ton when i needed to find a oil pond one problem, its rather brittle.

Works fine for me. it did take me a couple of hours ( I forgot the bearing behind the piston sensor). Had to follow his guide and connect everything in order and make sure parts were correctly welded and when making modifications, it depends on whether or not the whole structure is on a lift or not. The order of when installing stuff matters on and off a lift as seen on his video. Now I need to upgrade my pistons to have more force.

OMG i just got this game yesterday and i'm already overwhelmed. thanks for this, it helped a lot!

Thank you for taking your time to explain this! It is very helpful, cheers!

Are you going to upload an episode of survival today? I’m hooked on that series worse than tiger king

I spent like 2 hours two days ago trying to copy the engine from your video

Wow I was literally going to pull up a video on piston engines and going to try and build one RIGHT NOW, then THIS video shows up on my feed. HOW did you KNOW I wanted this kAN? Love the videos, though I think multiplayer ones are my favorite.

Hot tip: If you are trying to go at high speeds, switch the piston lengths to 2 instead of 3 to have it run smoothly! Your welcome 😉

dude, i commented it on your video, i didnt thought that you would actually make a video about it! you rock!

Kan, a cool idea for a piston engine would be to use pistons powering half the revolution and then suspension for the ”dead part”. Probably very hard to control, but would be cool to see if it made the engine more powerful

No way! I’ve wanted this for years! thx awesome

This'll be really useful when I play Survival again! Gasoline seems annoying to get, since I think you get it from crude oil. So I'm happy there's a (kind of) costless engine :)

Thank you. I was *this* close to putting your timelapse in ur noob vs pro piston powered challenge into slow mo and doing it that way lol

I had to watch ur noob v pro video at 0.25x speed to replicate it for survival yesterday and now you release this lol

Omg THANK YOU I have been wanting a tatorial of this engine cuz I need it just in case I get survival

Thank you, I literally searched for a piston engine tutorial yesterday but couldn't find a good one.

Thumbs up!! I had some juddering but fixed it by adding a pipe to each 'outer' wheel bearing and welding the pipe to the chassis, :)

My attempt at building one of these wasn't far off, but now it works way better!

KAN ur the best man this video helped me a lot thx i spet six hours 11:00pm-5:00am just making a car for the pist0n engine which was great because i hate oil runs

Very cool.. I got this game a while ago but I've never really played it much. I never knew you could do this type of building. Thanks for the video

Really I spent about an hour to copy your design from your survival series and a day later you come out with a tutorial

Brilliant design. I like it.

Hey you could use the piston engine as a sprinkler. Just put it horizontally and then put some water cannons on the gear thingy.

I never knew you could do that with the welder, steering linkages here I come!

Yay finally a good guide to piston engines

I just started playing Scrap Mechanic for the first time, I will definitely have to give this a try awesome piston engine!

New to the game but after a few tries got it working thanks

DUDE YES I HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT IT FOR 3 DAYS NOW

Yess ty been trying to find a good video tutorial of a piston engine thank you

Thank you for the beginner friendly tutorial.

Very helpful thank you. That's how my gasoline shortage was solved. 👍👍

Thanks KAN I now know how to build piston car Keep up the good work

THANK YOU! THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have spent hours on trying to make one of these!

I love this engine design it works great on my piston powered R.V. Reason: It has low amount of brearings is easy to make and fits perfect in my R.V. ! Thx Kan!

You can also put the wheels on the outside and use another piston or suspension to bring the rotation through the block

Really helpful! Now I won't need fuel anymore!

So I have been watching Scrapman for a couple weeks, so naturally, I've seen you around, but recently I followed a youtube tutorial that was posted to steam. I am just now finding out it was this built by you! I thought that was kinda funny... Thanks for the builds, keep up the good work!

You could save a component kit from the sensor by putting the control pistons in the middle - as in flip and move 1 set of piston/sensors, and move the control pistons in between.

That creative piston glitch is interesting, you might be able to make something cool if you're creative enough! Also nice tutorial!

Thx so much I found a piston engine like yours and I’m going to make it and I needed this

Found out it’s useful to set the pistons to 2 because sometimes the sensors are half a block in and don’t sense one of the blocks

thanks, exactly what I needed

Thank you exactly what I needed

Awesome. So for a car you could have this rigged up for RWD and then have a driver's seat with steering bearing on the front tires, or something.

Very helpful, great introduction to piston engines

Amazing video as always! You made so much progress in scrap mechanic survival! Keep up the good work!

If you upgrade a controller to level 5 and put 5 bearings on each side back wheel, loop it with 360 degree rotation. You get infinite fuel. PS you can hook it up to the seat and S will be backwards and W will go forwards. I hope I helped.

OMG thank you SOOOO much. I been playing with piston in creative for almost 4 days but could ever figure anything out.

I improvised a crappy suspension glitch powered propulsion system for my car, but it's big and ugly, and turning is a pain too, so i think i'm gonna stick to your design for now until i refine my own. Thanks for the tutorial by the way, really helped to understand the mechanics, i only got the game today cause of survival update

I made a very similar engine and it really helped to change the shape of piston sensor things from an I shape to upside down L

Thank you kan

(for base defense) you could make a piston engine that spins a few pistons connected to the middle or even the sides of the engine (that are extended so they will kind of come out of the top of the engine and spin basically how a wheel would ) enough that they don't make contact with anything(because pistons don't have collision physics ) and have saws or something at the end so that it deals large amounts of damage to any farm bots that try to harm your crops.

Thanks Kan. Very well explained and easy to follow. Can you maybe do a tutorial on how you build the mining rig too? That thing was awesome.

OMG SO USEFUL!!!!!!!!!! We need survival mods still, though.

Man when u made the roadster on noob vs pro i replayed the video in slow motion to rebuild it, and it worked and it was crazy good fast and powerfull

Very good! i finally understood how to do that! thanks!

reminds me of jump rope when i was little ahhh the memorys

Thanks kan ☺️!

Thx you Ian I love all your videos this will help me so much thx kan

Thanks man. Now I have a car with pistons, cv joints and basic gears.

You could possibly use (even in survival) the controller on a bearing and connect the controller to the seat and use sensors to make this engine on W and S.

This is exactly what I needed

I made a car that uses two of these- one for each rear wheel- its wide and occasionally the steering slowly drifts but it has a lot of power and can haul 1125 of the heavy tier three concrete and still manage to start rolling and pickup speed. any more than that and it doesn't like starting.

Thank you soooo much. Gonna start building one of these !!

I am not sure of the specifics, but Alstrak's piston engine has the equivalent of the 3 blocks you push tilted once he gets speed, apparently there's some sensor delay or something, so it makes it go faster.

Thank you so much for this tutorial kAN, going be building this live in survival on my twitch stream tonight. I'll be linking my views back here.

Perfect. It's just what I wanted. Thank you, kAN!

I've been needing this.

Thank you so much i subscribed and liked you deserve it keep up the good work ! :D

I was actually going to look up how to do this.

Thank you I needed to now how to make this

I know you built a stationary base but have you considered making a mobile one? I know you need to use the terrain to grow things but you could use that piston engine to propel your mobile home. You could (probably) grow your crops quickly with fertilizer and then be gone before the bots show up. Need to do some mining? Make a second vehicle for that. ... ... Then again storage and maneuverability on a mobile base might become an issue if it's too big for the latter. Something to think about.

thanks so much! I really like this style of video like a reference to inspire builds. You could use this format for different types of suspensions, irrigation, automation for mining/lumbering etc, and I hope you consider it!

Thats awesome, thanks for uploading the tutorial.

With color mode on, sometimes the pistons will stop because when the sensor doesen't directly see the block, it stops.

thank you so much this will help me a lot bc I don't even a car:)

Omg thx i didnt expect u to actually listen to my comment on ur other video

how do you make it attach to both at the same time thats what i cant do it just only ataches to one part and i dont know how to make it atach to both 3:15

Nice tutorial and because of that I got it to work. There's one problem I have though, whatever I try, my frame always breaks up. I don't know why, or what I'm missing, but as soon as I let the engine run the frame comes apart.... (this happens in creative, haven't tried in survival because of this)

thx I am hopefully getting the game myself soon

to fix the survival/creative thing for the motor, you just have to place 2 to the lenght in the piston

i make an engine variant its the same but with 2 pistons, the change is 90º between pistons, and work perfectly

What happens if you activate forward and back at the same time? Should you use an Xor gate on one of them (Fwd/Back) to prevent that from happening?

"Noodle bendy guy" Guys we got a new name for the thing. Dammit i dont even have a name for it

I love this engine as it will carry my heaviest scavenge vehicle, equipped with almost 20 chests to pile everything in, however, it almost has no steering, I don't know if its because both rear wheels are pushing it together, or not enough weight on the front tires, though with the build I am using this on, I don't think that is the cause. Has anyone who has used this on a 4 wheel vehicle had this issue, and how did you fix it?

Thanks kan finaly i know how to make it :)

haha and i worked out the kinks for this well for me only 9 hours ago. Yea helpful as i was having the jerking motion will have to color to what the sensor senses. Now i would like to see from you which is the best piston engine to haul a truck load of stuff