Who Can Build a Piston Powered Engine With the MOST Torque? 

What other challenges should we try in Scrap Mechanic?

Regarding making large engines: Pistons in scrap mechanic, contrary to real engines, push and pull on all strokes rather than pushing only on every second stroke. The issue with this dual action is that you need a brace on BOTH sides of the arm when making a large engine. If you do not do so the pistons may overpower the controller on either the push or pull part of its stroke. To fix this, you either need to have some sequence to lock in the piston arms, use more bearings or use something that has more torque than a controller. The first fix involves extending each piston individually and locking it with a brace. The second method involves stacking bearings in some way to make them act in parallel. This could be blueprint edited to take up the same space as a single bearing. The final solution which a lot of us prefer makes use of pistons to act as a bearing. In this method you blueprint edit the piston such that its head rotates 90 or 180 degrees when you spawn the creation. This method is the easiest to achieve and gets the most power. P.s. Learn how to use piston passthroughs and 2x1 ramp passthrough

Who can win a race with a piston engine they made

Kan resorting to using his friends to beat the medium and hard level is all kinds of hilarious.

Your crankshaft locks were on backwards. Also, try making the lock bars 4 block long so they dont clip, worked for me on the piston power challenge and got a 14.749 seconds consistently, and with the extra piston glitch i got a 2.59 seconds consistency.

It still looks like you again put the locking things on your drive shaft the wrong way, the piston on the load side is the one that's spinning in the locking direction, but the one behind it with less load just spins away from it. So when the piston at the front stops, the one behind it doesn't lock with it and is just free to overload the bearing with the controller and spin by itself

Hey Kan. A suggestion for next time. One main thing that I see missing from your design that is in a combustion engine is a harmonic balancer. It would go on the opposite end of the "flywheel". What this will do is balance out the weight from one end to the other and should put a stop to the wobbliness. Not sure of the physics in the game, but that is why internal combustion engines have one. Can't hurt to try, right? Great content btw. I've definitely learned a thing or two about physics from your content.

Another cool way to compare the torque of each engine would be to connect two engines with opposing rotation direction to a single shaft to see which engine can overpower the other one and turn the shaft in it's direction.

Kosmo's adjustable design is awesome, and all it needs is a little tuning

(mid video and seeing what you built rn) the problem why your engine skips is because the controllers dont have enough torque to withstand the pistons torque, which is why your pistons kind of bend the crank shaft around

Would be interesting to see if you can use suspensions on these engines to stiffen some and to loosen some and might make a good tuning option, kosmo's piston extension build was a good idea ,it absorbed most of the shock of the rotation and gave it a bit more speed.

I feel like Kan's wheel would be fixed by adding 2 more pistons to it, the skip comes from the shift in the pistons going from extending to retracting. Watching the video they retract faster than they extend so it create a natural skip since. Adding a piston or two to offset that difference should solve that

5:00 I wonder how much smoother it would run if you give each piston its own 2 sensors (instead of a timingwheel) and move the sensors in/out to adjust timing/stroke. Drive them with a memorycell

I'll say it again, stacked encoder wheel. Basically two encoder wheels (only the white parts) stacked on top of each other with a controller-adjusted bearing between them. Gives you super fine control over the piston activation points

It looks to me (as a viewer and not a player) that part of your skipping/timing issue may be from the flywheel/encoder interacting with the frame it's mounted to.

I have been running into the same issue that you are when scaling up my engines. My first engine was a boxer 8 that ran perfectly until I tried to make the crank one block longer. The controller was not strong enough to set the angles and so it would not even run. I am not sure how to fix this. I am loving the content!

Love engines, and when they go boom, it adds a clang ca-chunk to my ears. We need more clang ca-chunk in life. Thanks for the shows KAN.

Don’t know about strength of piston in contraction but if you use 90 deg offset in stead of 180 deg you might get quite a bit more torque because they would be no dead point and pistons would work together applying torque all the way though the rotation. Even though it will be unbalanced on low rpm you don’t care

One thing I've learned from overclocking computers is that you don't really know what's going to work until you try it. Don't limit yourself by what you think will work and what won't.

omg its been 3 years sinse ive seen a video from this chanel and it changed a lot more than i thought it wold, even tho i lost my old account and forgot of this chanel ill get back up to watching it every day as i used to

What about a 4 piston similar to Kosmo's design, but a 90 degree offset similar to a locomotive driver? As in one set pushing down while the other is at top/bottom dead center, and as it rounds the second will start pushing/pulling to get the first set through the top/bottom.

I might be wrong, but the problem with kAN`s engine was in locks, they were in the wrong direction so 6000 torque limit was from 3 controller bearings between each piston (As i remember controller outputs around 2000 torque)

"Uh, captain, the engine's doing the ugga-duggas again" 😂 I lost it lol 😂 You guys should do 8 piston challenges like this. Leaves more room for variation.

Y'all should do a trucking challenge, by having a size limit on the engine, and placing them in trucks. The challenge part is having 3 trials, where you can score 2 points in each. The points you could get are from the first load, and how fast you can bring it. The second point is for how much your vehicle can take. Then each trial is a different setting. One for straight line. Second is up a hill. Third is a tight technical road.

I'd like to point out that on Kosmos' first and second test the test bench was on avg torque and not max like every other test.

6:24 that is a flat plane crankshaft.

Just wanted to mention a boxer engine is an engine that has opposing pistons connected to the same crankshaft journal. What you're referring to is a flat plane crank.

Kosmos pistons weren't extending correctly. You can see only one sensor is lighting up because the second sensor is behind the first and can't see the correct color, meaning only one of his two pistons is actually putting forth effort to crank the shaft.

Could you slowly spin the encoding wheel 1 degree at a time to find the sweet spot?

Kan, the engine Kosmo made is not a boxer, but an inline 4 with a flatplane crank. Yours on the other hand has a crossplane crank. Boxer engines have the pistons on opposite sides of the crank.

I kept hearing you call Cosmo's design a "Boxer" when it's not, in fact his runs like most IRL Inline 4s do, except in a 4 stroke the pistons would only fire every 2 rotations, and only one piston would fire each time. They run like this to reduce vibrations and keep the engine balanced, which may come in handy in scrap mechanic if you run at a higher RPM. An actual boxer would be if the pistons were horizontal and you had 2 one each side, like a V4 but flat. And basically the 2 opposing pistons would push in and out in sync. If they weren't in sync it'd just be a Flat 4. The main benefit of these IRL are low center of mass, which helps handling. I hope I explained this well, but I'm not expert, I just learned from the internet, lol.

I like these challenges. I am trying to encourage game mechanics and games that teach people stuff. Like the steam engine sim

Yall gotta try and do piston car races again You could race different sized engines starting with 4 piston then progress up to like 8 or 10 piston designs

you guys need to make a piston engine race!

Is it possible to make a 4 piston engine where each piston is made of 4 scrap mechanic pistons? Should in theory quadruple the torque

kan if you balance the crank shaft you might be able to get a higher rpm

I managed 22953Nm. I made a two cylinder inline engine, two pistons per cylinder at 15 blocks extention. I put them 90 degrees offset, and made a huge flywheel to keep it moving. The controller couldn't keep the crank straight, so I made reinforcements from concrete blocks that locked into each other.

one thing: the locks are engaged by the controler, and the output is working in the opposite direction than the locks are locking

I totally wanna see single stroke 4 piston engine now

A 1 2 3 4 firing order would make for an incredibly unstable engine irl. If it could start, it would shake itself apart.

You guys should do a piston car race

Circling back to the fact that multiple pistons move faster than a single one, Is it possible to squeeze multiple pistons per piston to utilize that potential speed increase? You'd have to fiddle with timings A LOT but it might be worth it if your performance increases geometrically. Nightmares and disasters are also pretty good for content lol.

I swear the longer piston length works for me. I wonder why it didn't work for Kosmo tho

Keep making these videos, maybe make one where youre just testing what are the best combinations to make more hp or torque. Or make a vid of making the most hp and putting it in a car to race them. Drag cars first and maybe then a track cars

Please try an in-line 4 with 90 degrees between cylinders with a cross plane crank (firing order: 1-3-2-7)

What he made isn't a boxer it's a flatplane I4, which is what they normally are irl. You keep making crosspoane ones which are kinda rare.

I know this will probably be a skipping record to hear but, I would like to see a cool dyno built engine with a chassis that is made to have various engines swapped into it, you could do like different piston engine configurations and then race like V8s, then I4, then I6. And have similar engines but have them be unique and maybe do a multiplayer challenge out of it!

Try 270 deg offset for each piston. :D

Something is very off with kan timing. It looked like the cranks were offset 22.5° but the sensors were in 90° intervalls.

Did any one else thing that at 18:30 it looked like Kosmo's second piston on his duel piston stroke was not activating?

Would it be possible to make a mechanism that transform linear movements into rotatory movement? Would be interesting to see how much torque can output the lift in that scenario

The stuttering engines are likely due to the engines being unbalanced. Real old car engines have weirdly shaped cooling fans and unbalanced flywheels to help the engine run smoother. You’ll find cooling fans on old cars with fins in completely random spots because it’s just what gave the best results when the engines were tested.

do a challenge where 4 of you all have to make engines and interchange 2 of them to power each others car

I think you built the locking mechanism backwards again lol, just built it both ways next time to make sure its all locked up and all pistons work togeher

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the friction from your timing wheel definitely doesn't help going smoothly lol

Kan you should try using v8 pattern in scrap mechanic and see how much torque you would get, just for food for thought.

Piston engine battle bots now!!!!!

Is the tgt rpm supposed to be set to 2?

Looks like cosmos 2nd piston aint firing cause piston 3 covers the sensor if u look at 18:08 isch

11:30 Torque locks in wrong orientation again :( You can see them disengaging here.

I feel like the issue was that your engine had all the pistons firing one the same side at the same time. Like all 4 were on the same side simultaneously, like it was meant to be a v8 or something Edit: I messed with it myself, and I was able to surpass 13900 torque with an inline 4 and a 7 block crank. It actually didn't stall at that torque, but it was so slow that the dyno wouldn't track the torque anymore

Observers closer to the output rather than the outside

Try this again but double up the pistons so that you increase the torque by a lot

Oh no! We got a bad case of the ugadugas!

Yeah, as other people have mentioned, it looks like your locks are just simply bad. At 11:29 you can clearly see they aren't doing what they're supposed to.

How about a V2 layout with double pistons?

there are problems that arise with bigger values, but the problem with your engine is that the locks are not aligned for 90°, but instead to 45°, which made the pistons come close to each other

what is the song you overlay while building

Make a cabering rifle that shoots and ejects casings (maybe shoots using explosives)

I am not sure but it seems your encoder wheel is of by one block and hitting the top of the engine

I do believe looking at this engine it could be a better 6 cylinder make than a 4

When you have that long of a stroke, the controller doesnt have enough torque to offset the crankpins, or whatever you want to call them, to the 90 degrees you have set. Thats why it is running so janky, your timing system is built around each piston being 90 degrees offset from each other, and because they arent, they activate at the wrong times and fight against the other pistons instead of providing more torque. Some people here say that your crank locks/braces are in the wrong direction, but you actually need to have crank locks/braces in both directions otherwise it will just keep folding up like it does now, but inte the other direction.

oh wow its the default cube song :3

Kan did u try to give the engine a proper firing order like a 4 cylinder has the firing order 1 3 4 2 maybe it would run better :D

i dont build piston engines but i think the timing colors need alot of work

Hello kAN. Can you try stormworks? I think you will like it

Fant large pistons, make some giga engines! Lmao

You should try to build a rotory motor

Why not think of making a competition with who can make the useful vehicle in the game scrap mechanic

Limit right around 1.67 lb/ft per cubic inch N/A with gasoline?

I wish I u could multiplayer with u guys

Looking at youre engine the problem is with the location of the locking bits. they are too close together

i just made a engine after watching this for the second time and tbh id like to know what you think of my inline 4 engine and maybe it will give you some ideas cuz i was able to get 8800 NM of torque and 34 hp at 50 rpm also if the comments could give me more advise on how to make it better that would be appreciated its on the workshop title "piston engine 5.2 max torque" by kurd i also am gonna be uploading further designs such as max speed and designs with more/less pistons. edit just posted a radial 16 making a ridiculous 10630 NM of torque and 131 hp at 118 rpm

Look at a crank shaft on a car engine. The connection points are offset. Your crank is a straight line....try a offset crank

I like Kosmo's method where the sensors are on the end of the crank arms. Seems a lot easier to make the timing perfect using that method. No matter what angle you have between crank arms, they would always trigger at the exact right time.

He didn't build a boxer he built a flat plane crank and he was trying get it to fire 1 3 2 4 becuase that how most 4 cylinder engines fire irl to be the most efficient

You should build a car with a piston engine

What's the name of the mod being used here?

You should do one with torque @ pk power instead.

Kan try build a massive piston engine that can push 10000 newton meters

because these pistons push and pull unlike real pistons , you do efectively have power strokes in both directions Is it possible to build the crank shaft on a square coloumn and hve the connecting pieces on each face instead of using a controller offsetting the pistons ....this negates the need for locks

is it me or both kAN's and Kosmo's engine locks are set in the wrong direction ?

Not sure your background and what you know about engines, but maybe try recreating a specific firing order. I think right now you have a point where all 4 pistons are on the same side of the engine in their downward stroke. No bueno. Which is also why it spins a lot on the dyno, then stops. Because they all push through their downward stroke, get stuck at the very bottom, then all pull together on their upward stroke. Atleast thats what my intuition would tell me. Scrap mechanics physics are wonky so what should work breaks it half the time

One of the sensors wasn’t working on Kosmo’s engine

I was thinking it would be cool to try to make thrusters function as cylinders in an engine which will also make you one of the first people to make an engine where the cylinder doesn't rotate unlike common piston engines

on the kosmo engine only one of the inside pistones was workoing

i wanna see an engine with an offset crank.

Piston hp challenge?

The pistons should be 90 degrees apart

I may not be a scrap mechanic player, but I feel like having the crank shaft have bearings throughout the engine hurt your engine