Cyclone "Engineering" gets worse yet, Buddy. Let's start with the overall layout. This has to be one of the few times in history that anyone has built a vertical shaft radial engine. Why a vertical shaft? Who uses vertical shafts outside of lawnmowers, outboard motors, ice augers and post-hole diggers? Yeah, it's a vanishingly rare device. If you want to see just how impractical it is, look at the drawings Cyclone commissioned for their super-duper sports car. The vertical shaft mid-engine pretty much wiped out rear visibility. The average generator, pump, machine tool, farm implement and so on uses horizontal shafts … so why build a product that can't bolt right up to such machinery? Strange, strange, strange behavior for a company that was bragging that their engines were almost infinitely scalable and suitable replacements for virtually the entire range of IE engines.
Then there's the radial layout, the sole reason behind this idiotic "spider bearing". (Will Cyclone ever quit attempting to make the entire world adopt their terminology rather than the other way around? Probably just as soon as engineers recognize a Schoell Cycle.)
Now, why in the world would anyone use a radial engine? The layout is practically untouched by the engineering community at large. Yes, radial engines were workhorses in WW2, especially in aircraft. The reason for that is that the radial cylinder distribution allows you to stick cooling fins on the cylinder without interfering with adjacent cylinders. It ALSO allows all the cylinders to receive cooling ram air undisrupted by the other cylinders...venting cooling air to the rear jugs of a 12 cylinder vee engine is just too troublesome. This explanation utterly eliminates any pretense of an explanation for a radial steam engine - you want to insulate the cylinders, not cool them off. What they have done is make an engine with greater surface area with which to reject heat when the goal is to preserve it.
There is a reason for the radial, vertical shaft design. Harry Schoell stated it repeatedly. He wanted a design that looked good and would therefore generate marketing buzz. Every engineering school in the country teaches that form follows function but the geniuses at Cyclone think that form leads instead. This credo followed through with the condenser design, it had to neatly stack into the artistic design of the engine. That it did, it looked gorgeous. Of course, anyone with a ruler and a calculator could easily compare the surface area to an automotive radiator and see that the surface area was utterly inadequate for the job … a fatal flaw for a hermetically sealed engine that is to allow no escape of steam nor water. If you can't condense the steam, where does it all go?
The so-called "spider bearing" was installed to deal with the well-known problem of uneven piston travel profiles found in radial engines using master connecting rods. Somehow, one wonders how all those WW2 aircraft managed to stagger into the air with these problems …. let alone approach 500 mph in a few cases. One solution was to design a master rod with the connecting rod pins at different radii and fitting connecting rods of different lengths to these pins. It didn't utterly equalize the motion of each piston but it made the differences irrelevant in real world use. Instead, Cyclone came up with possibly the strangest motion ever used in an engine.
Every engine of which I am familiar produces constrained motion ... by constrained I mean that the components can be at one, and only one, position at any given degree of revolution. The position of the piston in the traditional crank and connecting rod engine can be mathematically calculated for any rotational angle without ever touching the engine. The same flies for a Scotch Yoke. Likewise the Wankel, Stirling, Brayton, Miller, turbines and so on. Constrained motion makes it possible to design components that contain stresses to predefined limits while guaranteeing predictable expansion and compression. And then there's Cyclone.
The "spider bearing's" gross motion is constrained by the fact that it revolves on the crankpin; so they are good there. The problem is that there is nothing that defines what angle the "spider bearing" assumes at any point in the revolution … it's limited to a range rather than a mathematically defined angle. Just looking at the patent drawing you realize that, with the crank held rigid, it is possible to rotate the "spider bearing" on the crankpin and cause the pistons to move up or down in their respective cylinders. Allegedly, the force of combustion gas pressures against pistons in cylinders will force the respective rods into the correct positions but that's never going to happen in the real world. It is ESPECIALLY not going to happen because the rods are meant to be stopped in their swing by impact. Since there are no inelastic construction materials, there will certainly be rebounding.
Now, let's examine how this positioning via impact affect the engine. First of all, it has drastic effects on piston acceleration. Typically, piston travel is basically composed of two superimposed sine waves … one produced by the crank rotating and the other by rod angularity. This isn't absolutely ideal but acceptable since changes in acceleration occur smoothly in a sine wave. Acceleration poses real limits on the motion of parts in an engine, you can only pull so many "gravities" before things get hurt. So, what happens in a Cyclone? The rods swing around as the pistons move in their bores and, in turn, the rods are bought to abrupt halts. This abrupt halt causes a huge, instantaneous change in acceleration … imparting an unacceptable shock along the rod. When the rod bounces off its stop (which it most assuredly will)we get yet another violent change of acceleration riding right after the first. Envision it, the piston is moving on its own way and then it gets pulled up violently, before getting yanked in the opposite direction. Yep, brilliant engineering.
And, you know what? This ain't the only problem. That sudden halt against the stop puts a shear load on the rod, because it really needed that on top of the compression loads.
And it still gets better. Engine balance is produced by offsetting reciprocating inertial forces against one another and also apportioning these to cancel out rotating forces. It's a bit of a discipline. Now, we have to ask ourselves, what happens when the inertial loads are no longer predictable due to unconstrained motion? Can we balance an engine in which the crank angle and the piston locations are not precisely defined at all time? Yeah, you knew the answer.
Over the years I've discussed this with over half a dozen mechanical engineers … not a single one took the idea seriously though the responses ranged from derision to laughter. Now we have an alleged engineer on the board trying to alibi this nonsense. The Cyclone insiders are sure easy to spot.
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