IF you wanted to try and explain to somebody how an engine works, describing the suck, squeeze, bang, blow sequence of a two-stroke engine would be the easiest route.
But what if the person you were explaining it to still didn’t get it? Then it might be easier to actually show them the inner workings of an engine, and how good would it be to be able to do that, while the engine was running!
That’s the feat that Chlyo Racing has achieved, as the team there has created just such a tool, a fully functional two-stroke engine, with a completely transparent barrel, combustion chamber and head. In the full video you can see the team building and then installing the engine into a bike that we think is a Simson MTX. It even shows how they drilled and then machined the ports within the barrel of the motor which looks to be made of acrylic. The good bit of the video though begins at around 9 minutes in, when they are ready to fuel the bike and get it up and running. After a few kicks, the dinky two-stroke barks into life, and not only can you see the piston running up and down the bore, you can see the individual combustion events as they happen within the engine. Once it’s running smoothly, the throttle is opened up and as the revs rise the entire top of the combustion chamber glows a yellowy-orange colour.
Cool it may be, although in the real world, we don’t think there is much more to the engine than a bit of a curiosity, after all, the wear on the acrylic bore must be fairly high, and we’d assume that it’d start to lose compression after extensive running. That doesn’t detract from the video though, as it genuinely lets you get a look inside an engine like never before!
