I dont want to bring up a dead thread, so I'll make this one instead.

GoldenMotor.com

PureWirez

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Mar 30, 2012
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I was reading through all the past stuff on the board recently and I came upon a post about putting a miniature rotary engine on a bike. The thread kind of died there after everyone realized the only scaled down Wankels these days are for large small planes, which don't have the power to push the bike by itself.
But that got me to thinking because nobody brought up the possibility of two engines making contact at the side of the side of your back wheel with a rubber rotor or something. The only problem I saw with it was that you would have trouble keeping the motors going at a constant speed. Wouldn't it be semi-easy to run the already electric motors through a power regulator and splitter, essentially tying them together and giving yourself a boost in power?
 

16v4nrbrgr

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Mar 17, 2012
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You could turbocharge one of them with a teeny turbo and maybe make it perform like a china girl until it 'splodes!
 

PureWirez

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I suppose you could, but I don't think that would help them grip more, maybe I'm foolish but I have been thinking about cross between a hot wheels motorized track and that thing they made to throw cards 300mph in mythbusters. I don"t think it would be the most power efficient method though lol.
 

Cavi Mike

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Dec 17, 2011
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I have absolutely no idea what you're asking. Do you want the rotary engines to power the bike or electric motors? Or engines powering generators which in-turn power the motors like a train?
 

16v4nrbrgr

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He wants to use two rotary engines in a friction drive setup, a very expensive one though! I think it would be interesting to see what power you could get out of one of the RC engines with a tiny turbo since Mazdas respond to boost very well and you can more than quadruple the power output of a 13B with high boost. Not really worth the effort considering the small percentage that the engine weight is of the total bicycle and rider system, so the power to weight ratio would only be slightly increased by using a rotary, and turbocharging would negate the reliability aspects of the rotary engine. It would be really neat as an engineering exercise though!

I need to go on a diet and training regimen to increase my power to weight ratio by dropping 15-20 pounds! lol
 

PureWirez

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Lmao, sorry if I'm explaining this poorly. Have you ever seen one of those hotwheel tracks that powers the cars around it? Basically I wanted to back mount two of them side by side, and divvy the friction workload between them. Also, alot of these model airplane engines are electric( I realize this isn't a wankle rotary if it doesn't have rotors, but ohwell) so to hook them together and to make sure they run together at the same speed, you just build a power regulator/splitter and hook them upto it.
[also, these engines are only really expensive/heavy if you get the high octane ones. The electric are fairly light, much cheaper, but have significantly less power]
 
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cannonball2

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Oct 28, 2010
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I dont know which electric model engines you are referring to but the brushless motors have mega power per size. There was a 40% contest plane I recall that had a 20hp motor in the planes spinner! They have gotten fairly cheap over the years also. You can run two off one speed control providing it is rated correctly. Range might be an issue.
 

motor_bike_fanatic

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Jul 26, 2011
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This might be a "neat engineering exercise", but is it really worth the time and effort? if you could even match the power of a stock china engine I would be surprised. Seems like a whole lot of effort for something that might get you 1 hp if your lucky. Plus think about the load you would be putting on these engines. They just are not made to propel a bike with the weight of a person. they are designed for what they are used for. And they already have friction drive kits for bicycles that produce pretty decent power from what I have read.
 

PureWirez

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I was just putting in an idea that popped in my head, I wasn't going to do it once I figured the power requirements for the engines over time. It came down to either needing a $1000 lithium battery or dozens of windbelts and pinwheel generators for any long distance. lol