As we begin the last article in this series on the basics of the internal combustion engine, let's stop to review what we've covered during the last five articles. We began last May by detailIing the ...

Rotary engines (also known as Wankel engines and Wankel rotary engines) are quite different from piston or "reciprocating" engines. One of the distinguishing features is that they don't need valves to ...

Internal combustion might as well be wizardry to me. I have a basic idea of how engines work and I’ve been wrenching on them since I was a teenager, so I get the gist of it, but my feeble brain still ...

Any given garage or workshop can house a multitude of different small, diesel engine-powered implements, such as log splitters. The annoying thing about these many small engines is that, much like the ...

Any certified gearhead knows that diesel engines do not use spark plugs. But why not? If power in an engine is created by combustion or explosion of flammable liquids, won't a spark plug in a diesel ...

How boxer engines work, why they’re not just “flat” engines, and a 120-year evolution traced from the 1899 Benz to the latest Porsche and Subaru boxers. Boxer engines feature flat, opposing pistons ...

Basic engine education is much like basic sex education: There are hundreds of well-written, informative books on the subject but only a handful of the interested people are willing to expend the time ...