Burn, Baby, Burn!
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
A lot is riding on your car’s ablity to burn its fuel efficiently and completely. The explosion in the combustion chamber basically propels each piston downward in its turn. This keeps the engine running by maintaining the rotary motion of the crankshaft, which ensures (via the alternator) that all the other necessary systems (such as electronic fuel injection) continue to have power.
With so much depending on combustion in the engine, it always surprises me when engineers design cars with really poorly designed combustion chambers. For instance, an old boyfriend of mine had a Nissan truck that had not one but two spark plugs per chamber. Okay, guys, if you have to put two spark plugs in the combustion chamber in order to ensure all the fuel gets burned, there is something really wrong with your design!
To a lesser extent, how easily it is to change the spark plugs really ought to be a factor in the engine design. After all, we’re talking about a part that wears out, and therefore needs to be changed with some regularity. So why wouldn’t you want to make it easy to get to?
Yet my sister’s old 1986 1/2 Toyota Supra was designed so that you had to remove the entire intake manifold in order to get to the spark plugs, which went down into the top of the engine, instead of in from the side, as most cars are designed. It was really easy to get Toyota parts for that car, but it was a pain in the patootie to actually do the work.
Examples like these just go to show how important it is for car manufacturers to put some thought into how they design their cars!
