it's called a cam shaft, not a cam't shaft

May 1, 2021 12:46 PM

From Bartosz Ciechanowski, an extremely readable illustrated tutorial of the basics of an internal combustion engine, with interactive 3D illustrations of various parts and principles.
posted by cortex (12 comments total)

via I'm pretty sure scruss on social media somewhere, hi scruss
posted by cortex at 12:47 PM on May 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

There's also a number of links out to other sources illustrating details or advanced bits the writeup doesn't get into; one of them is this short video from Smarter Every Day that also walks through at a basic level the operation of a four-stroke engine.
posted by cortex at 1:19 PM on May 1, 2021

The three-slider diagram about cam shape, about 2/3rds down the page, is amusing in that, if left on my screen it absolutely eats up all available video memory on this Intel iGPU and everything stops rendering. I'm gonna have to move to my gaming rig to finish reading this page.
posted by glonous keming at 2:37 PM on May 1, 2021

Don't miss their previous blog posts from the Archives link. There are several quite interesting ones.
posted by zengargoyle at 3:15 PM on May 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is fabulous. I forgot that combustion = mini explosions.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:45 PM on May 1, 2021

right back atcha, cortex! I via'd it from HackerNews, after someone told me that one of my random plotter writeups made it on there
posted by scruss at 8:21 PM on May 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

Be sure to check out Ciechanowski‘s other tutorials on light and lenses, they’re amazing. Also dig into the site a bit with developer tools - he puts together these little tutorials by hand, it’s a delight.
posted by q*ben at 10:23 PM on May 1, 2021

Really enjoyed this—I feel like I finally understand. Better late than never—we’re already using all-electric garden tools and car will be next.
posted by kinnakeet at 12:20 AM on May 2, 2021

This was so interesting, I understood parts of it already but this really clarified. Maybe in a few years this will be an artefact in the 'understanding old timey internal combustion engines' history class!
posted by ElasticParrot at 9:17 AM on May 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Internal combustion engine is indeed TRULY PROMETHIAN. Too long did read.
posted by Captain Chesapeake at 11:08 AM on May 2, 2021

If you think animated mechanical movements are neat, check out 507 Mechanical Movements or the more complex Animated Engines.
posted by Harald74 at 10:44 PM on May 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

This immediately reminded me of this other great visualization of internal combustion engines, subsystem by subsystem. Made by Jacob O'Neal.
posted by lostburner at 4:40 PM on May 3, 2021