New Life for an Old Engine Case

May 2005

I've had an old single cylinder snowmobile case sitting on a shelf for a couple of years, waiting for the chance to become a new age engine.

Last year I began toying with the prospect of replacing the internal crank with a disk pack, while maintaining the opposed bearing configuration. This concept was also a key factor in downscaling from 10-inch rotors to 4.5-inch rotors.

The more we looked at it, the more we saw the wisdom in working with small turbines. We figured that if we personally had a need for small turbines in our experimental work, club members must also need a turbine that requires much less energy to arrive at real engineering data.

So here it is -- a brief photo gallery of the project that kicked off the small turbine initiative.