Engineering Johnson posted a photo of a World War I biplane engine and a commenter called it a radial engine. It does look like a radial, but radial engines have a rotating crankshaft. The engines on early biplanes were often what is called a rotary engine. The crankshaft is stationary and the engine spins around it. They are a different sort of beast, and they packed a lot of power in a light package. Here are some videos that show a little bit about them. Pilots were subjected to castor oil that exhausted from the engine. The Germans used mineral oil, and that caused fouling problems with the sparkplugs, so they moved away from the rotary designs.
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3 comments:
I'd read something that one of the reasons for moving away from rotary engines was because the large spinning mass of metal created some big amount of centrifugal forces that fought turns.
I though they started fairly easily.
The handling problems caused by the gyroscopic effect killed almost as many Camel pilots as the Germans did! It is a wonder that novice pilots were able to learn how to fly these machines.
I understand that fuel delivery was also pretty tough....
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