Watch An Engine Combustion Cycle Through A Glass Head

Thanks to a special glass cylinder head on a lawn mower engine and an ultra slow-motion camera, this video lets you see the combustion cycle in whole new way

Matt Robinson

17 Jan 2017

While we have seen a clear engine cover in use before (on a two-stroke engine, rather than a four-stroke), we’ve never seen the combustion cycle quite like this before.

Using a glass-topped lawn mower engine, these guys produced some stunning footage, with a 4000 frames-per-second look at the combustion cycle. That’s 150 times slower than real time, in case you were wondering.

Sit back, relax, and prepare to be mesmerised…

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

I want a glass rotary

ah00t13

Ummm, interesing…. You can glass LS swap it

That has already been done in the first Fast & furious

Satisfying. ‘Nuff said.

Lawnmower engine… B18 or K20?

Haha oh you silly, I see what you did there

That’d br kinda cool, though. A B18-powered lawnmower.

Gallo’s 12

Gallo12

Nice Honda bro, can you send me a tutorial how do it on my Civic?

Can someone explain me why is there spark 2 times per cycle?

It’s a waste spark system. It burns all the unburnt fuel in the exhaust to reduce emissions.

I have an generator/karting engine that does the same. for my engine, there is a strong magnet put on top of the flywheel. Over flywheel there is a coil. every time the magnet passes the coil, electricity is made and the spark plug does its thing. Because the flywheel is on crankshaft, the magnet passes the coil on every crank’s full turn, aka every 360°. thus there is a spark 2 times per cycle. Its made that way only because it is simple. I guess this engine works the same way

SuckSqueezeBangBlow.avi

Still runs better on alcohol than some of my friends.

Ooooooooohhhh!!!

what about diesel

Works more or less the same way, only you don’t have spark plugs but glow plugs to make the Diesel fuel ignite itself from the temperature and the compression.
Oh, and all you will see through the glass top is black soot.