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The inlet and exhaust valves are located in the cylinder head, and both valves are mechanically operated by one push-rod and rocker, radial pipes from crank case to inlet valve casing taking the mixture to the cylinders. The exhaust valves are placed on the leading, or air-screw side, of the engine, in order to get the fullest possible cooling effect.
An interesting type of pioneer radial engine was the Farcot, in which the cylinders were arranged in a horizontal plane, with a vertical crankshaft which operated the air-screw through bevel gearing. This was an eight-cylinder engine, developing 64 horse-power at 1,200 revolutions per minute.
It was made with six cylinders arranged on each side of a common crank case, with long bolts passing through the cylinder heads to assist in holding them down. The induction piping and valve-operating gear were arranged below the engine, and the half-speed shaft carried the air-screw.
The big "bus," as the airplanes were called, with propeller whirling, lumbered over the ground; the smoothness of flying came to it and, deafened to everything but the clatter of the motor and the thrash of the air-screw, Hal gazed down. Points of light, yellow and red and some almost white, glowed on the ground.
With this engine, a gearing was introduced to enable the propeller to run at a lower speed than that of the engine, the slight loss of efficiency caused by the friction of the gearing being compensated by the slower speed of the air-screw, which had higher efficiency than would have been the case if it had been run at the engine speed.
In the eighteen-cylinder model the impulses occur at each 40 degrees of angular rotation of the cylinders, securing an extremely even rotation of the air-screw. In 1913 the Gnome Monosoupape engine was introduced, a model in which the inlet valve to the cylinder was omitted, while the piston was of the ordinary cast-iron type.
Each crankshaft drove a separate air-screw. This pattern of engine was taken up by the Dutheil-Chambers firm in the pioneer days of aircraft, when the firm in question produced seven different sizes of horizontal engines.
The ratio of the gearing that is, the speed of the air-screw relatively to that of the engine, could be chosen so as to suit exactly the requirements of the air-screw, and the gearing itself, on this engine, was accomplished on the half-speed shaft actuating the valves.
A casing, mounted on the top of the engine, supports the air-screw, which is driven through bevel gearing from the upper end of the crankshaft. With this type of engine a better rate of air-screw efficiency is obtained by gearing the screw down to half the rate of revolution of the engine, this giving a more even torque.
An even torque, or great uniformity of rotation, is transmitted to the air-screw by these engines, while the design also permits of such good balance of the engine itself that vibration is practically eliminated.
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