Lego Engines!

Try this on for size! This was built by one of my 7th grade students. It's powered by a Lego Mindstorms NXT and actually runs pretty darn smoothley!



Square piston and crankshaft.



Interesting spoked flywheel and the "electric start".



Intake / exhaust port at the bottom of the cylinder.



Video of it in action!



He said he just kinda started putting stuff together and this is what came out of it. Very impressive!


Now, I could have sworn I posted this one somewhere but can't seem to find it... So here it is (again?).

This was built by one of my 8th grade students that was also building my wobbler air engine.  Same story- he was playing with legos and this sort of emerged from the chaos.  This one even RUNS on compressed air.  It takes a LOT of it though-  lots of leaks through all the gaps.







Kind of hard to see but if you look to the right of the little square lego piece you can see the air intake port.



And of course a video of it in action!

Penny Engine! So small you can power it with your BREATH.

A couple of weeks ago I had kind of a wild hair and came up with this little guy.  Flywheel is made out of a penny, and it will run on air from your breath!



It started out as this pile of leftover parts from past Hot Wheels builds.


All of that got turned into these bits.



Gotta have some semi-unique tools to do all that though.  The jewelers saw and pin vice / jewelers drill are lotsa fun to play with.



Getting the rotating assembly put together.



Piston, cylinder, and associated bits.



This type of engine is commonly called a "Wobbler" or an Oscillating Steam Engine, because the entire cylinder wobbles back and forth.  As it does, one of these holes lines up with the hole in the cylinder, letting pressure in to push the piston down.  On the way back up, the other hole lines up and lets the pressure out.



 

 





And of course, some videos of it running.  First one shows me powering it with my lungs and then a longer run with the air compressor.  Second vid was the second time I had ever gotten it to run, using the air compressor on that one.






This was a lot of fun to make.  It was even more fun to watch the band teacher, who you would think has lung capacity to spare, turn red, then purple, then white trying to get it to go!

Also wrote an instructable on this one and entered it into a couple of contests over there.  Check it out here:  http://www.instructables.com/id/Penny-Engine-micro-air-powered-engine/