This drawing and the blog that came with it got me in to trouble yesterday. One should be suspicious of both static drawings of engines, and (sometimes) the words of bloggers. Don't get me wrong, our Harley Evolution engine doesn't miss a beat (see below), I don't even have to touch wood or cross my fingers there, it a glorious piece of engineering, lovely in every way, and even a delight to polish.
However, as I stated yesterday (yikes!) in the Event Theatre, and twice to make it worse, it is still flawed.
There might be a great dissertation in the title 'The Myth of Perfect Engineering'; I won't be writing it but somebody should. Instead I shall be buying myself a little model kit of a V-twin with moving parts from Haynes (including little flashing spark plug lights) for £25 and eat humble pie; to remind myself not just of the four stroke cycle, but of the fact that both pistons in a Harley engines absolutely DO NOT spark at the same time, despite the fact that this charmingly allowed me to conclude this was why Harleys were so loud.
What a twit.
The pistons rise at the same moment but are on different parts of the cycle.
And the engine is slightly out of balance if you compare it to the 'perfect' symmetry of a horizontally opposed engine as might be found in a BMW R75 (the so called boxer type) but hell, Harley have spent spent every working day since the twenties in the design shop in Milwaukee trying to fix that inherent problem, and this does rather represent a triumph in evolutionary technology over pure rationality.
If you need proof, then, of America's 'can do' mentality as opposed to Germany's exquisite diagram look no further; demonstrated, of course, in products, maybe even 'cultural products' (?) that date from way back; think for instance of WW2 tanks (Tiger vs Sherman) or machine guns (M42 vs M2).
Now I would like to write THAT cultural history of technology, but to do so I'd better sharpen up my act.
