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Detroit, 2:52 AM
Fri Nov 27
1 posts in the last 24 hours
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@lostarchitect:
Here's my second bike, the 1985 Suzuki RG500. It had a square four-cylinder (two crankshafts!) and made 95HP. No bike has ever come close to being as much fun for me.
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[www.jaylenosgarage.com]
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Of course this just could be a tall tail.
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Only about half of Saab strokers had an oil pump, the others sucked premixed oil and gas right through the carb into the bottom end. No worries spinning either direction. I have done the four reverse gears trick myself.
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I helped my father convert '65-68 3-cylinder models into V4s back in the late 60s and early 70s. He probably converted about 40 or 50 cars. He was a mechanical engineer who bought parts directly from Saab, so he did the conversions very accurately. Driving the cars, you could never tell they hadn't been born with four cylinders.
One day in the early 80s, we were out working on a 99 when we heard a 3-cylinder Saab turn the corner and come up the street. We both dropped our tools and walked out to the curb, and a 1968 Saab 96 (big windshield, sheet-metal grille) with V4 emblems pulled up and stopped. An older gentleman got out and said, "Well, you must be the Saab guys I heard about down here."
We both asked, almost in stereo, "What the hell did you do to that car?"
The old guy replied, "I bought this one new off the showroom floor, but I never did like the V4, so I converted it back to a 3-cylinder."
09/19/09
One certainly has to move the radiator to the front of the car instead of behind the engine...
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Hey, you get a heart-click. Anybody piloting a 93 for grocery runs is OK by me.
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*catch*
*watches video*
*both fall over*
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A fair number of European cars (like this Saab) had them too, but often with four speeds. Some Italian cars like Alfas and Lancias even had five-speed columns - yikes.
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I wish I knew how the freewheeling mechanism works inside a 96 transmission. I was always afraid of breaking it. There's this trick where you can make a fast, tight right-angle turn on a dirt road in a 96 using the free-wheeling. Charge into the turn too fast in second gear. A third of the way through the turn, when you've got the steering wheel turned the way you want but the car is understeering and going in a straight line anyway, floor it. When the engine speed passes the speed of the wheels then bam! suddenly the wheels are powered, understeer no more, and they yank you off at a right angle. It's that bam! that used to worry me.
09/19/09
@wkiernan: It seems that they were using a one way roller clutch. 6 rollers on earlier models, later changed to 10.
It's pretty simple: in this case, when the inner shaft turns counterclockwise, the friction from the outer shaft on the four rollers drags them back along the inner shaft, so that they wedge in place and the outer shaft turns with the inner shaft.
When the inner shaft turns clockwise, the friction from the outer shaft pushes the rollers against a spring, but clearance increases, so minimal force is transmitted from the inner shaft to the outer shaft.
The bam! you experienced was the rollers wedging into place, as well as the rest of the drivetrain taking up slack. Per your experience, a well built roller clutch should be fairly hard to break.
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