Rotary motor – aka the Wankelaka engine kills everything it ever touches – is what most car enthusiasts love or scared. My first car was a 1983 RX-7, brilliant in a light brown and with the 12A carburetor makes all 100hp, so I’m totally in the first category.
In case you lost it:
Of course, that prehistoric twin-rotor engine was far from reaching the pinnacle of rotary technology. No, for that, we have to go to YouTube guy Rob Dahm. Sure, we’ve seen his three-rotor car and RX-7 . full-time 4-wheel drive and even a C5 Chevy Corvette that you swapped the rotation forbut now things are really spiraling out of control because someone gave him a handmade 12-blade motor.
Yes, 12 propellers. Those are the most propellers of anything ever (read them and cry Kiwis), and they’re laid out in a super cool Y design with a single-bank rotating counter on the bottom and the other side. The man who originally built the engine did so for his tugboat after he got tired of blowing up high displacement Chevys and never let it run more than the carburetor. and a pair of Jaguar V12 ignition systems. Now it’s Rob’s job to take the engine and bring it into the modern era with fuel injection and maybe even forced induction.
This video shows the disassembled engine, partially assembled for shipping without propellers, and the engineering on display is amazing and worth seeing. I just hope that the next video in the series comes sooner rather than later because I want to hear this thing run.
