Dan Gurney’s Moment-Cancelling Four-Stroke engine is amazing.
Designed for motorcycles as its primary application, the Moment Cancelling Four Stroke (MC4S) engine has a 2 cylinder inline layout, with counter rotating individual crankshafts; this eliminates or cancels out vibration, which is a common problem with a traditional crankshaft.
Once rival competitors in motorsport Dan Gurney and Chuck Palmgren, are now joining forces and have come up with this engine design. While motorcycles are the focus for now, this concept could be implemented for automobiles, boats, and other motor vehicles.
While hybrid powertrains might seem to be the future, Gurney says internal combustion engines still have a future.
“The fact is that there are global and US oil and gas fields available which should last for many, many decades, I want to have a go at making the internal combustion engine even more competitive with electric power for some of those decades.”
One of the biggest problems in typical engine layouts and configurations is the need for balancing shafts and counterweights to reduce vibration and improve smoothness. Dan Gurney sums it up rather well:
“Without special balancing systems, vibration and reciprocating engines go together,”
“My experience is that things vibrate for a while, then fatigue and fall off or fall apart.”
As both crankshafts turn in opposite directions, their moments of inertia cancel each other out, thus eliminating vibrations, it also has the added benefit of allowing for smaller, fewer moving parts, resulting in a more compact, simpler mechanism.
While suppressing vibrations might appear to be the main focus of this development, other aspects of engine design, such as intake and exhaust fluid dynamics, are also being improved upon. The intake runners have been tapered to adjust flow velocity and optimize combustion.
This level of quality and brilliance is sure to be expected from Dan Gurney.
Watch the video below.
ALSO DON’T MISS: Wonderful “naked” 2-stroke horizontal engine!