Wankel bike

APART from providing endless schoolboy sniggers the Wankel rotary engine is one of the greatest near-misses of 20th century engineering.

Many of us know and are fans of rotary-engined cars like the Mazda RX-7 , but there are even cooler Wankel-engined motorcycles. The likes of Kawasaki , Suzuki , and Yamaha have also created wild rotary bikes. To know more about rotary motorcycles, we first have to get to know the rotary engine. Made by Dr. Felix Wankel in Germany in , it took some time for the eccentric rotary mill to jump from drawing board into production, be it for cars or motorcycles.

Wankel bike

The world-class S engine produces a stunning amount of power from a small, compact and easy-to-integrate unit. All our engines feature patented SPARCS cooling technology to give you better performance and a longer-lasting engine. With a market-leading power to weight ratio and a compact design for easy integration, we'll help design and build the right solution for you. If you need an engine with unrivalled endurance, world-class power and a low total cost of ownership, the S is ideal for you. By combining our patented Compact SPARCS cooling system with a modern rotary engine you benefit from an engine which is reliable, efficient and long-lasting. And, because the S is compact and lightweight it's easier to integrate into your application. It will also give improved performance through being lighter and more aerodynamic. You want your engineering partner to offer products of an exceptional standard. Advanced Innovative Engineering can offer you a truly one-stop shop. We don't just build engines - we consult, conceptualise, develop, design and test solutions to your problems. We can do this because all our activities are based at one state-of-the-art facility in the heart of the UK's aerospace engineering and manufacturing industries. Talk to us today.

More on that later, as around that time, Suzuki also took up the mantle of making a production rotary motorcycle, wankel bike. It carried a cc air-cooled engine with a single rotor, making 20 horsepower and later producing 32hp.

The internal combustion engine has been with us since the s, but it has remained largely the same in all that time: pistons moving up and down in a cylinder, converting that movement to rotary movement by the use of a crankshaft. One brave and seemingly revolutionary development was the rotary engine , conceived by Felix Wankel in the s and offering advantages in simplicity of construction and power output. Here, we celebrate the motorcycles that dared to be different. It was also expensive, with Cycle World magazine summing up thus: "Less performance for more money takes this rotary out of the realm of practicality. It might not have made it into production - only two prototypes are believed to have been built - but it just shows how serious the Japanese manufacturers were considering the Wankel engine and how it was seen as one possible future for the motorcycle. It made its first appearance at the Tokyo Motor Show and was powered by a 66 horsepower, single rotor engine, fitted into the frame and running gear of the Yamaha TX, which at least gave it typical s Yamaha good looks. Compared to the two-strokes of the time, however, the Wankel was just too complex and unreliable and the manufacturers had an uphill struggle to persuade customers.

The Hercules W used a Sachs-sourced Wankel, single-rotor, rotary engine. Felix Wankel born in Lahr, Germany had the vision for his remarkable rotary engine at the age of 17 and began working on prototypes 5 years later. He gained his first patent for his engine in The first motorcycle applications for this promising engine appeared shortly after the first rotary-powered automobiles, the Mazda Cosmo and NSU Spider were introduced in It had separate intake, combustion and exhaust cavities. A rotary engine has no piston chugging up and down. Think of the rotor as though it is a piston with fewer parts and spinning instead of circulating up and down. The most famous rotary engine was the to Mazda RX The head does not contain a combustion chamber, but instead seals off the rotor.

Wankel bike

And now for something completely different, I am pleased to offer this rare Hercules W Wankel rotary powered motorcycle. Who even knew that this bike existed? Certainly not me until recently. Rare and unusual is what I love. According to the owner:. This is a later oil-injected example.

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With a market-leading power to weight ratio and a compact design for easy integration, we'll help design and build the right solution for you. What is an A2 motorcycle licence and how much does it cost? With the oil crisis at a peak and the motorcycle taking in too much fuel, it could never make production, even as it made for a smooth ride. That said, this never made it into production and remained a prototype, given the complexity of the machine on the whole. But the basic idea of getting rid of all the reciprocating bits of a normal engine — the pistons, con-rods, valves — and replacing them with a design that does the same suck-squeeze-bang-blog sequence using purely rotating parts is, frankly, genius. Home Features Top 10s. It also tends to have more power, is smaller, and weighs less. In the first Wankel motorcycle, the rotary mill came mated to the existing IFA gearbox and made 24 horsepower, double that of the conventional cc MZ two-stroke engine it replaced. Shame, because the bits underneath were serious and included a beautiful aluminium Spondon frame and high-end WP suspension. Only were ever produced, however, so expect to pay a lot for one today. After Commander models, Norton finally called an end to the rotary-engine run but gave the world four fantastic Wankel-engined motorcycles. The Suzuki RE5, however, despite having a single-rotor rotary engine, was complex and heavy. Unfortunately, the even better looking F2, shown as a prototype in and intended to be a cheaper follow-up to the F1, never reached production.

The revolutionary rotary engine designed by Dr. Felix Wankel, henceforth known as the Wankel engine, is a design of tremendous promise, and expensive vexation. It seemed the wonder motor of the future in the s, and many automobile manufacturers took a out a license on the design, from General Motors to Rolls Royce, as did many aircraft and.

Given that the Classic also came more than a decade after the last serious Wankel production bike, the Suzuki RE5 went off production. Skip to main content. That said, there are plenty of Wankel-engined motorcycles around, and here are the coolest of them all. Here, we celebrate the motorcycles that dared to be different. The F1 Sport was more an effort to use up the remaining parts at the factory than to attract new customers but looked even better now that some of the bodywork had been cut away to reveal the aluminum frame. The big change for the Commander was the adoption of water-cooling for the engine and, of course, that all-enclosing bodywork, complete with built-in panniers - no-one can accuse Norton of being boring in their thinking. You want your engineering partner to offer products of an exceptional standard. Mecum Auctions. Go onto eBay right now and there will probably be one or two available. Another unique thing about this motorcycle, other than the Wankel engine, was a strange rotating biscuit tin instrument cluster. When it comes to the advantage of the Wankel engine as compared to the traditional counter-balancing piston format, it has uniform torque and less vibration. With the oil crisis at a peak and the motorcycle taking in too much fuel, it could never make production, even as it made for a smooth ride.