2.670 Summary by Melis A. '08

Today was the last day of 2.670. I had wanted to make a really cool modification to my engine by making it a generator, but I didn’t have enough time to make it work. Anyway, I spent all morning putting together the pieces and I managed to finish at 3:31 — and the competition started at 3:30. There were some reallllly cool engines. Many people decorated their engines by using the water jet or CNC mill to etch designs into their flywheel, cylinder plate, and bearing plates. Basically, you draw the design that you want on a 3D CAD program like Solidworks (see image below of a flywheel I designed for fun) and then use another program to take your drawing and tell the machine exactly how to make your part by defining the tool paths. Then, open your file on the computer connected to CNC mill or water jet, and bam! It makes your part for you.

Everyone lined up their engines and ran them at the same time:
[]

Here are some examples of pretty engines. The first one won the award for Best Craftsmanship; it’s missing some major parts because it wasn’t completed by the time I took this pictures. But, the flywheel has little mice on it, the bearing plate has bars, and the cylinder plate has cheese, so when the flywheel turns its supposed to look like the mice are running for the cheese.

[]

Dragons:
[]

LEDs mounted on the flywheel with a battery:
[]

Below are examples of modified engines that have been designed to go faster. The idea behind making them vertical is because it minimizes friction. One of them has fins and they all try to maximize the heat
delivered to the “hot” side of the engine.

[]

This is a picture of Professor Hart.

Picture of me and my best buddy, Maria (can you tell that we love our engines?) Maria’s engine was particularly cool because one of her parts hit the flywheel so it made a great tapping noise. It was an engine/musical instrument.

Our engines:

To see a video of my engine running, click here! I didn’t get it to run in time for the speed competition, but afterwards I worked on it some more and got it go at a max of 750 rpm. Moral of the story is to be persistent.