Everything wrong with the 12 Rotor

the 12 rotor is a thing of myth I've seen gossips such as it's never ran all the way over to its made 2000 horsepower at idle well I will tell you that it is a very real engine and it has ran not only is it the world's only 12 rotor but it's also one of the very first Billet engines I am honored to make a video with this title looking at the things that are wrong with it only exists because of the guy that created the engine Tyson Garvin actually showed me most of what he thought was already wrong with his first revision he made this back in 2008 and back then he was walking and even running while I still had my shoes tied together there are so many people that made it possible for people like me and the internet YouTube At Large to learn about how to make these engines even better and I think that's my favorite part quit the gatekeeping and share what we can about rotary engines we are going to go through the top 10 to 12 things wrong with this engine and they are actually critical this isn't just for the title but also because these are things that we're going to address address in both a short-term and long-term solution this engine was made back in 2008 and a lot has improved in general a lot of people have learned even more information about how to make a rotary engine run even better this engine the core of it being right here was built as a marine application and I'll tell you what number one on most of your lists of what's wrong with the engine ah it's rotary is absolutely wrong a rotary engine in naturally aspirated form is one of the most Stout Motors known to man I'm telling you 300 000 miles and a rotary does not skip a beat anybody that's got one you don't even hear from them because they're out driving they're having a fun time it's only when you turbocharged you get into problems the only drawback to using rotary in any application is they generate a lot of heat well it's a marine application you have a massive ocean of a radiator so coolant comes in goes to the motor and coolant goes out essentially you have all of the ice cold water to cool this motor down so what you would have thought was number one is not at all this engine was absolutely perfect for what he was making it for where I might think that this isn't a problem I'm sure a lot of you are going to say this is the problem right here 12 rotors Apex seals haha jokes all day long this is actually probably one of the best safest most solid parts of the engine because they are Mazda rotors and they've been used in hundreds of thousands if not millions of engines no real guesswork there the only issue is is that the width of these rotors vary and so one of the very first things that we did was standardized how wide these rotors are so they could be interchanged anywhere in the engine the very first issue that is actually pretty critical is left a Telltale sign from the engine running back many years ago these little deposits tell you something very interesting about this design first of all is that oil and residue can get in there that's actually kind of a concern because you would think that this is water cooled when in fact it's not it's just air pockets behind this surface and so we have aluminum and then air and air is more of an insulator than ability to remove heat or move heat so we now have air pockets hidden underneath here but that's not as big of a deal as the fact that the intake Port right here where oil and gasoline and air all travel through it comes from the top travel through here and then come out to the rotor here the problem is there's nothing sealing this from all of this my biggest concern is that at Full Tilt the gasoline is capable of igniting or auto igniting I don't know but say 500 600 Degrees I know that this combustion chamber gets extremely hot and with air being the only thing behind this steel I would be concerned that you could ignite this in there now it'd have to be perfect I have to be a nice Vapor everything would have to be absolutely critically masked to cause that to explode nonetheless you shouldn't have fuel in a place it shouldn't be if this area actually got that hot these O-rings would have long since melted which actually some of them did I would like to machine an O-ring specifically right here and then also I would have loved to have water or coolant or even oil going in these holes somehow actually there's probably a way to do that the timing of a rotor is dictated by this gear right here it's called a stationary gear and the rotor sits on there and while the E shaft spins in circles the rotor dances around this on each gear tooth over here is the combustion chamber so when you explode for the lack of a better word when you ignite there's a desire for everything to push this way and of course it doesn't push the gear over it ends up rotating and that's where you get rotational energy from ignition this is that same side right and look at how little material is on this side and this side this was done out of absolute necessity to get the oil to drain to the side here but it doesn't change the fact that this aluminum is much weaker on the two sides where this gear is actually going to be experiencing most of the force I don't think that this is going to be a make or break deal but then that combined with the fact that this top bolt is missing on every single one of these makes it a little bit of a concern now what this bolt is is on the back side of these you can see that that was actually what the traditional motor uses as an alignment piece so I would actually wish that we could put more bolts in or we might even drill these out to get that to align in microscopic levels you could actually cause this gear to bend this way and you don't have a bolt fighting it so all you have is really this here and it's pivoting off of these four that's being very pedantic but in reality when a bearing is only three thousands of clearance that does make a difference another thing is that these are fine but see all these bolts right here they're perfectly fine for being slightly too short but again because of the lack of material I would like to have them the full depth I would actually rather have longer bolts cut down when we compress or pull this material there's nothing in that hole so we have even less metal even though the bolt is a different material that bolt helps prevent issues all the way through so might as well use as much of the length that we've been given now here's probably the biggest one that's going to bite Us in the ass this is no disrespect to the creator of this engine this was built when I was in diapers and I was wearing diapers yesterday the issue is is that the oil system is a very big Challenge and I don't even have a better way of doing it the fact is it is what it is you see these little air filters looking things here are basically the dry sump inlets oil transmits through this block in multiple spots which is kind of similar to the stock block I would love to have these little dowels between these to help prevent the overaring from busting out but that's not really my concern my concern is that the oil is fed through here and goes to this one and then drain down to the bottom there's a hole right here and it sucks it out through the vacuum the problem is is that now we have this one being fed here and then drains to this one this one also fed through the center here and then drains to this one now we've got a problem where this one isn't the same as these it also gets the waste oil from these two if it was just one to one that's not a big problem we have a vacuum here right and imagine having two straws and ones in air and one's in your drink which straw are you gonna pull the easiest from it's gonna be the one from Air so you're not actually going to vacuum up your drink when one of these channels gets free that means that it stops producing a vacuum and pulling on the other channel and so that just more or less would build up I think he tried resolving that with was by blocking the center one off and adding a little bit of resistance to the upper ones if that's the right approach and I think that we can make that a little bit better but that is going to be a problem with oiling as we go on I would imagine that these rotors would actually be more likely to have oil escape the oil control Rings because if you block this off I've done this before on my motor the blow up I can't get away from the combustion out the oil system so the blow by actually starts bubbling essentially pushing out of the oil control Rings this engine was designed basically naturally aspirated and our problem here is that turbocharging a rotary this is all aluminum on traditional engines it's kind of guided inside of a steel sleeve and that prevents you from putting a lot of the heat to the outer aluminum I'm a little concerned that these Corvette or whatever style Crush o-ring things are going to be a problem and I'm also concerned that there's no real way to encapsulate this if you have two square inches and 28 pounds of boost you're talking about 60 pounds of force trying to pull these two apart you'd like to have multiple bolt holes to prevent that from occurring you don't see that here and you see them kind of on the other plates or in different places and I can't tap into these spots all of these coolant holes the other thing related to the exhaust is see this one right here the center exhaust Port that is a different angle not timing angle this angles like that where these are actually flat perpendicular like the traditional engines you have more material here that will absorb more heat the exhaust coming out of here is the different profile than the exhaust coming out of here these two are identical we can treat them as such here is something that's a little controversial and I think it's very exciting but it's something I do not have experience with this is one of the e-shaft pieces the way he did this is beautifully modular and I checked all the splines and even though he said he did them on like 1940s equipment these are really impressively squared up they're consistent and interchangeable very impressed with that but we have an issue where these bearings have been beaten to and I've got replacement ones now this bearing style comes from SKF so I've ordered the quality ten thousand or nine thousand RPM bearing replacement this can handle side load meaning load this way they're mostly meant for radial load not axial that's the correct terms for that there is nothing holding this e shaft together this way you have an e shaft that will have oil pressure inside of it and while it's not that big of a deal the oil pressure is actually causing all the pieces to kind of want to separate that would technically be one of the things that would naturally do you would have an e-shaft that wants to come apart at some microscopic level like these pieces right here this e-shaft has nothing to hold it together other than this bearing here and then the equivalent bearing on the other side of the motor so these bearings are very critical to the containment of the rotary engine e shaft on this motor it's not so much a problem as much as a concern compared to the traditional Motors there is no end play you can't test and float you can't test any that because it doesn't exist now this one right here is bad I'm gonna replace all of them just in case this is one of the most obscure issues with this motor these gears are all that tie the three four rotors together and so here is a very weird issue I've noticed whilst trying to figure out the timing of the motor let's just ignore everything else and just look at one of these this is a four rotor and I know that world pretty well and so we can say one of these teeth or one of these valleys is top dead center it's not exactly on a tooth but it's like right before the side of the tooth right there is zero degrees on this motor nice and straightforward simple enough it starts getting interesting because we have two different scenarios we have one where there's a gear between them and two where they're touching each other all three of these gears I confirmed it with I built it they're all machined the exact same way so they all have the same teeth and they have the same splines same rotation this one's not that one and vice versa you have a scenario where either way one of these is off this is a tooth it goes between two teeth and this is a tooth that goes between two teeth these two in theory could be identical top dead center and so when you spin the whole motor and this one's at 300 degrees this one's at 300 degrees the way that gears work these two gears cannot be in the same tooth spot at the same time because they have to touch each other so if this one's at a tooth this one has to be at a valley they were in the exact same spot they would be touching like that what I need to do is make sure if they're like this well there's 60 teeth one half of a rotation that's three degrees off three degrees is both a massive number and a very small number at the same time you want to know how big of a deal that is put your engine at your most safest extreme timing number you want and then add three degrees you can tell anybody that's a relatively experienced tuner ooh that that's uncomfortable if part of the motor is running at three degrees off that means that we don't have an even consistent pulsing you could engineer it and do that and I'm not exactly sure how this was built in terms of like timing from here to here this is the sort of stuff that you have to make sure is exactly the same if you're handed a motor that you didn't build if zero is right here on this one is zero at the same spot here I can't tell yet because these can shift a little bit thanks to the hall Tech we can do this is once the engine is all together say this one is three degrees off that's fine we can adjust and make all of those three degrees off we come to a very technical issue as all of these kind of are it takes a lot of processing power to fire this engine as a 12 rotor there becomes a couple realistic challenges to that one is that you need an obnoxiously expensive computer to run this because there is no other engine that runs like this so there's a shortcut to this motor there are no counterweights and I would almost say it's a bad thing we don't get to run it as a 12 rotor right now it is it will fire all 12 rotors but what you see here is the current solution to this engine these two rotors are firing at the same time these two rotors are firing at the same time so if you look at just this much you've got 180 degrees and a rotor is firing no matter what if you had to splice wires you could splice wires from this one to this one spark plug wires and it would work same thing to hear so this is actually running as a four rotor as a two rotor because these are on opposite sides and you get this kind of lub dub thing going on it actually balances out thing is though is that it's still a two rotor or is it a four rotor You could argue either way the way it's running but no one can deny the fact that there are four rotors running at once this gives you the ability to splice wires together and that's what we're going to do with this 12 rotor is that a haltek R5 can run this engine all six sets of two on one computer that would require 12 spark plugs for leading trailing spark outputs and at least 12 injectors placed together a set of primaries and secondary set of primary secondaries if I go to turn this into a traditional four rotor which is where each of these fire at 90 degrees from each other we need counterweights we do have this slot here and we do have these gears here that we can ultimately attach counterweights to but we don't at this moment because of both technical limitations and physical limitations this will run as a double pulse six rotor which is going to still sound way crazier than a six rotor because we have two rotors fightering yeah once this is probably the most expensive gold mine that is only useful for this engine originally when Tyson built this motor he built the ability to have two his boat could take two engines why not make two 12 rotors as if one wasn't crazy enough these are the steel inserts faces and they're beefy this is only three of them there are a couple that are on the engine right now or that were delivered with the motor that were tarnished scuffed or whatever the case may be from the engine eating for a brief moment that's why it was brought to us not running we're going to get accounted for all of the faces that are good or don't need any work or are you know looking flat and make sure we have enough account for to build the entire motor the same thing goes for these which are probably the even more expensive impressive piece the fact that each one of these was wire cut out of a block of steel it is mind-blowing so thankfully we have all of these spares as well I don't think any of these were damaged Tyson just sent me the information on making beautiful O-rings ourselves we have the material we just need to get the primer and glue there's a couple O-rings on this thing that are missing we will make those as well so the prep is so different from any other rotary engine I've ever experienced we have found a simple but fundamental challenge to the way this engine is designed this plate is beautiful thick steel or some sort of alloy of iron it's not cast the thickness helps with it preventing any sort of deformity the problem is the only thing pressing really hard from one side is this and it is pressing on the very tip of this entire piece Steel on steel on the other side mostly the pressure is coming from the center of all the O-rings pushing inward the other way so what you get is a natural desire for this piece to volcano to Bow Inward and collapse on the rotor especially as this engine comes up to heat that aluminum that's all on that face there is expanding more than the steel is and it is pushing a lot of pressure on this entire plate but the outside edge is being held by the steel and so the inside of these plates end up being conical you cave in so how do we know that well check this out look at how far that straight edge and teeter-totter we were originally going to grind this down now here's the problem with it what happens when we grind that down this section becomes thinner thinner thinner area right here is directly in front of this o-ring as this gets thinner it still is going to push it up higher and now we have the ability for the oil system to escape collapse into these open pockets and into the intake we need to keep that Center area of metal the same thickness because that's the whole way he designed the O-rings however we're going to solve that we've got a temporary solution right now we are just simply going to play Devil's Advocate and we're going to take this plate put it in backwards evenly on the piece we happen to have a bearing puller meant to do this job we know that it's actually expanding on the combustion expansion area so you can see it's off-centered if it's down on this side you get it to Snug right there and we're going to do three pumps and you're going to see something really wild same piece but now look at all the light coming in through the center it is reversed steel has a memory like a spring you know Springs are made of steel we are going to undo the damage that's been done to it by doing the equal and opposite this one's a little aggressive I could probably use one more pump so I better though but it is yeah you can already see it it is considerably better so that's what we're going to do to solve that with all of those problems come all of the short and long-term solutions for each one of them that said the whole reason we're doing that is because right now we are in the process of filming the entire assembly and ultimately firing up this motor none of these problems are actually life-threatening for running it at least once you can see 12 rotors takes a long time this is about three to four days of just prepping rotors even with having some of the existing ingredients but that next video is going to be out very soon on assembling and getting this motor ready to fire

Channel: Rob Dahm

Views: 698,132

Keywords: Custom & Performance Vehicles, Mazda, Sports Cars, Vehicle Modification & Tuning, Vehicle Parts & Accessories, Engine & Transmission, High Performance & Aftermarket Auto Parts, Vehicle Wheels & Tires, Used Vehicles, Vehicle Specs Reviews & Comparisons, Transmission Repair & Maintenance, Batteries, Brakes, Interior, Vehicle Fuels & Lubricants, Collision & Auto Body Repair, Oil Changes, Auto Glass Repair & Replacement, California, Rob Dahm, RX7, Hybrid & Alternative Vehicles

Id: 24F4FAMtC-8

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023