{"id":34855,"date":"2014-02-11T08:58:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T08:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.influx.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=34855"},"modified":"2022-06-30T11:40:15","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T10:40:15","slug":"mercedes-c-111-felix-wankel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adrianflux.co.uk\/influx\/features\/mercedes-c-111-felix-wankel\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercedes C-111 & Felix Wankel"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the heady, creatively inspired days of the end of the 1960s, the whole world appeared ready to go rotary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the Frankfurt Motor Show of 1969 the Mercedes Benz C111 was one of the most spectacular manifestations of the much vaunted rotary revolution.<\/p>\n

But that future never came true (at least not in this dimension). So what was the revolutionary rotary and what happened to it?<\/p>\n

\"c111-engine-cut\"<\/a> A thing of engineering beauty<\/em><\/p>\n

The man who invented the rotary engine was Felix Wankel, a brilliant but fascist German autodidact born in 1902. Losing his father in WW1, he couldn’t afford to go to university but was a naturally gifted engineer who learnt his trade in tooling shops whilst hanging out with the Hitler Youth and other unsavoury characters. He had conceived this new type of engine as early as 1924 \u2013 and before he died in 1988 he would see it used in cars, chainsaws and even aeroplanes.<\/p>\n

Wankel’s political leanings saw him rise high in the National Socialist party – but having fallen out with Nazi hierarchy when Hitler assumed power in 1933, he went on to design engine components for the military during the Second World War. In the early fifties he began developing the early versions of the rotary engine itself for small engineering firms in the reconstructing German state.<\/p>\n

\"c111-frame\"<\/a>
\nThe C-111 frame in progress<\/em><\/p>\n

Wankel’s design used a rotating triangle inside an epitrochoidal (oval) housing to convert pressure into rotating movement without pistons. The output shaft, being driven at three times the rotor speed, produced a firing cycle that a piston engine would require two cylinders to achieve, making the rotary a very compact engine.<\/p>\n

As it was always moving in the same direction the rotor caused minimal vibration \u2013 at least when compared to the start-stop- back-forth motion of the piston engine. In short the Wankel had less parts, was smoother and more compact \u2013 and could deliver a higher power-to-weight ratio than the piston engines of its day.<\/p>\n

There’s a great explanatory video below. Turn off the sound unless you like cheesy Euro techno.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n