xxtrizz wrote:I dont like the V shaped engine. IM going to take a stab at this scientifically but I might be wrong. My inference here is that the cylinders on a v shaped engine have gravitational force applied to them at the corner of the heads which causes them to "lay" up against the inside of the cylinder walls. Im going to assume maybe that the friction from this application is going to be greater than gravitational force down the shaft of the head to the connecting rod to the crank from an inline system. Maybe in that fact the force puts undue stress at the joints of the system which might incur unneeded wear to the system itself. So having an inline system would produce better horsepower and output than a V shaped engine. The other good thing about the vertical set up a of an inline system is that it doesnt only take the firing of the next cylinder to pull the last one down. Maybe even gravity has a hand in that scheme not noticable enough but present nevertheless. Im not a mechanical genius so I might be wrong about these things.
The only other thing im going to say is that if you put someone in a tube and had them hop on a trampoline they would go up without a problem and their descent would be more radical due to gravity. But if they were hopping at an angle (if that was even possible) their force of gravity would push them up against the tube walls on descent maybe even ascent but not as much so.
Um...yeah...you take a stab, but you missed pretty bad.
First of all, if this was true, then nobody would buy a horizontally displaced engine, like a WRX or 911.
And the main reason why it's not ture....
It has nothing to do with the piston-to-cylinder wall clearance like a couple people mentioned either.
First of all, piston rings ride on oil. The oil takes up the clearance between the rings and the cylinder wall. Oil is not compressable. If you have a piston, with rings, then oil, then a cylinder wall, the pressure that the rings apply to the oil is the same around the entire circumference of the piston. So there would be no more pressure on one side than the other.
Second of all, gravity only attracts at 9.8 m/s^2, or 32 ft/s^2. A typical piston speed is about 3800 ft/s. At a 90 degree angle, such as in a horzontally displaced engine, with say, a 5" stroke, the piston would fall .0035" in one stroke. A 60 degree angle V-6 would only allow the piston to fall .0012" in one stroke. And keep in mind, this would only be if there was no oil between the rings and cylinder wall! Which, there is, so this whole calculation is bogus anyway.