CorvAircraft> variable valve timing on corvair?

[Eric Overton]

Kevin --
At 03:22 PM 1/1/2008, you wrote:
>There are only 3 cylinders guys.  The others have been done away with.

         Thanks for the clarification.  Obviously it never dawned on 
me that somebody would take a very nicely intrinsically balanced 
engine like a horizontally opposed six and intentionally turn it into 
something that's intrinsically a balancing nightmare like a an 
inline-3.  That was something I shut out of my mind pretty early.

>There was an engine like this at Oshkosh years ago where one side 
>was blanked out and it ran on just one bank.  It was also stood up 
>like this engine.  It must not have worked well as it was only seen once

         I'm guessing it was a real pill to balance and that any 
gains made by having variable valve timing (if the OSH engine even 
had that) were promptly lost by the intrinsic wackiness of trying to 
turn a horizontally opposed six into an inline-3 -- and then having 
to dink around with things like balancing shafts to keep it from 
shaking itself apart from end-to-end.  True, there are cars (the Geo 
Metro comes to mind) with 3-cylinder engines.  But a whole lot of 
engineering goes into getting rid of that second order vibration and 
keeping two more shafts spinning at 2x crank speed properly 
lubricated and both balanced with and phased to every other rotating 
part in the engine.

-- Eric