650

[Dave G]

Has anyone ever taken a standard 1300cc Festiva engine and cut it down to 650?

Many, many moons ago I did this with a VW Type 1 engine just for grins. I was inspired by a magazine article by someone who did it and claimed to double the gas mileage. It was simply a matter of removing two pistons, rods, and the valve train stuff for those two cylinders (and of course some other things like sealing unused oil passages, etc.). It seemed to run OK, but I never got around to putting it in a car. (Ended up giving it to a buddy who needed a crankcase...)

Anyway, it would probably be easy to do the same thing to a Festiva engine. The hard part, I'm guessing, would be convincing the EFI system to ignore the missing injectors, eh? Or maybe that wouldn't be hard. I dunno :-).

Obviously the thing wouldn't be much of a high-speed cruiser, but would probably be fine for driving around town.

Thoughts?

[Gforcefd]

Of course then you have a car with half as much horse power, since the festiva can barley kind hills in my area, Im gonna say, nooo. But I would love to see it done, maybe stick the motor on a lawn mower :-)

Logan

[htchbck]

My B3 ran on 3 cylinders for a long time (it was still running when I pulled it in favor of my new BP)... I drove the poor thing back from nashville (about a 5 hour drive for me) once, then back and forth on the 45 minute drive too and from work 5 days a week for a couple of months... it didn't run great, but it wasn't too bad other than sounding horrible and making harsh vibrations.

[oxbrain]

The injectors are easy, just don't plug in those injectors. It's bank fire, so the ecu wouldn't even know.

[muscle_Car1]

Umm no the vw motor is a flat 4 so the harmonics wouldn't be off. Someone makes an aircompressor out of old aircooled vw motors. 2 for power & 2 for air compressing duties.

The inline four won't work very well at all with only 2 cylinders firing

[mattswabb]

What about oil pressure? Doesn't the gap between the rod bearing and the crank help determine the pressure? Without the rods the oil would go straight thru. It would follow the path of least resistance. You would need to plug those holes in the crank.

[Dave G]

The inline four won't work very well at all with only 2 cylinders firing

Should balance out just fine; the firing order is 1, 3, 4, 2. It takes 2 complete revolutions of the crank for all 4 to fire, which means that one fires every 180 degrees. So you would use either 1 and 4 or 3 and 2, and they would fire 360 degrees apart - 1 power stroke each full revolution instead of 2. Like any 2 cylinder engine it wouldn't be as smooth as a 4, but would be balanced just fine.

[25Horseplay]

Why? :shock:

[warlocke]

Why? :shock:

:withstupid:

[Kraig]

To double the mpg and the estimated time of arrival

[pole120]

What about setting up a variable displacement system???
Fab up a circuit that (for simplicity's sake) with the flip of a switch inside the cabin could add/remove signal power to two injectors?

My idea is building off of the variable displacement system on the newer GM engines.

My assumption is that at cruising speeds on highways it would not be necessary to have all 4 cylinders firing to maintain speed.

~Josh

[Dave G]

Why? :shock:

Because I never finished the VW, that's why :-)

[Dave G]

What about oil pressure? Doesn't the gap between the rod bearing and the crank help determine the pressure? Without the rods the oil would go straight thru. It would follow the path of least resistance. You would need to plug those holes in the crank.

Yeah, I said that :-). They need to be either clamped or welded shut.

[25Horseplay]

OK, I just thought these cars already get great gas mileage!

[Dave G]

What about setting up a variable displacement system???
Fab up a circuit that (for simplicity's sake) with the flip of a switch inside the cabin could add/remove signal power to two injectors?

My idea is building off of the variable displacement system on the newer GM engines.

I believe those are quite a bit more complicated than that; they also prop the exhaust valves open on the "dead" cylinders so you don't waste all that energy on compressing air for no good reason. That's a lot of machine work to make that happen on an otherwise normal engine. The neat thing about just taking two pistons out is that it would (theoretically :-) ) be easy & cheap to do.