3 ms·
Kinda, kinda not, they have been proven to be vulnerable to mishandling. They have few quirks and require a bit different handling than normal engine, which mea
by ilyt 4y ago
Kinda, kinda not, they have been proven to be vulnerable to mishandling. They have few quirks and require a bit different handling than normal engine, which means that someone treating it as any other car. But at some point it will need to have engine out job and replace apex seals.
In motorsports it proven to be very reliable for example.
> IIRC even the more refined Renesis engine on the RX-8 seems to have been proven to be ornery.
Renesis was evolution in performance but IIRC had some quirks that weren't solved because the car stopped being produced. IIRC the modern apex seals with modern materials do a pretty good job. It also have oil metering pump which just...stole the engine oil and put it into fuel (which was required to oil the seals), which means if you were not on top of filling oil up, you could end up starving the engine. It wasn't a good idea either as 2 stroke oil was better for that use case, so many people removed the metering pump and just added some 2 stroke to the fuel tank every time they filled up
- 20after4 4y agoThe oil metering pump was a simple mechanical device on Mazda Wankel engines up to ~1991 (the first and second generation rx-7, and I presume other models in Japan.) This was replaced by an electronically controlled pump on all the later models. The advantage of electronic control is that it conserves oil at low RPM. Unfortunately, the reliability of the pump (and the wiring) became a problem. With the RX-8, they had to dial back the oil supply to meet modern emissions regulations and this lead to premature wear to a lot of engines. I believe this contributed heavily to dwindling sales and ultimately to the decision to discontinue the RX-8 in 2012.
- ilyt 4y agoYeah, I wonder how they deal with it in the liquid piston engine, emission control gotta be harder with no valves that can be controlled.