Barrel Engines 

The FairDiesel Limited range of engine designs is based on the "Barrel Engine" concept. Such designs date from the 1910's and consist of a series of parallel cylinders wrapped around a drive-shaft, with the pistons coupled to it through a....

swash-plate ---

or a cam ---

or a wobble-plate ---

As the pistons are driven back and forth the swash-plate, cam or wobble-plate is driven round and is coupled via the drive shaft to the load.

One such engine, the Statax, is believed to have powered an aircraft in 1914, whilst another, the seven-cylinder Redrup Fury, known to have flown in 1929, is shown below with part of the casing cut away to show the swash-plate linkage.

The Fury was one of a whole series of engines designed by Charles Redrup whose story is told in Diesel Publishing book, "The Knife and Fork Man". He always claimed that most of his prototypes were made in his home workshop with little more than a knife and fork!

There are many configurations of Barrel Engines;

A modern engine, based on the cam principle, is the Dyna-Cam, a double-ended spark-ignition barrel engine with twelve cylinders arranged on either side of one cam:-

Opposed Piston Engines 

During the 1920's the German company Junkers developed an unusual engine with two opposed pistons in each cylinder:-

The Jumo Engine

The two sets of opposed pistons drove two crankshafts, linked together by a train of gears to the drive shaft. The engine was a two-stroke diesel, and used ports at each end of the cylinder liner for inlet and exhaust. Such engines were produced under licence by Napier during the 1930's.

A modern two-cylinder version of this engine is manufactured by Diesel Air Limited.

The Diesel Air DAIR 100

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