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Earlier this year, Swedish carmaker Koenigsegg introduced the Tiny Friendly Giant, an in-house name for its new “freevalve” engine. The 2.0-liter, three-cylinder engine makes a whopping 600 hp for the front end of the four-seat, all-wheel drive Gemera hypercar.
From our intro story: Instead of a camshaft, each valve is controlled by an independent actuator and spring system. Each spring system can open or close the valve when it wants (timing), as much as it wants (lift) and for as long as it wants (duration). That means that the computer controlling all this can decide to run the engine on whatever cycle (Otto, Atkinson, Miller) it wants, as well as deactivate any cylinder at any time. And that’s in addition to all the usual power and efficiency benefits mentioned.
So, how long would it take for some backyard mechanic to build one of his or her own? About nine months, as we’ve just learned about this madman, who is trying to recreate the technology for a newly purchased Harbor Freight Predator motor.
Take a look at the video from Wesley Kagan’s YouTube channel above as he designs a few solutions to design his own camless technology to install on the cheap motor. Some of the stuff is hard to understand, “the duality of waveforms” anybody? But basically he’s trying to control the cams without a shaft.
Kagan mills his own parts, which is probably something you’d need to do if you were going to attempt something like this. After the design portion, he gets to construction (at about 10 minutes in). At about 17 minutes he fires it up. He also makes the CAD work and coding available to all who want to try it.
Check out the rest of Kagan’s YouTube page too, he has a bunch interesting (crazy) projects going on.
