Souped-Up

These days “tiny” seems to be all the rage, even going so far as the tiny house craze. I actually don’t get the whole tiny house thing. Heck, they don’t even have a garage, the most important room of the house! But tiny engines…that’s something I can get excited about. I like to take things that aren’t designed to go fast and make them go fast. To give you an idea, I have a mobility scooter - an electric one - that I put a go kart engine on. Just to say I did it. In the photo here you can see some of the stock internal parts of the scooter’s 100cc motor. It started out as a 3 horsepower motor and now makes 12 horsepower on nitromethane. 

Doing Wheelies

One of the things I did for the scooter was install a billet connecting rod I made for the 100cc motor. It was only designed to go 5 miles an hour, but now I’ve got it going about 30. My friends and I call this the Mobility Scooter of Death, and yes, it can do wheelies!

Here’s the billet connecting rod I made for the 100cc motor.

The Test Track

Of course anyone working on engine parts MUST have a test track, so fortunately my friend built one in his back yard.

That’s me on the test track, in the red kart.

Souping Them Up

Right now I’m working on some engines I bought at Harbor Freight. They’re little 100cc engines and I’m souping them up and putting a super charger on them. This is going to be maybe a tabletop conversation piece. Not too many people have engines on their coffee table that they can start up and entertain guests.

Work Becomes Play

The great thing about this hobby is, sometimes I get to enjoy it in my work life too. Of course Okuma America has a lot of customers that make engine parts. I get the chance to create programs for machine demos where we’re showing our capabilities with engine parts. Usually I figure out what I’m going to make by reverse engineering the parts that are in the engine, decide what kind of material I need, and then use something like the CAM software from ESPRIT. Once the demo is made the customer typically goes to their distributor to watch it in action.

Why Do I Do This?

Sometimes people ask me why I like making these parts so much. I just like taking something that was designed to do one thing and make it do something different. It’s easy to take a race motorcycle and make it faster, because it’s already fast by design. But if you take a washing machine motor and make it power something that goes fast, that, to me, is interesting.

Brian Kateley is Applications Engineer, Okuma America Corporation.