My Professor gave us two projects this semster. The first was to build the air engine that I have featured in another project. The second project was to design and build something of our choosing. After much thought (and hearing that no sophomore individual or team had ever successfully done it) the baby concept of building an internal combustion (IC) engine was born. Now the questions was where does one begin when designing an engine? I find that when I do a project I can get very much absorbed in the fine details far to early, so I made a point of starting with as general of a design as possible and refine it from there. I started by defining what type of IC engine I would like to make. I wanted it to be as simple as possible so I chose a two stroke. After this I made a list of things that needed to be decided upon before I went any further. They were:

-what displacement would the engine be (ballpark)
-what ignition method would it utilize? (e.g. spark plug? glow plug?)

I believed that answering the above two questions would really define what kind of engine I was to make. The size of  the engine and ignition method both very strongly influence the design of an engine. I chose glow plug for my ignition and less than .1 cubic inch for the displacement. The glow plug was chosen for its simplicity as it doesn't require anything to time it and the displacement was decided upon after performing calculations that showed that it would make the engine a convenient size for utilizing standard size bar stock, and the tools that I had.

So with a vague image in my mind and the ignition and displacement decided upon it was time to perform some research.