Originally Posted by cmac2012 (Post 3714473)

I can only guess you're talking about hybrids. I'd heard a little about that, I didn't realize it happened that often. But I suspect you have to be right, that would be a lot of wear and tear.

I don't quite get the starter setup on the Brutus car. You can see the valve train moving from the beginning but at some point it sure seems like a clutch is loosed that engages the pistons, that is, the momentum of the flywheel, the whine slows considerably all at once. But it makes no sense that the valve train would be separate from that.

Originally Posted by cmac2012 (Post 3714492)

I've heard a bit over the years about our burning more fuel than we realize while idling but I've never experienced a stop start car. There are a few traffic lights in my circuit that I know are long as hell. If I'm back from the front a ways I'll sometime turn off the engine, that way (with a manual) I can just leave it in first and relax my feet. Then I have plenty of time to restart.

Up in OlyWA, where I went to HS and where about half of my family still lives, they went whacky for traffic circles about 10 years ago. They're all over the place. I'm in favor. Much less stopping and starting and idling.

Not everyone is thrilled and I gather that in several locations, at least one house needed to be seized and demolished to pull it off.

One of my pet peeves in modern times is $h!tty stop lights. The good ones will have sensors that activate the left turn light if you move into that lane and no traffic is coming the other way. There really ought to be major inroads made into smart traffic lights. There's one about a mile from my shop - and this hard into silicon valley, a couple of miles from bleeping octopus Facebook - where you will have to wait - at night, very light traffic, for one to two minutes to get green. More and more if there are no headlights visible I'll run it. Plan to tell the cop that I'd been there for 5 minutes, surely it's broken, right?

Originally Posted by Zulfiqar (Post 3715656)

It has a decompression lever, whats happening is that fuel is allowed to suck in but the mix is not compressed, this wet mix lives there until the decompression lever is released and then you get a compression with the wet mix followed by a spark and eventually one or two cylinders speed up with an ignition event and the engine party gets going.

like 4 stroke large capacity single cylinder dirt bike engines. Its very painful to experience a kickback on those without decompression lever engaged.

In short what you are hearing is the starter spinning the engine with no load, if you remove all the plugs from your engine, it will sound the same

Originally Posted by tbomachines (Post 3715666)

I'm also a fan of traffic circles, they seem to be (And I know there are plenty of studies on this too) significantly more efficient. I would imagine that they are safer too, someone is much less likely to miss the circle than a stoplight and a hit would mean an oblique blow rather than a right angle.

Back on topic, compression valves are a nice idea for the home mechanic. I would love to unscrew or flip a switch every time I needed to check timing or something that an engine needed to be turned over by hand.

Originally Posted by cmac2012 (Post 3717642)

Not to be an ass but there is an unscrew option: spark plugs. But that's a pain. It's been so long since I turned over anything other than one of 2.5 L BMW 6s while checking timing I'm not well versed in what it's like but I know on my M20s it's not hard enough to warrant removing anything.

Not sure how hard it is to turn a diesel over by hand, but the normal timing is not checked.

That's a good point about traffic circles being an impediment to someone running a light or stop sign. I've had a couple of near misses where I saw some ass running one at high speed in time to stop my beginning to pull out. In one I was driving taxi, must have been late 70s, some ass blew a 4 way at maybe 60 or 70, just way out of line. I had 3 guys in the car eating fast food - I saw the twit after I'd started to pull out, hit the brakes, food went flying but all three saw what had happened and thanked me for noticing.