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EVER WONDERED HOW A ROTARY ENGINE IS MADE AT THE FACTORY? FRAME HAS YOU COVERED.

Rotary engines, also known as Wankel engines after their inventor Felix Wankel, are a unique type of internal combustion engine that differs significantly from traditional piston engines - pistonless power. Instead of pistons moving up and down within cylinders, rotary engines utilize a triangular rotor that orbits within an epitrochoidal chamber on an eccentric shaft (a version of a crankshaft). This design allows for a compact and lightweight engine with fewer moving parts, resulting in a high power-to-weight ratio and smooth operation. There are some interesting features of a rotary motor, including a compact design thanks to the absence of reciprocating parts, enabling a more compact engine layout. A 13B rotary sort of looks like an extension of the bell housing, it's so compact that when I took out a streetlight with my Mk2 Ford Escort that was fitted with a 13B turbo, I hit on the right side headlight and it wrecked the car, but the motor was still fine because of the way it doesn’t take up space. Rotaries also have a high power-to-weight ratio, and their strange configuration means they have a small capacity when measured like a piston setup. A 13B is rated at just 1.3 litres - as per the name - but with the right bits and pieces, it can make many hundreds of horses. We don’t see new setups these days because while they’re compact and can make great power, they’re inefficient when it comes to emissions and that explains the lack of advancement on them. A new version is pegged to be released sometime soon, but it will be a smaller supplemental motor to an EV setup. This here writer is a massive rotary fan - I once owned a rotary-powered car. It was a basic 13B powerplant fitted to a Mk2 Ford Escort and it still had the stock turbo and was set up and run by a MicroTech management system. The car wasn’t a monster, but it also wasn’t slow with a whopping 139 kW to the rear wheels. It was still enough to almost write myself off when I took out a street light early one morning.

The most popular rotary-powered car is the Series 6 / FD Mazda RX-7 which debuted in 1991 (1992 model year) as the 3rd-generation of Mazda’s iconic car. It featured the 13B-REW, a 1.3L twin-rotor with twin sequential turbochargers, and it was the first mass-produced sequential twin-turbo setup in the world. In stock form, it was rated at 203 kW, but with the right fiddling and modifications like giving it a bridge port, uprated apex seals, a big single turbo and better fuelling these compact powerplants can churn out many hundreds of horses. Mazda produced 68,589 units of the FD RX-7 between 1992 and 2002. It’s not clear how many are left because many ended up in the hands of unskilled drivers who promptly managed to wreck the cars. The production only really stopped due to the Wankel motor not being able to conform to the then-new emissions laws around the world. Mazda also didn’t seem to want to try and sort out the issues and so the beloved rotary faded away. In recent years there has been a new one, but it isn’t the main powerplant for a new car, instead, it’s the range-extending ICE component in an EV car, with the electrification side being the main focus. It’s not clear if the powerplant is the same size as the 13B or if it can be removed and fitted to another car. Either way, seeing a rotary motor being assembled at the factory level is something quite rare, especially since the original cars that use them haven’t been in production for around 23 years. Now, thanks to the YouTube channel, FRAME, this seldom-seen production line is shown off in a new video that only the folks from FRAME can put together. In fact, if you’re into the technical side of things, it’s a YouTube channel you should click that subscribe button on. This 17-minute look into the inner workings of how a rotary powerplant is made is properly interesting. Let us know what you think.

Take a look at the YouTube video from the folks at FRAME as they take us into the inner workings of the manufacture and assembly of the iconic rotary powerplant, albeit in a slightly different form to the iconic 13B. It's still interesting though: How Japan Builds Advanced Rotary Engine Inside Massive Factory - Production Line | FRAME

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