bpatton said:
ZFD said:
pelican said:
I still think if they could get the nrv588 rotary racer street legal it'd outsell the new commando
They'd need some drawings first, and guess who has them- Norton Motors Ltd/Andover Norton International Ltd. They have all the drawings of all the rotaries from BSA/Triumph rotary day1 right through the end in 1993. Without the drawings and the background information given in them- learned in twenty years of building first prototypes, then production bikes- you are looking at years of frustrating development. Which is why the rotary saga went nowhere in the end.
The technology they acquired was nice but it's 20 years old now. The world has moved on. A modern Wankel in high zoot chassis would be fantastic. It wouldn't take genius to put it together, just point and click.
http://www.rotaryengines.ca/main/karts.htm
bpatton,
Not sure if you are aware what goes into the construction of a rotary engine, and what to watch out for. As far as materials and tested tolerances go there was virtually
NO progress between the Crighton/Norton racer engine of the 2009 TT and the winning Hislop/JPN Norton bike of the 1992 TT- bar the success rate. In fact, it was built from leftovers of Norton rotary production engines.
As a reputable manufacturer you don't want to buy some cart engines, the construction principles of which remain the secret of their manufacturer, and transplant them into a motorcycle. For one thing, if the power claims made in that homepage they are pretty pathetic powerwise- they claim 41HP from 407cc whilst even the "Interpol2" air cooled Norton Police bikes of the early 1980s had over 80HP from 588cc. More importantly, a cart engine has to meet no emissions laws or serious noise restrictions. There is a wealth of research into rotary engine emissions in the Norton files, as well as practical experience. I used to do the EC emissions approvals for the Norton rotaries then. Are you aware Norton had the first emissions testrig for motorcycles in the UK,
years before any other party including the British state authorities had? Did you know David Garside, Nortons then chief technician, wrote an SAE paper on rotary engine emissions in the late
1970s?
I doubt the rotary engine is really viable in today's environmental legislation framework. In a motorcycle one tries to keep weight down and does not want, or even have the space for, aditional complications like voluminous oil seperators, oil coolers, not to mention various exhaust gas cleaning devices which, to add to the problem, must withstand the very high exhaust temperatures (reputedly over 1.000°C)and gas speeds (reputedly about Mach1) of the rotary engine, etc. I was the first to run a Norton on catalysts (1991), and the temperatures were our major problem. Again, on a motorcycle one has only so much space and length available for an exhaust system. Could one make it as long and as voluminous as one liked- as on a car- temperatures and speeds could be brought down.
Was there a rotary Norton- a new one- I should welcome it; however, I don't think there will ever be one.
