Anyone who is fond of cars can tell a lot about them: about "ordinary", simple machines, and about "more complicated" - with horizontally arranged cylinders, or air cooling, or about "exotic", for example, about rotary engines … But not many know about the strange "duplex" two-stroke engine of the Trojan Utility Car.
Outwardly, it was the most common car for the 1920s. But the Trojan car “inside” was, to put it bluntly, not at all orthodox. The car did not have a frame, in the traditional sense: in fact, it was a deep metal trough that contained all the "stuffing", and the body was bolted on top. Comfort in the car included the very minimum of what was needed - seats, barely noticeable upholstery, a steering wheel. The tires on the Trojan Utility Car were missing; they were replaced by a thick rubber band on the wheel rims.
And the real masterpiece of all the oddities of this car was the engine. After all, he was … under the front seat, despite the fact that the carburetor "lived" in its place, under the hood, along with the gas tank and radiator. And it was a very unusual eleven-horse power unit. Its layout was super rare V4, generally found in single cars. The volume was different for different versions - 1527 or 1488 cubic meters. cm.
The engine was a two-stroke, with four cylinders arranged in a square shape. The four pistons had only two connecting rods and two combustion chambers. Each pair of cylinders had a common combustion chamber, and each pair of pistons had a common Y-shaped connecting rod. And, as strange as it sounds, it was a bold and somewhat brilliant move. Leslie Hounsfield, who designed the car, proved that this arrangement was "more mechanically correct" than using a two-piece connecting rod.
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The advantage of such a scheme is also that the synchronization of the valves was easier (we can say that the valve mechanism, as there was none, and the engine is two-stroke). The intake and exhaust valves were located in different cylinders, therefore, the intake opened earlier and the exhaust remained open longer. The result was that almost maximum torque was available immediately at idle, and the engine pulled in a way that modern two-stroke engines cannot.
In addition, Trojan Utility Car turned out to be super cheap in production and especially in maintenance. As the manufacturer of this car advertised his brainchild - according to estimates, a person spent less money on moving it over a distance of three hundred kilometers than on buying shoes and socks. It's cheaper to ride than to walk! But, like any fairy tale, the Trojan also came to an end. A revolution in combustion chamber design in the 1960s killed this remarkable car.
