Topic: What would the Sohc engine look like if Cylinder offset were to be applied?

[1080]

As technology is applied to new engine designs. What would the SOHC engine look like?

[Don R]

 Interesting, if I'm not mistaken the flathead ford V8 had offset cylinders.

 

[C317414]

Interesting, if I'm not mistaken the flathead ford V8 had offset cylinders.

You are correct, the Ford Flathead V8 had offset cylinders. 

This is not new technology, and has been around for many years in IC and steam engines.  They are referred to as desaxe engines.

[bear]

We used offset cylinder's in one of our early 69mm stroked SOHC motors to allow us to squeeze out a 75mm bore.
It did not end well. The issue we had was more to do with bore size rather than the offset.

[Don R]

  When I was building the Briggs and Stratton Jr Dragster motors my favorite shop (ARC) had an option in the catalog to offset or tilt the bores when machining for sleeves. The offset was for the reasons listed above and the tilt was to open the flat top piston to the valve in block combustion chamber. Those ideas worked good with stock bores (go kart rules)
  Our problem was we wanted the biggest bore size we could get so that limited the trickery to pretty much just the maximum overbore. We had two cars going and blew both engines the same weekend, I bought a WKA cheater engine from a retired go kart guy and build another engine from the broken stuff. My 10 year old daughter noticed right away the engine in her car was badly out of balance. By the following race I had another .100 over block machined and assembled.
 I did a swirl intake port that worked awesome, I ported heavier to the outside of the port thinking I could swirl the mix into the combustion chamber. A pro engine builder saw one of them once and insisted to know who ported it, my buddy who was there didn't know but the builder said whoever it was really knows his ship. I took it as a huge compliment.

[HondaMan]

When I worked at MSA they had a Bonneville Lakester class car (24" high!). It took most of the awards in the classes it ran in most years, too.
They were building up a CB750K3 engine for it when they came across a KZ1000 for $200 and started over, using that engine (the K3 engine is in the bike on the cover of my book). After 3 more seasons they came up with the offset cylinders concept to stagger the bores with a stroker crank and it became a 1500cc (1489 actual) class car, and took all honors every year they ran it. They always ran gas-class first, then added nitro and rejetted and ran trials until they got it close, then went for broke on the last run. In 2 out of 3 years they would end up with the Fuel-class record, too: those un-won years saw the engine come home in pieces instead. I still have a T-shirt around here somewhere with the team and the car on it.