revtothelimit - motorbike forum

Great to get back on my bike last year but winter came all too soon so i decided to keep myself busy
and get back into model making. Had an idea of what i wanted to do and after a bit of searching found
some free plans on the internet.
Its an Otto Langen engine , i believe the very first combustion engine running on town gas.
This is my first dry build , quite a lot of snags to fix but i hope to try and get it running one day
in the future.

Cool. Do you make the parts yourself or is it a kit?

Everything except the gears and flywheel are made from bar stock.
Flywheel has been machined down a fair bit and the gears are not worth machining as they can be bought
cheap enough and then machined to size.

Ah, I was going to ask you how you made the gears. Looks very cool.

I've made gears in the past, just to satisfy my curiosity, they are not too hard to do as all you are really doing is cutting one tooth
and then replicating it around the blank.
The problem is its quite expensive to buy the cutters, probably more than the gears . You can make
you own cutters but its a lot of work and again not worth the hassle unless your making
lots of the same gears.

That's what I've found. I need the indexer and the cutters which is plenty of money when I can buy the gears from china and machine the appropriate thickness I need and the keyways.

That Otto Langen engine is a solid project. Gears can be a pain to make, so buying them and just adjusting makes sense. It’s cool that you're doing most of it from scratch though.