Okay, so let's talk now about engine components. As you can see, there are quite a few engine components that make up an engine. We'll run through the main ones now, but we'll only cover the components that are common to both for and two stroke engines. Let's start at the top. The most iconic symbol of an engine is the piston. And we can see the piston here.

The piston itself travels up and down linearly within the cylinder liner. That is this section here is called the cylinder liner simply because it's cylinder shaped. The cylinder liner within a normal engine is slightly more complicated than that currently shown. And we can have a look at a true cylinder liner a little bit later. So we have a piston The piston itself connects to a connecting rod. That is this item here.

And the connecting rod connects to a crank shaft. The crank shaft is this squiggly shape that we're looking at. Now, it runs from left to right. And as you can see here, from the right side to the left is a straight line. Although the shaft itself is not straight at all, it actually travels up and down and up and down. The reason for this is that as the piston moves up and down, the crank shaft actually rotates.

Don't worry too much about that right now we're going to have a look at that animation in a moment. Those are the main items that are common to foreign two stroke engines. What I'll do right now is quickly load up a model of a piston assembly because I want to show you exactly this piece in a bit more detail so that you can see exactly how it can Next to the crankshaft. So here we are, we're now looking at the piston and connecting rod again. But we've exploded it out into all of its components. play the animation, you can actually see it being assembled.

And you can see there are quite a few parts involved. We're not going to go into great detail concerning all of these parts, but we are going to look at the complete component as a whole and try to understand exactly what it does. So we can see we've got the piston top here. See we've got the connecting rod. In fact, let's just explode out so we can see everything. So here is that piston.

Here is a connecting rod. We actually have some bearings. These are what they call plain metal bearings here. And these bearings are the only thing separating the connecting rod from the credit shaft. The reason that we have the bearings is because when we clamp all this together, let me just reassemble it, it's going to clamp on to the crank shaft here. But we want the bearings to allow the crankshaft to rotate.

But the connecting rod itself is only going to move up and down and around with the crankshaft, it's not going to rotate to the same degree that the crankshaft is going to rotate. And that's the purpose of having these plain metal bearings. So that is essentially piston assembly. Let's go back and have a look at the other model now and we can watch the entire thing working and then we'll have a look at the two stroke and four stroke cycle. So here we are. We're looking at a piston connecting rod also known as a con rod.

So don't be thrown off by that so and crankshaft, seven lightweight clamps onto the crank shaft. See, there's the bolts here and there's another one on the other side. So we're going to tighten that up, it clamps onto the crank shaft. And then what's going to happen is as the piston moves up and down within the cylinder liner, the crankshaft itself is going to rotate. Let's see that happening because it's a lot easier to see it rather than explain it. And there we go, the piston travels down in a linear, that is to say, a straight line motion.

It then travels up, and the crankshaft continues to rotate. So we're changing the linear motion that's occurring in this area for rotary motion that's occurring where the crank shaft is. As you can see, there's also a lot of action that's occurring at the top of the cylinder liner. These items here are valves and the valves will open and close at specific times during the combustion cycle. Now I don't want to talk about those at the moment because the idea with this lesson was to simply discuss some of the main components that are common to both the two stroke engine and the four stroke engine, and even the steam engine. Now, this setup of piston conrod crankshaft is used a lot throughout engineering anyway, not just for four stroke and two stroke engines and steam engines, but you can also use it for positive displacement pumps.

If we did so then we'd actually refer to this as being a piston pump. Let's go and have a look now at exactly how a two stroke engine works because it's a much simpler design than a four stroke engine.