It’s been a long while since we last checked on the shenanigans of Garage 54. Lately, the team has been obsessed with cutting car parts up then welding them back together. Can an engine still run after it’s been sliced in half? Let’s find out!
The last time we peered into the delightful weirdness that is Garage 54, the team tried to clean used oil using a ton of filters. It was a pretty wasteful exercise that didn’t achieve anything and sadly, a lot of the team’s recent experiments followed a similar grain. Now, Vlad and his team is firmly back to the silly intriguing tests they’re known best for.
A viewer told them to cut an engine in half, but they decided to go a bit further; cut a four cylinder Lada engine in half then make it run again as a two cylinder.
Sadly, Vlad and crew won’t simply cut the engine in half; that would have been great to watch. Instead, they will take the engine apart piece by piece.
Vlad explains that they have to cut it in a way that didn’t damage cylinders one and two. Saving that half of the engine means that the oil pump, timing chains and distributor will remain intact.
The team tears down the engine and Vlad explains how hard it would be to achieve what they want.
He says that once the cuts are done they’ll have to reweld the flange that the flywheel bolts to. The head will also need to be chopped and they want to cut the engine up in a way to preserve some of the engine’s oil channels along with a couple of head bolts.
The team learned that they’re good enough at welding crankshafts to make a car run, so they’ll cut this one in half, weld it back up, then mill down the roughness.
It’s pretty awesome to watch the montage of them creating an adorable two cylinder engine. Vlad says that they expect the 64 horsepower to be halved to 32, maybe 27 horsepower. That’s less power than a kei car.
One of the team’s previous efforts was an attempt to convert a four-stroke engine into a “one-stroke” engine and it didn’t work at all.
So I was a bit surprised to see that the little Lada two that they made fired right up. And it didn’t just run, but seemingly ran pretty well. The tiny engine is even cuter once dropped into a red Lada in the garage.
There’s so much room for repairs!
Of course, slicing the horsepower at least in half resulted in a Lada that had very little oomph. Vlad also experienced some problems with the carburetor and the little engine having blow-by.
But you can slice an engine in half and weld it all back to work, it just may not work well. It would be cool to see them drop this into a motorcycle or something smaller than that sedan.
Watch Garage 54 for more of their awesome experiments!
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