The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons ...

In a world dominated by pistons, the rotary engine was something different for motorists. It was the vision of German engineer Felix Wankel, built on the belief that the up-and-down motion of pistons ...

Chris Bruce has worked in the automotive industry since 2011 and has written thousands of stories about cars, motorsports, and motorcycles in that time. He has written for Autoblog, Autoviva, CarFax, ...

At Old Rhinebeck Airdrome in Red Hook, New York, sits one of the premier collections of vintage aircraft in the United States. Director of Maintenance Mark Mondello is one of the key people ...

Perfectly tuning the heat range of an engine's spark plugs is something of a dark art to all but the most well versed tuners and the engineering egg heads at automotive OEMs. Getting the spark plug ...

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Mazda’s obsession with the rotary engine. No matter how market trends change, how regulations tighten, or how quickly electrification advances, ...

Every story dealing with a new rotary engine from Mazda lands in a different place on the matrix of possibilities between “Coming soon!” and “Never gonna happen!” In 2011 it was speculated that the ...

The Wankel rotary engine is known for its troubled life in the mainstream automotive industry, its high power-to-weight ratio, and the intoxicating buzz it makes at full tilt. Popular with die-hard ...

Wankel rotary engine powered thousands of aircraft. One of several problems: It spewed castor oil on its pilots.

While modern engines feature many tweaks and improvements on the original ideas, they usually aren't as interesting as the strange contraptions engineers experimented with in the early days. Take, for ...