The Sad Truth And The Future Of 2 Stroke Power Units

by Dan
(Cedarhill, mo, usa)

My experience begins with the karting engines and RD400 Yamaha street bikes. My experience has been with just about every major brand from 1970 to present. I am a hardcore 2 stroke engine enthusiast as well as a builder of naturally aspirated high output race engines for dragracing, sanddrags, street and landspeed.

As to the power levels these machines are capable of I am continually amazed! Even my old RD street bike has benefited from some of the newer technologies, mostly in the category of digital ignition. My bike makes more power today than we ever dreamed of getting from a 400, it is extensively modified for dragrace and roadrace competition, and makes solid power from 4,000 to 12,000 rpm! It has been my dream to see these little lightweight wonders make it back into production, because in short, for their size and dollars spent there isn't a 4 stroke engine out there that can truly compete.

With the advances of modern fuel injection, oil injection and digital ignitions we can now build these engines to put out 3 times the power the factories ever intended for them, sometimes exceeding those figures! In racing applications we build 350cc motors that will cover 300' in 4.5 seconds, making upwards of 100 h.p. to do it. This is without F.I. but nevertheless is a testament to output. I have raced many of these bikes without major failures over hundreds of races.

The only real reason the two stroke engine has not been mass produced in the 30 yrs is the lack of mechanical parts that can fail. An engine with only three major moving components does not feed a lot of people, because of its reliability. With the technologies available today after the initial costs this would again be true. I would expect these engines to be even more reliable with the addition of ceramic bearing technologies, materials and coatings.