This little beast is a fully armed and operational V12 engine. It was built by Ralf Drendel, from Germany (of course). Running on nitro fuel (same stuff that powers many RC cars), it was designed to power large RC airplanes, but is such a gas guzzler that it might not be practical. Who cares, though… I’d be willing to trade a few minutes of flight time for the throaty roar that comes out of this thing when it hits 5,000 rpm. It’s no slouch when it comes to power, either, producing about 7 hp. If you’ve ever wanted to know what, exactly, a horsepower is, read on after the jump.
As you may have guessed, the term “horsepower” is pretty old… It was coined by James Watt (the guy who sort of invented the steam engine) back in the late 18th century. Horsepower was a marketing term, since Watt was trying to sell his engines to replace horses turning mill wheels. Watt estimated that a horse could pull about 180 pounds while moving 180 feet in 1 minute, so that’s what he decided to call 1 horsepower. A few hundred years later, somebody actually bothered to ask a horse about the whole idea, and it turns out that although some horses can put out up to 15hp in bursts, your average horse produces less than 1hp. We puny humans can manage about 1.2hp over a short time, and sustain between 0.1hp and 0.3hp depending on how buff we are. For what it’s worth, 1 horsepower is equivalent to about 750 watts. The more you know…
[ V12 RC Engine ] VIA [ Jalopnik ]
Nice article..