I finished the design of the Stirling engine and printed it out! But I’m far from done.

I’ve added:

• A cylinder
• A stand
• Deeper holes to make it easier to screw into the design

Printing this took about 4+ hours, and putting it together who knows how long.

However, there were major flaws that I was able to pinpoint:

• The cranks don’t always move uniformly. Although they are screwed together, as 3d prints, they don’t actually have threads, so the screws are able to rotate independently from the other cranks.
• It’s hard to spin the shafts, and the cranks, at the same time, because of the issue above and friction.
• And…the most obvious…it doesn’t work.

I think it’s because of the aforementioned flaws, and because I was designing the beta engine based on mechanical linkages alone, not size or pressure, etc.

So now, I’ve decided to redesign the beta Stirling engine as a Rhombic Stirling engine, and go deep into the math using formulas from stuff like Schmidt analysis.