YouTuber Technically Evan has posted another project he was able to piece together from Lego bricks. He built a working replica of a Chevrolet V8 engine using exclusively 40-year-old parts and control system.
The replica is impressively large at 1.2 meters (4 feet) long and over 18 kilos (40 pounds) heavy. All the internals are actual moving parts, and an eight-plug ignition system is implemented as well. The engine is linked with a five-speed manual transmission.
According to Evan Koblentz, he used exclusively Lego parts 40 years old and older. Most of them came from the history’s first Expert Builders kits released in the 1970s and ‘80s. These kits preceded the Lego Technic series we know today. The goal was to demonstrate that you could build incredibly complex mechanisms out of the most basic old components given enough motivation.
The system that controls the engine when it is running deserves a separate mention. Koblentz used an Apple II PC from the eighties along with a Lego Control Center 8-bit controller as an improvised, yet fully functional ECU.