Jets are cool, I'll admit. They're blindingly fast and loud as hell - in an annoyingly high pitched kind of way. They can run on cheap kerosene instead of expensive AvGas and definitely have a certain aesthetic charm of their own
Not as cool to my taste as a Golden Age aircraft like the Gee Bee, though
Go ahead.... I defy you to tell me that is not one Very Cool airplane
But aesthetics aside, nothing........NOTHING in the world
sounds as cool as a Big piston engine
Jet engines are the auditory equivalent of that wheedly-whee guitard with the state-of-the-art boutique amps and pedal collection that still somehow can only manage to produce 45 variations on painful icepick tone. The guy that's also incapable of playing anything other than
clouds of pentatonic gnat-notes that don't amount to ****
Big piston engines are all about the bass end of the sonic spectrum. One major reason Harley-Davidson motorcycles are still so popular, despite being 'stone age' technology, is because they have that low-frequency
thump going on that Ricky Racer and his Really Radical Riceburner can never touch with a ten foot pole
An 80" Harley motor has a piston roughly 3.5" across (technically, bore size), give or take a couple of thousandths
The most over-the-top 100" Harley stroker motor has pistons that measure right around 4"
A Big Block Chevy motor has pistons averaging about 4.5"
The bore size of the most common aircraft radial engines back in their heyday - Wright Cyclone, Pratt & Whitney Wasp, Bristol Hercules -
started at about 5.5" and certain variants of those engines got pretty close to 6" bore........ Aircraft radials generally have a minimum of 7 cylinders, 9 cylinder single row types were once common as dirt, and double-row variations like the P&W Twin Wasp were made (and flown) by the tens of thousands. Water-cooled piston aircraft engines in their heyday usually had 12 cylinders, with similar sized bores, and some oddball variations had 24 cylinders or
more
What that means in terms of audio output is that your garden variety piston aircraft engine - say a P&W Wasp or a Rolls Royce/Packard Merlin- is barking out more low frequency sonic bliss with one turn of the crankshaft than two of the Biggest Baddest Big Blocks ever built, or alternately,
four full-tilt Harley stroker motors parked next to each other and all running at once. There are a few remarkably open-minded bikers out there that have figured this out for themselves and built accordingly
Nevertheless, the sheer physical limitations of shoehorning even an itty-bitty radial like the Rotec 2800 (@
only 172 cubic inches
) shown in the above pic mean that this admittedly Very cool bike can never compete in the sonic sweepstakes with even a relatively "small" aircraft engine like the Wright Cyclones that powered the famous B-17 bomber of WW2, or the superb Rolls Royce/Packard Merlin that powered the Supermarine Spitfire and P-51 Mustang
And neither can a jet of any description
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