How to Make Single Cylinder Stirling

This is a great video by RimstarOrg on Youtube. It’s a straight forward single cylinder Stirling engine tutorial.

I like the simplicity of this Beta Stirling engine. It uses a tomato soup can, balsa wood, thread, a latex balloon, a clothes hanger, some tacks and glue.

RimstarOrg’s video make it easy and achievable to build this little single cylinder Stirling engine. It’s also a great engine for demonstration of the Stirling cycle. It’s very easy to see the expansion and compression of the working fluid (in this case the atmosphere).

You should look at his other videos for other fun green energy projects. I’ve put links to his website and YouTube channel at the end of this post.

Quote from the Video Description:

"How to make a Stirling engine using a tomato paste can and other household items. This is a single cylinder design or beta configuration. I start out with an overview of the design and a quick explanation of how the Stirling engine works. Then I go step-by-step through its construction, followed by it running and then some construction tips.

This one uses a balloon instead of a piston. It uses balsa wood for the displacer cylinder, coat hanger wire for the crankshaft along with a paperclip, a thread to connect the displacer to the paperclip, and a wooden flywheel. The connecting rods are attached to the diaphragm using thumbtacks.

As far as I can tell, the credit for this design goes to Mr. Saburo Tsucchida, a teacher of Kasukabe technical high school in Japan. I found it on Koichi Hirata’s website: Koichi Hirata's website

3D animations done using Blender 2.63."