HONDA’S TWO-STROKE PLANS

Honda apparently hasn’t given up on the two-stroke. A website in the UK called morebikes dug up patent drawings that show a fuel-injected two-stoke motor with a slightly different twist. In this design, clean air is drawn into the crankcase through a case reed, then, when the piston is near TDC, an upward pointing injector sprays fuel into the crankcase. Transfer ports take the charged fuel up to a valve in the combustion chamber. The advantage in this design over a direct-injection design is that it shouldn’t require such massive fuel pressure, which is problematic and expensive. Presumably, the design is cleaner than conventional two-strokes. Honda stopped producing two-stroke engines in 2007, saying at the time that it was a four-stroke company. This was on the heals of the costly EXP-2 project, which was a clean to-stroke project in the ’90s that had advanced almost to production. The new design drawings show a base that seems more appropriate for an industrial motor of some kind, and probably isn’t intended for a motorcycle, at least not initially.