It has been a fabulous century for science and technology. Many inventions and innovations have been made in the past one hundred years largely due to the fact that there have been two World Wars. From the car all the way down to tiny chips, the technology surrounding us has never stopped growing or in some cases never ceased to get smaller. But due to some misfortune technology has become way too complicated for people to comprehend fully without being specialists; therefore, 95% of America is technologically illiterate by any reasonable standard according to a comment by Goldstein in 1993 (1).

This summer I have been working with two fellow Researchers and Dr. Krupczak to re-develop and improve his current course, Science and Technology of Everyday Life, for non-science and non-engineering majors offered here at Hope College. The course was designed to aid the non-science major to become more familiar with today's technology.

One important aspect of today's technology is the automobile, since nearly every household in America owns one. The internal combustion engine is one critical component of the car. The engine converts chemical energy into mechanical energy mainly using the 4-stroke cycle and the crankshaft. The crankshaft changes linear motion into rotational motion. The crankshaft shown on page 2 turns the up-down motion of the pistons into rotational motion of the flywheel.

The purpose of my work was to build a device to help students understand the function of the crankshaft in an internal combustion engine. The crankshaft demonstration must make the crankshaft function easier to understand and it must also be clearly observable. Our demonstration was an attempt to copy an engine but to make the rotation of the crankshaft visible and observable. Below is a picture of a crankshaft as found in a car engine. Our demonstration was to simulate this look almost exactly, i.e. the crank, pistons, and cylinders were to be located in a similar fashion as they are found in a car engine.

Fig. 1: View of Automobile Crankshaft, Pistons, and Cylinders taken from Crouse and Anglin. Automotive Engines, 8th Edition, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, New York: 1995.

It was decided that a clear acrylic enclosure was to be designed and built to go along with a base for the crankshaft that was already built. The design phase went from simple conceptual pencil drawings to more sophisticated drawings on CAD. After all the necessary measurements were made and materials ordered, a mock enclosure was built out of cardboard to ensure that no detail was overlooked. Any flaws found at this stage were easily corrected and construction began. Construction consisted of cutting and preparing all acrylic materials and then gluing them together. The final assembly was then mounted onto the base of the crankshaft using L-brackets to provide stability and support. The project was a success; all design requirements were met and the final product has a professional appearance.