It goes up, compresses a violent explosion, and goes down. A piston's job is easy enough to understand, but if you examine what it's required to do, you may be amazed it works at all. Think about ...

Golf balls have dimples, so they fly farther than balls that don't. Apply the same principle to diesel engines, and you have a gross oversimplification of why dimpled pistons were invented. It's a ...

Many performance cars, including the supercharged Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and most Ferrari GT models, rely on forged pistons — instead of cast-aluminum pistons — for their additional strength. Forged ...

To celebrate HOT ROD's 75th anniversary, we teamed up with CASTROL GTX to bring you some of the stories that exemplify the core of what HOT ROD is and reflect the brand's influence on America's car ...

The team at Garage 54 replace aluminum pistons inside of an engine with custom-made plastic pistons. The engine, surprisingly, runs for longer than it has any right to run. Garage 54 specializes in ...

We've highlighted the guys at Garage 54 a few times for some of their craziest builds and bizarre engineering experiments. With all due respect to the American tuners and hot-rodders squeezing extra ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Ferrari is exploring a groundbreaking approach to the internal combustion engine, as revealed by a recent European patent filing.

Recently, I had an opportunity to spend a day with "Mr. Horsepower" Nick Arias Jr., while covering a tech article pertaining to an Arias engine he built some time ago. Nick Arias is a man of genius ...

In last month's installment, Texas Speed and Performance (TSP) used a brand-new GM L92/LS3 block as the foundation to build a high-performance 418ci stroker engine. Sunset Racecraft in Lubbock, Texas, ...

The German company's 500-hp A03 is the most powerful piston aircraft certified to date and could act as a turbogenerator to power electric motors and recharge batteries. RED Aircraft's A03 piston ...