1,000,000
 

So I was thinking about how many times certain parts of my car have done their particular action. At first I was thinking that my Canadian 944 has a KM odometer with 178,000 km. The little 10ths wheel has been around 1.7 million times. So last night I got thinking about the engine. We ask an awful lot of the components. To do something like rotate 1000 times a minute at idle is pretty impressive considering all the other action that goes on(plugs firing and whatnot).

So I did a few calculations. ***Please check my math*** If I'm cruising along the highway at 3000 rpm, that's 180,000 per hour. It would take about 5.5 hours to do 1,000,000 rotations. At 60 mph, that would be only about 333 miles.

I was watching the NASCAR race when I was doing this. Assume the run the engine at about 7000 rpm or 420,000 rph. They do a million revolutions in 2.38 hours. At an average speed of 170, that would be about 404 miles. Or roughly the Coca Cola 400.

My car has 100,000 miles on it. Let's assume I drive it an average of 36mph over that mileage. The average on my OBC (not the porsche) usually works out to this to account for stop lights, Arby's drive through, etc. That works out to about 2777 hours or 166,666 minutes. Factoring all the highway driving at 3000 rpm and idling at 1000, let's say an average of 1500 rpm over that mileage. I came up with 250,000,000 revolutions.

I'm impressed.

For those that were thinking about R.E.M. from the title, here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP84jBQKUq4

That's nothing....you need to think in TRILLIONS these days...:eek:

Imagine what's going on in an F1 engine in just a seconds time. 300 or so cycles, to me that mind boggling.

Taken to a different extreme,
A top fuel dragster engine does about 423 revolutions on a good pass, then it gets rebuilt.

I grew up with a guy who's a Top Fuel driver. I threw that stat. at some freinds at a race in Joliet once and they looked at me funny.

Did you ever and try and count the stars to.