Last month's "How It Works" story gave you the basics of the four-stroke cycle, describing the motion of the intake and exhaust valves in relation to the piston moving up and down in the cylinder.

In the first two installments of this series on engine fundamentals, we've covered the subject from its absolute beginning. An internal combustion engine is a machine that converts the energy of a ...

The language of import performance can be strange. Sometimes it's a verbal stew of numbers and letters--RX-8, NSX, and MR2, for example--that seem randomly tossed together. At other times it adopts ...

Do you know what a timing belt or a timing chain is and what they do? Could you find them on your vehicle's engine if you had to? If you answered no, don't sweat it. Both are buried behind a lot of ...

Every engine has a means of coordinating the timing between the valve train and the rest of the engine. Some engines use a timing chain and some a timing belt. A timing belt has the relatively ...