Local shows off engine at OCC

Nearly 30 years ago John Bjorkman found a blown-out eight-cylinder engine on the ground and had an idea. Cutting the block down to two cylinders, Bjorkman, 58, of Costa Mesa created a revolutionary engine capable of putting out 1,500 horsepower.

In 1984, after years of work, Bjorkman successfully powered up the engine for the first time. It would occupy the next 23 years of his life. In 2002 Bjorkman took the engine — now in the belly of a long red racer — to El Mirage Dry Lake in the southern Mojave Desert. The car broke the speed record for the area, speeding across the finish line at 218 mph. However, Bjorkman believes the car would have clocked at a much higher speed.

“I was doing 238 when … [the super charger] broke, and it was still accelerating,” Bjorkman said.

It was the last time he would drive the engine, but not the last time he would hit the accelerator.

Wednesday, Bjorkman brought the motor to Orange Coast College with fellow mechanics Gary Hook of Costa Mesa and Steve Lloyd of Huntington Beach hoping to rev up the imaginations of students studying at the school’s technical center. The trio spent the day demonstrating the engine’s awesome power and talking with anyone who passed through about the technology used to get it that way.

Deciding to no longer use the engine for setting speed records, Bjorkman has plans to place it in an old hot rod truck and keep it on display. The engine, having been refurbished several times over the years with newer parts, is now housed in a metal dune-buggy style frame. For cooling purposes, there is no radiator on board, they do not drive the vehicle around but rather tow it to different locations.

“You wouldn’t want to run it for long,” Bjorkman said. “Typically for a one-mile race, you go through four gallons,” and the nitromethane it runs on costs $30 per gallon. The key is that it is a two-cylinder engine pumping all that out, he added.

Anyone who stood before the engine as it fired up could feel its ear-pounding power — even through a set of earplugs. Sitting in the driver’s seat, you can feel the rhythm of the engine in your chest, the trio said.

A slight tap on the accelerator and it jumped to life. Revved only to a quarter of it’s possible power, it became easy to sense how quickly it could gain speed.

The fact that there are only two cylinders caused a slight problem in getting the right pieces to work with the engine’s pace during the building stages, Bjorkman said.

“It was an evolution of parts,” he said. “We changed, upgraded, played around and blew up,” a lot of parts. Because of the slower tempo of the two-cylinders, as opposed to the rhythm of eight, many pieces were ripped in two.

It took close to 10 years to get the engine put together without pulling certain pieces to shreds. It was originally planned for use in a racing motorcycle, but Bjorkman reconsidered that after crashing it into a wall.

“A lot of people told me I couldn’t do this,” Bjorkman said.

But every time this OCC grad starts up his two-cylinder pet project he proves them wrong. And the engine shows few signs of weakness, even after all these years.