Mechanics

Engine mounts have one job: let the engine move enough to not destroy itself or the chassis, while not letting it move enough to shake the cabin apart. Those two requirements are in direct opposition. Get it wrong in one direction, and your engine torque reaction cracks the frame. Get it wrong in the other, and the idle vibration transmits straight to the steering wheel and seat. The design space is narrow, the loading is multi-directional, and the rubber changes its behavior depending on temperature, amplitude, and frequency. It’s not a bolt-sizing problem. It’s a dynamics problem. ...

Everyone wants lighter wheels. Lighter unsprung mass improves handling response, reduces suspension load, and — on a two-wheeler where gyroscopic effects matter — changes the steering feel in ways that are hard to model and easy to notice. Magnesium is 35% lighter than aluminium. The trade is real: magnesium corrodes badly, costs more, and behaves differently under fatigue loading. The project was to find out whether the trade is worth it, under what conditions, and what the design has to look like to make it work. ...

A piston ring is a small part solving a brutal problem: maintain a gas-tight seal in a cylinder that’s changing pressure by 50–100 bar every 10 milliseconds, while moving at 10–20 m/s, while bathed in hot oil of varying viscosity, for 200,000 km. The fact that this works at all is a minor engineering miracle. The fact that it can be optimized requires understanding what’s actually happening at the ring-liner interface — and that interface is where three different physical regimes collide. ...

My M.Tech thesis was on standing waves in rotating tires. It sounds narrow. It turned out to be a masterclass in how rotation breaks everything you thought you knew about structural mechanics. The Problem Nobody Warns You About A tire at rest is just a pressurized toroidal shell. You can do Hertzian contact analysis on it, compute deflection, estimate contact patch pressure — all standard stuff. ...