Back to basics: the piston

In order to understand how an engine works, we first need to understand what kind of engine we are dealing with. Almost all cars today boast a four stroke internal combustion engine.  These engines employ a four stroke process that includes intake stroke, compression stroke, combustion stroke, and exhaust stroke. Auto.howstuffworks.com

I obtained my information from the website above. The writer talks about how an engine operates almost like a potato gun. A part of the engine dubbed the piston strokes down to let air and gas come in.  This process is called the intake stroke. The piston then shoots  back up to compress the air gas mixture and make it more explosive. This action of forming pressure is the compression stage.  When the piston reaches the top of its stroke the spark plug ignites the gasoline forcing the piston  back down.  The explosion created by the piston and spark plug is the combustion stroke.  At the bottom of the piston's stroke the gasses are released out of the exhaust pipe, thus completing the exhaust stroke. Force from the piston's downward motion makes a part called the crank shaft shift in a circular motion. Car wheels are rotated by this process. Now that we know how the piston works, in the next post we will discover how this mechanism affects the rest of the engine.   Just simply the piston was amazing to me and I can't wait to see how it plays into the bigger whole that is the engine. Hopefully learning about the piston helps you understand how an engine functions. I know learning about the piston helped me more. In the next post I will look more into the engine as a whole. What really drives those car wheels forward?