Overhead Valve - Advantages

Advantages

Overhead valve (OHV) engines have specific advantages:

  • Smaller overall packaging: because of the camshaft's location inside the engine block, OHV engines are more compact than an overhead cam engine of comparable displacement. For example, Ford's 4.6 L OHC modular V8 is larger than the 5.0 L I-head Windsor V8 it replaced. GM's 4.6 L OHC Northstar V8 is slightly taller and wider than GM's larger displacement 5.7 to 7.0 L I-head LS V8. The Ford Ka uses the venerable Kent Crossflow OHV engine to fit under its low bonnet line.
  • Less complex drive system: OHV engines have a less complex drive system to time the camshaft when compared with OHC engines. Most OHC engines drive the camshaft or camshafts using a timing belt, a chain or multiple chains. These systems require the use of tensioners which add some complexity to the engine. In contrast an OHV engine has the camshaft positioned just above crankshaft and can be run with a much smaller chain or even direct gear connection.

Read more about this topic:  Overhead Valve

Famous quotes containing the word advantages:

    ... is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.
    Frank Pittman (20th century)

    For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)