Gearhead Modifies His Engine With Koenigsegg Tech

It's not often that we're introduced to a supercar that could truly change the motor vehicle landscape as we know it, but the Koenigsegg Gemera is such a car. Unveiled earlier this year, the Gemera is a forthcoming uber-expensive four-seater "Mega-GT" with a hybrid powertrain good for an anticipated 1,727 horsepower, but its real paryt piece isn't the electric portion of its propulsion system; it's the internal combustion engine.

When the Gemera launches, it's 2.0-liter three-cylinder engine, dubbed the "Tiny Friendly Giant", will be the first production car engine in the world with a camless valvetrain from Koenigsegg's sister company Freevalve. It's an impressive bit of technology, built around digitally controlled electro-hydraulic-pneumatic valve actuators - twelve in all - that can vary each valve's timing, duration, and lift independently.

That's cool and all, but can we see the homebrew version now?

Yes, we can. Some bold pioneer of do-it-yourself electro-mechanical wizardry has built his very own Freevalve-style camless valvetrain, and put it on an inexpensive Harbor Freight single-cylinder engine with all of 212 cubic centimeters of displacement. Leveraging his advanced technical know-how, Wesley Kagan assembled and programmed a custom control circuit driven by a common, off-the-shelf Arduino microcontroller, with a magnetic Hall-effect sensor to locate top-dead-center - basic stuff. The actual driving force behind the valve events is a 130-Hz pneumatic actuator purchased from the internet.

The end result is a small-displacement, single-cylinder engine with pneumatically opened valves and no camshaft that, incredibly, actually works. Sort of.