Giovanni Faiella
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October 2025 Complete

Stirling Engine Design and Machining

A Stirling engine that I modeled in SOLIDWORKS, documented with drawings for manufacturing, and then machined and assembled in the shop. The finished engine ran at 600 RPM.

  • SOLIDWORKS
  • Drawings for manufacturing
  • Lathe
  • Mill
  • CNC
The SOLIDWORKS assembly. Click and drag to rotate it.

Overview

This was a course project where we designed a Stirling engine in SOLIDWORKS and then built it ourselves in the machine shop. The purpose of the project was to give us experience with CAD, reading and composing SOLIDWORKS drawings, machining on the lathe and the mill, and a beginner's introduction to CNC, as well as generally working in a lab.

The machining and assembly part of the project was done together with my classmate, Andrew Miley.

The result: 600 RPM

Once everything was machined and assembled, our engine ran at 600 RPM.

The finished engine running
The finished Stirling engine on a shop bench: aluminum base plate, cylinder plate and bearing block, brass flywheel and power cylinder
The assembled engine in the shop

Designing for manufacturing

The biggest focus for me in this project was designing the parts so they could actually be made, and composing the drawings that we would machine from. A model can look right on the screen, but in the shop the drawing is what you go off of, so every dimension and tolerance needs to be there.

  • I modeled each component of the engine in SOLIDWORKS, dimensionally accurate to the engineering specification and fit.
  • I put all of the components together into the full engine assembly, which let me check the fit and alignment before anything was machined.
  • I composed the drawing package: an assembled view with a section view, an exploded view with numbered balloons, and a bill of materials covering all 39 line items. The drawings are in inches, with tolerances of ±0.1, ±0.01 and ±0.001 depending on the number of decimal places.
Assembled view drawing of the Stirling engine with section C-CAssembled view and section Exploded view drawing of the Stirling engine with numbered balloonsExploded view Bill of materials for the Stirling engine, 39 itemsBill of materials

Click a drawing to see it full size, or open the drawing package (PDF).

Exploded view

Exploded view drawing of the Stirling engine
Exploded view of the engine assembly

In the machine shop

Andrew and I machined our parts on the lathe and the mill, and we also got some beginner experience on the CNC. The parts we made were:

  • the base plate
  • the bearing block
  • the cylinder plate, the middle component between the two pistons
  • the brass valve on the side of the engine

The screws and bolts were not made by us. After machining, we assembled the engine ourselves.

Turning the flywheel by hand after assembly to check that everything moves freely.

What I took from it

This project helped me build skills such as machining on the lathe and the mill, and it gave me my first experience with CNC. It also reinforced what I had learned about CAD and drawings in my coursework. Seeing parts made from drawings I composed showed me how important it is to think about manufacturing while designing, not after.