Man builds bike with 200-year-old engine that runs off heat and doesn’t use gas or battery

Tom Stanton built a bike using an engine that runs off heat – no gas, no battery, no roar.

Just a little warmth, some sealed air, and a wild idea that actually worked.

The engine design is over 200 years old. The rest? Pure 2024 garage ingenuity.

And somehow, against the odds, the bike runs.

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How do you build a working bike around an engine that runs off heat?

Stanton – a YouTuber and aerospace engineer – set out to power a bicycle using a Stirling engine. 

It’s an old-school engine that runs off heat, patented in 1816, that works by shuttling air between a hot side and a cold side. 

Heat makes the air push. Cold pulls it back. Do that fast enough, and you’ve got a working engine.

He started small – heating syringes, testing pressure cycles – but scaling that up meant building a full aluminum engine block from scratch. 

He machined the internals, 3D printed the cranks, and water-cooled the cold side. Opposite that, a red-hot steel cap feeds heat into the system.

That got him a spinning model. But not a working one.

Stirling engines are picky – especially when you’re asking them to do something they were never meant to do. 

Tiny amounts of friction matter. Air leaks kill power. Even the crank throw has to be perfect.

The big breakthrough was a flexible piston ring – 3D printed in TPU – that sealed well enough to build pressure without adding drag. 

Suddenly, compression was back. 

The piston moved like it should. The crank spun. The bike rolled.

It puts out around 100 to 150 watts. That’s just enough to keep things moving at 15mph on flat ground.

Even after the heat source is turned off, the engine keeps running for a while – coasting on the warmth stored in the steel.

No throttle. No gears. Just heat and air doing their thing.

This thing shouldn’t work but it does

This wasn’t a practical build. It’s not efficient. It’s not scalable. But that’s the point.

Stirling engines are almost never used for transport. They’re low-power, hard to throttle, and notoriously slow to spin up. 

But with modern tools – CNC machines, 3D printers, off-the-shelf bearings –  Stanton managed to make it move.

He’s still improving it. 

He’s working on thinner belts, a proper clutch, and a radiator loop to manage temps. 

There’s talk of a regenerator, too – something to recycle heat and squeeze out a little more power. 

But even in its current state, it’s doing something that shouldn’t be possible: it runs, quietly and reliably.

It’s an unlikely idea made real – and that’s exactly why it matters.

No engine noise. No emissions. Just a whisper of hot air pushing something forward.

That’s the magic of this thing. And that’s why we love it.

Watch Tom’s full video below, or subscribe to his YouTube channel here:

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