To get accurate natural frequencies of an engine crankshafts, finite element equations of motion are developed, taking real geometries of the shaft into account. For the crankshaft with wide crank webs, a specialized rotating web element is developed. This includes the effects of rotary inertia, gyroscopic moment, and shear. After the finite element equations are constructed, eigenvalues are extracted from the system equations to get natural frequencies, based on the Sturm sequence method which exploits the banded forms of the system matrices to reduce computations. The scheme developed can be used for the free vibration analysis of any type of spinning structures which include skew symmetric gyroscopic moment matrix in the system matrices. The results are compared with experimental data in order to confirm the study.