1. Lycoming?

This is the most fundamental choice. Mr Lycoming has been building aeroplane engines for years. He has not really updated his technology since 1954 apparently. But then with a low-rev high torque engine, perhaps he has a point. Lycomings are found in most GA gas-burning aircraft. We know how well they perform. How often do you hear of one failing - occasional, but not frequent. In scientific terms, "n" is a very large number for Lycomings. With thousands of them in service we know how well they perform. I like the predictability. But they are soooo expensive. Even when Van's sells them to you ($20-30,000 US).

Links

2. Modern Car Engine

See this site to see how a modern car engine can be used as the basis of an aircraft power plant. A set of gears is used to match engine revs (5000rpm) to propellor revs(2700rpm). The benefits are very significant. Liquid cooling means no fear of shock cooling, and tighter tolerances can be used. Also, the addition of the manufacturers supercharger means more power and higher altitudes. BUT... how many are flying now? Not many. You end up being the experimental test bed for the engine - not sure if I want to pay $US 20000+ to do that. Mybe in a few years when my Lycoming is out of hours.

3. Other experimental engines

Jabiru is an Australian company producing home build aircraft kits and their own engines. For the RV-7 we would need their 8-cylinder version. But it is fairly new technology, and I have friends who fly the 6-cylinder version in Jabiru aircraft and the have had temperature problems. So I have (perhaps unfairly) rejected this option. The engine is surprizingly expensive unfortunately.

4. Size?

Apparently Van and his designers considered the RV-6 and RV-7 suited to the 0-320 engines with 150 and 160 HP. But most builders go for 180HP or even 200HP. My decision was to go with the lighter and smoother option with the simplest propellor - an O-320 160HP engine with a Sensenich fixed pitch propellor.

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Engine arrives (November 14-20, 2005)

It never ceases to amaze me how much more difficult life is building this aircraft in Australia, rather than somewhere in the US. This week Aerosport Power airfreighted my O-320 engine from Kamloops to Sydney, Australia. They have been excellent and they sent me a scanned copy of the Waybill. They used Panalpina who freight to Australia via Air New Zealand. I got a call from the QANTAS Air Fright depot on Monday, an they promise to hold it to Friday with no storage charges. I drove to Sydney on Wednesday (500km, 6 hours), and turned up at the QANTAS freight terminal at Sydney Kingsford-Smith Airport with my documentation. I took a ticket and sat down to wait 10 minutes. A nice man on the counter checked and told me i would need Customs clearand - "It should be straight-forward", he said. He gave me a map, so I walked over to the Customs building and took another ticket and waited for service. Another nice man looked at the Waybill and asked for an estimate of the value of teh shipment. He then informed me that, for shipments of value more than AUD$1000.00 I HAD to use an Import agent! Whoa! After the panic subsided, I rang the good people at International Cargo Solutions (they brought in the Quickbuild Crates for me), and one of their brokers promised to drop what he was doing and handle it there and then. I drove over to their offices (3 kilometres, 10 minutes) and he sat down with a thick book of duties. What a releif when we discover that the duty on Aircraft engines is NIL. He told me to go for a walk, get some lunch and relax, shile he attempted to push it though over the internet. So I walked around Mascot for 1/2 hour and bought myself an excellent Souvlaki with chilli sauce from a local Greek Cafe. Exactly one hour later, the man from ICS rang to say it had all gone though. I strolled back, picked up the documentation, thanked him profusely, and headed back to QANTAS. I presented the papers and foty minutes later a forklift appeared with a nice plywood crate labelled "Aerosport Power". He placed it on the tray of my truck and, five hours after first driving in there, I left. I was lucky that the people at ICS were lind to deal with my situation immediately. They could have asked me to wait a few days, and I would have been left with $300/day freight storage fees. In anycase I will need to pay the best part of $2500.00 in Australian "Goods and Services Tax", even though the engine was built somewhere else.

Today (Sat 20th November) we drove back to Manilla,and the crate is in the new shed ready to be off-loaded and stored. I will leave it in storage until I am sure it is time to unpack and mount the engine.

Engine Mounting (30th May 2007)

Today my Technical Counsellor helped me mount the engine in the engine mount. Having read of nightmare stories, I wanted to have John here as he has done this thousands of times in his long career as a professional licenced aeronautical engineer. It was very much an anti-climax. We hoisted the engine and attached the three oil lines which emerge from the rear, and screwed on the dust cap over the tachometer cable drive socket (my tacho is purely electronic, and driven by magneto pulses). You need to do this with rear fixtures as access to them is very restricted once the engine is on.

We then liftted the engine up to the correct height and mated the mounting holes with the powder-coated welded engine mount (image 1 shows engine in final position). The actual mounting rubbers are each an assembly of two types of thick rubber rings, held together by a large bolt which also attaches the engine to these mounts. The "hard" rings bear the loads and so they need to be placed at the rear on the two top mounting points, and at the front on the two bottom mounting points. Image 3 shows one of the top mounts in detail, rear to the right. It took a little fiddling to line everything up so that both top bolts slid easily into position. We used the hoist to raise or lower the engine to get it right. The lower bolts were slightly more difficult to line up, but with the help of a little luck and a small tack hammer, we soon had the bolts in, and washers and nuts torqued. Image 2 shows the lightweight starter from teh front. Image 4 is the vacuum pump and oil filter, between which is an aluminium cap which seals the tachometer drive socket. Image 5 shows a view from below - the square shiny plate is where the carburettor will go. Image 6 shows the engine plate with serial number. Image 7 shows where the alternator will be fitted. Image 8 shows a rocker cover plate. Fortunately AeorSport Power used ECI parts and not Superiors. there is an Airworthiness Directive out requiring some Superior Cylinders and Pistons to be replaced - not an issue with ECI parts.

Engine

Lightweight starter

Dynafocal mount

Vacuum pump

From below

Serial Plate

Alternator location

ECI