All,
I salute all of you who struggle w/ the eccentricities of the Rotax engines;
and, I gather from previous postings that there are also many of you whose
troubles w/ these engines fall within a tolerable range of normal break-in,
maintenance, and experimental-category aircraft issues; nonetheless, I am
reluctant to follow in your footsteps. The irony for me to come to this
conclusion lays in my original criteria for the ideal kitplane; namely, that
I was seeking a swift, fast-build kit mated w/ a modern powerplant...I was
confident that the (partially) liquid-cooled Rotax powered Europa would do
nicely...a confidence I have concluded (at least for the moment) was
misplaced, based on the multiple postings which relate a wide variety of
recurrent and difficult to diagnose failures and glitches (see below for
today's).
In the past I have mentioned my excellent impression af Alex Bowman's CAM
125 after seeing it and talking w/ Alex at the NW EAA show Arlington. WA
this past summer. Based on the Honda VTEC engine, the CAM 125 has been
around for a number of years...though poorly marketed, it is robust...I'll
go out on a limb and say its bulletproof.
Alex, Neil Varcoe (his engineer), and Bob Masters (Firewall Forward Aero
Engines, makers of the CAM 125) have put together an excellent fwf package
and are looking for "3 or 4" guys who will commit to purchasing. They have
production molds for an attractive cowling and ancillary parts including a
very lo-drag mono fairing and an excellent cooling system. There is no
specific price tag for such a package at this time, though the stock engine
w/ PRSU goes for US$11,250.00. There is some dated info about Alex's Europa
at http://www.firewall.ca/main.html and I have a series of pixs I took last
summer.
For additional information, feel free to contact Neil Varcoe at:
www.vortac.ca, You may also contact me or Tony Renshaw, on or off-list.
Fred
A194
> on 12/20/04 2:01 PM, irampil@notes.cc.sunysb.edu at
> irampil@notes.cc.sunysb.edu wrote:
>
> Apropos the exhaust stack problems noted here last week,
> I have a small cautionary tale to tell:
>
> From the begining of my flight test program I have had intermittant
> problems with very rough periods on my 912S. I had a known
> small exhaust leak from Cyl 3, I thought from the joint to the head.
> In fact, it was a leak from the connection from the down tube to the
> muffler - they were separated by 2mm and the hot gas was jetting up
> to the carb float bowl. At high power and or high altitude, the exhaust
> would boil the gas in the float bowl - bad for serenity of pilot.
> After consultation with Andy, I loosed the slip joint on #1, set a bucking
> bar on the underside of the muffler, and tapped upward with a plastic
> mallet. The muffler moved 2mm up, the tube seated, and for 3.5 hrs now
> the engine is quite smooth........
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