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So? Why not the same? Our
engines are antiques ... anything over 50 years old? I have Lycoming
engine blueprints of todays engines, from 1946.
Improving engine reliability is
just engineering of structures... unfortunately controlled by myopic
'bottom -line' non-entrepreneurs.
There's a lesson lurking in
running your watercooled Corvette at 1600-rpm, though it has a 6000+
max RPM capability. Aircraft engine manufacturers could have their
designers modify their existing engine designs to live at 6000+ RPMs for short
periodes of time ... I suspect with very little geometry change ... and
thus be bulletproof at 2800... don't you agree?
Instead, i think, they have the
cart before the horse, if they complain that they have to have individual
cylinders that are replaceable because only a few thousand are made each year.
The reverse is true.
My peers remember 1966, a year when
GenAv sold tens of thousands of planes ... before the FAA became so bloated and
nit-pickey, and the courts were less precedent-enslaved, entertaining frivilous
lawsuits and giving technical decisions to common-sense-challenged juries...
fining Beech millions because a drun k flew into something.
Maybe manufacturers now only make
a few thousand engines a year because their engines have
fragile cases and flexible individual loose-fitting pistons in cold-to-hot
dimension-changing cylinder assemblies.
That's why I mentioned DeltaAir
and TAE liquid-cooled diesels. Liquid cooled engines don't use ANY oil,
and are longer-lived because they can be built to much closer tolerances.
Like big diesel engines with very rigid blocks. And blown diesels don't
need all those articulated poppet valves. Does that sound
reasonable?
Terrence
How does anyone else feel about this?
Fine.
Let's see, over rev the engine so that the valve springs can't get the
valves out of the way and, uh, something might crunch.
We utilize unique engines where individual cylinder assemblies are
replaceable rather than the whole engine of which only a few thousand are made
each year.
We run our engines in excess of 75% power hour-after-hour. At 75
MPH my water cooled Corvette engine idles along at 1600 RPM with a
6000+ max RPM capability that is only reached occasionally for short periods
of time.
Just ain't the same.....
Grayhawk
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