Update June 24th
On a personal note before you read this.
I too am tired of the mud slinging and back biting but it goes with the territory I suspect. I don't mind being the one to go public with anything I feel might be a danger to anyone. I can't sit by and watch someone get hurt or worse because I couldn't muster the strength to speak up for what I believe. I'm not always right and I admit when I screw up and I will screw up many more times. But I don't just want to sell products I want to challenge myself to build better products and I feel the rear system is the best system that has been developed to date. Many may not and that's ok but to discount it simply because I designed it or someone else didn't is only cheating yourself out of innovative parts. I would much rather Fly corvair come out with a fix for his ring gear and I would take mine off the market but until then Aerolite will sell them and they have been flight tested and are currently in service today. The rear starter is going in Bill Clapp's KR and will be at Oshkosh and I will have a running engine on our test stand also. At that time we will sell the rear setup. One thing everyone seems to discount is the fact that I to am a builder and I to need parts but I unlike most won't put up with waiting months and months for my parts. I offered to buy most of my parts from Fly corvair under the stipulation that my parts were supplied to me on a timely basis and Fly Corvair agreed. I also stated at that time that if Fly corvair didn't supply my parts when promised I would make them myself. So here we are. I told Fly Corvair I needed my parts to build an engine for Sun 'n Fun and as of a day before the fly-in hadn't received the parts. Fly Corvair did have my parts at Sun 'n Fun but by then we didn't need them as we have them being made else where. The point is Fly Corvair like any other business that fails to perform lost our business. We are developing a FWF based on the Corvair and can't have our venders hold up our production.
Also I felt Mark Langford should be the one to write the Technical news pages concerning the problems we have been seeing in the field and on our own planes. I thought he would be non biased and listen to what we had to say. I Not Aerolite am disappointed with Mark and have lost the respect I had for him over this issue. He went on a hunting expedition and disregarded everything we told him. If you look at my technical news page and click on distributors issues there are pics of what Mark says doesn't exist.
Mark has kicked Aerolite off his list and that's ok it is his right. But to slam someone and then kicking them off is only showing his bias.
Jeff
A few weeks ago, William Wynne wrote:
> I would also like to squash an Internet story: I had heard the rumor that
> the E/P distributor we had built for Bill Clapp damaged his engine at the
> Thomasville GA flying when he ran it...
Bill told me this same story at SNF, and Jeff of Aerolite told a similar one a few minutes later. They were trying to convince me that I should set up a Corvair AD (airworthiness directive) page, and that William's distributors should be at the top of the list. It seems that Bill recently acquired a distributor machine, and now knows more about distributors than William, and is saying that William was sending them out the door with something like 26 degrees of advance, rather than the 16 or so degrees they were supposed to have. Even if this were true (and I doubt it), you're supposed to set the timing with the engine running up near cruise RPM where all of the advance is "in", so anybody that's fried an engine like that didn't check the timing in the first place, or at least didn't set it correctly.
A few weeks ago I got an email from Jeff explaining how one of William Wynne's distributors had been the cause for the problems Jeff encountered on his first CorvAircraft engine that he built for a customer last year. He said the distributor was advancing too far and caused detonation which broke a ring, seized a cylinder, cracked the case, and later broke the crankshaft in a 2700cc engine that he built for a customer. Again, I was skeptical, but he says wobbly bushings allowed the distributor to advance too far and detonate. He said I should call his customers and get the full story, so I did.
I had said on initial start up two of the plug wires were crossed and the engine misfired early on the # 2 cylinder compression stroke hard enough to crush the piston and cause the ring to crack in 2 places. Once the problem was located, the piston and rings were replaced in the number two cylinder and the engine ran fine. After that the 40 hours were flown off and Ben departed for Florida. He then flew the plane locally in Florida and on to South Carolina with no problems. On his return flight back to Florida he felt a vibration and had oil on the canopy and landed in Ocala FL. where he added oil and took off. At that point,under full throttle for takeoff, the vibration worsened and he turned around and made a safe landing. Ben called me and left a message on my cell phone and I returned the call around 11:30 knowing if he was in a motel something was wrong. He explained what had happened and described to me he thought the crank was screwing out of the engine when he turned the propeller over by hand. I called William the next day and asked if he could go down and look at the plane and he said he would. William called me and said he didn't think the crank was broken. He thought just the thrust bearing was worn out. I gathered up another crank and my tools and headed to Ocala and when I opened the cowling the first thing I noticed was the cracked case and was surprised William hadn't seen it. I tore down the engine and found the crankshaft was broken at the #2 cylinder. the same place as the crushed piston. I didn't think anything about it as I thought it may have damaged it when it misfired, so I replaced the crank and case and restored the engine to running condition. The engine had logged ~ 104 hours at that point. During the build, William came by and looked it over. He requested the broken crank stating he wanted his nitrider to run tests on it and that he would give me the results and return the crank after the testing was completed. Although I have mad repeated requests for the results of the testing and the return of the broken crank, I have received neither. The ring gear had developed cracks and William took that without permission, leaving Ben to purchase another one which also has cracked despite Ben following William’s instructions on filing it smooth. When the engine was re-assembled, I set the timing for the initial start at 12 degrees and started the engine. I use a Snap on digital timing light and when I set static timming I am only concerned with the TDC mark and nothing else. I proceeded to set the timing and it would run fine but then on taxi it would die without reason. When I rechecked timing, the timing had changed and was incorrect. I called William and explained the timming was erratic and it wouldn't stay constant. I told him as well that I thought the advance seemed to be sticking. I took out the distributor and spun it and then reinstalled it and it seemed to be fine, but Ben took off and came back dead stick. Again, the timing had changed. I reset the timing and it seemed to be ok after that. However, Ben experienced five dead stick landings over the next several months. The distributor was finally rebuilt. I still stand by my statement that there was something wrong with that distributor in Ocala. It would not hold its timing.
I got the full story, but it wasn't the way Jeff told it. In fact, distributors were never mentioned until I asked about it. I'll spare you the details, but it sure sounded to me like the ring was broken during assembly, the engine was running very lean from day one (due either to lean jetting or over-advanced timing), and the series of problems that cropped up was caused by this lean condition, with perhaps too much ignition advance thrown into the mix. It seems a timing light didn't come into play until after some of the damage was already done, and even then there was some lack of understanding regarding the timing marks involved. Jeff admitted to me he'd set up the engine with 40 degrees of advance, but blamed it on WW's distributor error. I have to wonder how that could happen, because the timing marks are right there on the rear case, and all it takes to transfer them to the pulley is a piece of masking tape, a marker, and a ruler to extrapolate those marks to 32 degrees of max advance that any timing light can display. Of course that would require a basic understanding of ignition timing. In fact the owner of that engine says that Jeff sent his distributor to Bill Clapp to be checked on Bill's machine, and nothing was found to be wrong with it. Those two stories don't jive.
Mark with all due respect you have never talked to me about most of this and you have most of the story incorrect. You are correct that the ring might have been broken during assembly but I find it hard to believe I crushed the piston also. I have said time and time again what I think happened and I stand by it.
And as far as running too lean, the jets have not been changed and we just ran the same intake and carb from FL. to KY. and had no problems so the carb was not too lean. This carb had just been purchased after a total rebuild by D&G The jets were/are not incorrect and there are no manifold leaks, it is William Wynne’s.
I never said I set it up with 40 degrees advance. William said that. What I said was his numbers on the bottom were wrong and if I set it up that way I would have had 40 degrees of advance. When he puts the numbers on the bottom of his distributors shouldn't they be correct?
I also called another of Jeff's references, but to his credit, he refuses to be a part of the mudslinging that's been going on the internet, regardless of his opinion. We talked for over an hour, and I have a pretty good understanding of his situation. I'll respect his request that he be left entirely out of this and leave it at that, but I have to say that Jeff's invitation to call two of his customers for their story was a gamble that didn't work out in his favor.
I just returned from FLorida.and he helped me install our latest version of our engine in Ben's airplane and He said you were pumping him for information. Would an unhappy user help install an engine with his supplier and request our latest upgrades on his own engine? Furthermore would Ben let us install another engine in his airplane and fly it across country if he didn't have faith in our ability to build a good engine. He is also wanting to install the rear system on his engine which will be done and flown to Oshkosh.
I've been going out of my way to be impartial with this apparent squabble of who's best suited to provide airworthy parts for CorvAircraft conversion engines, but the answer is obvious to me...the guy that's been building and flying behind them for 15 years now. I personally would not want anybody else's next learning experience to be gained on an engine being built for me, especially if the success of my first flight depended on it.
Impartial??? I spoke to you for 5 minutes at Sun ’n Fun. You make it so I can see you slam me but make it so I can't respond. But did you call me and talk to me? No, you simply drop me from your list while documented problems continue to exist with parts supplied by the "other" vendor.
The rest of this post is more of the same.
WW and Kevin Fahy have been building Corvair engines since before most of us even thought about it, and not just a few engines. Most of us would never have thought of using the Corvair to power our airplanes. In fact, somebody called me to ask what I thought of the Corvair engine for KRs back in 1998, and I told them that all I needed to know was that I'd never seen one on an airplane before, and that had to be a clue. I found out a few months later that I was wrong.
William is the guy that's devoted an incredible amount of time and effort perfecting the CorvAircraft engine, developing components that the rest of you can bolt on and go flying behind. Anybody that's visited with him and the rest of the hangar gang knows that these guys put in hours that most of us would never even consider.
It looks to me like William is getting his delivery act together, and by all accounts, his products are not only top notch and constantly improving, but are well thought out and flight tested before he'll sell them. I will flight test his front bearing setup in the next few weeks, and I expect it will work just fine.
There are others on this list that are selling what I consider to be knockoffs of William's efforts, and I don't think it's right. As the CorvAircraft list owner, I don't want to be a part of it. I suspect that most of the old-timers would agree. Newbies show up and may think nothing of several folks selling the same product, not knowing who the originator was. It's awfully easy to take a dual point plate and use it as a template to match drill a copy, but is it right? I don't think so. Sure, you can imagine that somebody came up with that on their own, but you have to admit that there wouldn't even be a market for it if we didn't aspire to fly behind Corvairs, and the guy to thank for that is William Wynne.
All you have to do is look at the testing that William's done. I don't know of anybody else that's done crazy stuff like running Corvair engines on the test stand with varying amounts of advance, looking for the point at which detonation occurs, and progressing to the point that a hole burns in a piston and then starts blowing oil.and then runs it some more to see how long it will take for the oil supply to run out under those conditions! His website at http://www.flycorvair.com/hangar.html is full of innovative testing on products that are subjected to continuous improvement, as well as endless numbers of how-tos on many aspects of Corvair engine systems.
I never cease to be amazed at how much William knows about Corvair engines and how they operate in off-optimal conditions, but aviation engines as well. He knows the cause-and-effect relationships for almost every scenario. This kind of knowledge is difficult (if not impossible) to find, especially for the Corvair engine that's been pressed into aviation service.
And who did all of the cam testing to ascertain which cam worked best of all for us? Who's the guy that's been recurving distributors for years to get the advance correct for CorvAircraft use? Not Jeff, Bill, or Brady. Who will sell you parts that've never flown before? Not William. This list could go on for pages.
First of all, Aerolite does not sell or have any involvement in distributors, so why try to link us into this area? Aerolite DOES make a system that is unique and is not a "knockoff" as you state.
Secondly, William doesn't even have a pilot’s license and I don't recall one photo of him in an airplane flying. So that is the biggest falsehood of all. He doesn't mind letting others risk their lives to test his parts but worse than that he won't admit when there is a problem with them. Aerolite has NEVER sold a part that hasn’t been flight tested, and its tests are performed by unbiased third parties, NOT members of some "hangar gang" who have vested interests in making certain that tests give the desired results. Why did the 701 fail to make its flight to Sun ‘n Fun without being forced to land? We are told it was carburetor problems. I strongly doubt it. More likely detonation causing the overheating and loss of RPM. Perhaps a distributor problem?
I've decided to let Jeff find other venues to sell his wares. I unsubscribed him last year for telling tall tales regarding flexplates, and given my conversations with his customers, that hasn't changed. Since then, he's got another email address, and is now posting all kinds of advice to engine builders, and I personally don't feel he's qualified to do that. Until he makes up another email alias, you won't be hearing from him.
Show me one in the archives where I say anything about Ring gears.
Some of you may disagree with my opinion on this, but I'd like to remind posters that this is not a democracy.it's a dictatorship, and I reserve the right to throw anybody overboard that I see fit. I've talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of stories that most of you will never hear, and they all point to the same thing. I've tried to be more than fair, and feel I can no longer remain quiet on this.
Every time we have one of these fire fights on the web everybody piles on to make their comments and tell their tales, and people start wondering about how they're going to build their engines, or if maybe they should wait or reconsider, or whether they want to build a Corvair at all, and CorvAircraft engine progress is slowed again. And it doesn't help the CorvAircraft reputation when an engine only lasts a few hours due to the inexperience of the builder. Our time is much better spent building engines that will get us aloft than arguing about them.
I have zero problem with somebody creating an innovative new Corvair part that WW doesn't sell, and clearly wasn't copied. Dan's and Roy's front bearings are examples of that, and having three options in the testing phase is not a bad thing. And Brady's forged 4340 crankshaft might work out as well. These sorts of contributions could only be good for the CorvAircraft movement, assuming they're proven before a bunch of them are sold and installed.
That's just the way I see it from where I stand, and wanted you to know...
Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL
website: www.N56ML@hiwaay.net
email: N56ML at hiwaay.net
