Hello:
Just new to this group. One question to you guys. I know most of the
weakness's of the piston engines, what is
the weakness of the 13B, 20B rotary? Has there ever been a rotor break on a
rotary in a plane?
Rich

Nothing has ever broken in a rotary on an airplane to my knowledge.
The engine is cannon proof. People get as much as 900 HP out of
a rotary at 10,000 RPM with lots of boost and nitrous oxide for drag racing.
They don't come apart unlike a piston engine.

We had one crash when a muffler was lost and went through the pusher prop
taking out a blade and then the psru came off.

In another case the fan belt came off and took out the ignition wiring.

We had another engine lose oil pressure on the ground before takeoff because the
engine was mounted plugs up and that made the oil line from the oil sump
to the oil pump too long. This happened after 400 hours of flight time.
I don't recommend the plugs up mounting.

We have had several people severely overheat them but the
engine did not stop. Just leaked coolant when it cooled off.

Two in-flight fires right after take off because a cheap oil cooler split. 
This happened twice in a row because the first split oil cooler was replaced
with the same brand the second time. It looked like an oil cooler was made
in China and sold by Griffin Radiator. 

Tracy Crook had several off-the-shelf external mild and 0-too-thin stainless steel 
mufflers destroy themselves. That is an on going development process. His first 
0.035 thick stainless tangential muffler under the cowl lasted for about 800 hours 
as I recall.

A guy tried to use a stock RX7 manual transmission locked in second gear
as a cheap PSRU. It eventually stripped the gears but the output shaft would
also have failed in any event sooner or later.

Another guy plumbed the external oil filter backwards and the
one way valve in the oil filter caused a lack of oil pressure
from time to time. Took a 100 hours or so to find this.

Did I miss anything else guys?

Paul Lamar
 
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