Robin Ream wrote:

Hello Paul and everyone on this newsletter,

    A lot of us watching these various threads are not engineers and we collectively appreciate
and respect the opinions of all of you who are, and a lot of us are puzzled by this one
confounding question:  Why do so many of these million dollar fire wall forward (or rearward)
installations fail with regularity?  They have everything money can buy and they still shoot
craps.  Balanced against the high rollers setup is Tracy Crooks "affordable airplane" which seems
to reliably go on like the Energizer Bunny on stuff from the local auto parts store.  The beauty
queens are crashing and the plain Janes continue to haul the freight like there's nothing to it?
--  Please explain this paradox to us.

Thanks for your insight,
Robin

Just because you are rich does not mean you are smart :)
Aviation is a self cleaning oven. Darwin would love it.

Seriously; good engineering and common sense are required. One must
be willing to learn and avail himself of the knowledge resources
out there. Another factor is the willingness to question and understand 
why things are the way they are. For example; if you study a certified 
aircraft engine installation in minute detail, for every little feature 
there is a very good engineering reason why it is done that way. This 
is the result of 100 years of mostly trial and error development. When 
you put those features in the context of engineering theory you can 
then predict what will happen when a similar feature is employed. This 
is what engineering and mathematics are all about. The average lay person
takes engineering for granted. Take a chair for example. Looks simple 
but actually the stresses in the material the chair is constructed 
from are rather complex. 

My English Lit professor drew two lines on the black board three feet apart
and said this is science and engineering between the lines. The rest of
the world is art, architecture and literature. Actually the opposite is true.
Ancient engineers were very advanced for their time and some of the so-called 
art and architecture this professor so admired was the result of good 
engineering.

When starting with a significantly different engine, which the rotary is,
we are doomed to repeat some of those mistakes unless we apply those
same mathematical and engineering principles religiously. The purpose of this
newsletter is to speed up that process, expose people to the engineering
principles and reduce the duplication of mistakes.

In this case the person did not avail himself of the resources out there, 
particularly on the internet and therefore made some mistakes that were 
well known to cause problems. Unfortunately we are seeing that over
and over again. Just because it looks simple does not mean it is
simple. The contrary is probably true. If it looks simple there 
probably is some very sophisticated engineering in the background.

Paul Lamar
 
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