Keith,

I don't think anybody thinks the Wankel is fragile.
The question I get most often is it burns a lot of fuel.
The second question is what about the apex seals? A problem
that went away forty years ago.

Paul Lamar ...No rotor no motor.

Paul,

Until I started researching it again for this plane, _I_ thought it was
fragile -- my last direct experience was in the early 1980s.  Everyone
that I've talked to about my using the 13B has given some form of the
fragility/unreliability argument, and I don't hang around with stupid or
ignorant people (beats heck outta me why they let me hang around) . . .

This is the perception that most people have, in and out of the aviation
community.  People remember the early NSUs and the apex-seal problems,
and they automatically assume that if the engines were any good, Mazda
wouldn't be the only car to carry them.

Keith

 How could anybody think the engine was fragile when the racers
are getting 800 HP. People that think its fragile are not well
informed.

BINGO!!!!

People don't KNOW that racers are getting 800 HP.  People don't know how
many hours people are getting on these engines in aircraft.  For that
matter, most people don't even know that Mazda is still selling a car
with a rotary engine -- they think that ended with the RX-7.

People don't know half of what they think they know -- they hear
something, believe it, and until that belief is replaced by something
that counters it, they "know" it's the truth.  There's a mental box
marked "Wankel engine" in their minds, and all that's in it are rumors,
old wives' tales and things that they heard in 1974 about how the
engines die (they don't even know enough to know the phrase "apex seal,"
they just "know" they don't work).

THAT IS THE WHOLE IDEA BEHIND THE DEMO.  They "know" that the Wankel
isn't reliable, in the same way they "know" that a water-cooled engine
will seize a minute after the water goes away.

As one of my bishops used to say, "The problem isn't what we don't know.
The problem is what we know that ISN'T SO!"

Keith




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