Dan Duncan had gotten up past 13,000. He said he was balancing his
engines quite a bit tighter than the factory did it.
Dave Klingler
Consider the source :-)
The problem is not balance. It is centrifugal load on the rotor bearing.
That is why we run 150 psi oil pressure in the TTC engine.
Paul Lamar
What's the story about Dan Duncan and the doctor in Oklahoma ? Never
heard about it.
Steve Carlisle
I don't have all the details but I think he was convicted of mail fraud
and then
disappeared into Mexico I think. Many years ago.
Paul Lamar
Paul, please read! :)
Dan Duncan and his wife owned a successful company with about a
half-dozen employees called Duncan Aviation Engines, which sold Mazda
and air-cooled conversions for aircraft. He sold enough engines that
his delivery time stretched out to about 6 months, and he won some
rotary engine research work from NASA.
The 78th engine he sold was to a doctor in Oklahoma who happened to be
friends with the attorney general, who happened to be running for
governor. Shortly after he sold engine # 78, he moved his company to
Santa Fe, New Mexico to get some high-tech grants that were promised but
ultimately never delivered.
He wrote the doctor a letter telling him there would be a delay. The
doctor got mad and wrote him back a nastygram. Dan wrote the doctor
offering him a refund. If you�re keeping track, that�s three letters.
The doctor got mad and went to his friend the attorney general, who got
on TV and declared that he was �going to make an example of the Dan
Duncans of this world.�
About 5 in the morning a SWAT team showed up in Santa Fe and dragged Dan
and his wife out of bed. They found over 300 letters in his file
cabinet and charged him with one count of mail fraud for each letter.
Dan went off to jail in Oklahoma, where they beat him up pretty badly
and gave him an abdominal hernia. He paid a bunch of money to an
Oklahoma attorney who disappeared to Texas, and ended up representing
himself in court. He was able to prove he�d delivered all of the
engines except the one to the doctor.
If you were keeping track, that�s three letters and three counts of mail
fraud. Dan stayed in jail for about 18 months, as I remember, but they
never treated his injuries and the hernia got a lot worse. His wife
divorced him and moved back to Canada during that time. Dan got out and
worked as a truck driver for the movie industry for a while, building
about a dozen more aviation rotaries. When he was able, he moved up to
Canada to try to get his wife back and maybe get his injuries fixed.
A few people have found reasons to drag Dan�s name through the mud, but
I knew him to be a smart, honest and knowledgeable person, and he had a
fair number of loyal friends in Santa Fe. He built the turbocharged
Mazda that went in the Seahawk amphib my friend and I were building, and
every so often I see pictures on this list of engines I think I
recognize as Dan�s, evidently still running. I think the last one might
have been a Coot with a belt drive.
Dan�s method of engineering was to build engines and test his ideas to
destruction. He drained all of the oil out of his little Mazda truck
once and drove it from Santa Fe to Albuqerque, just to see what would
happen. It made the entire trip.
I lost track of Dan in about 1989, but I hope he�s still alive and happy
wherever he is. He didn�t at all deserve what happened to him, and he�d
still be building engines today if it weren�t for litigous doctors and
politicians.
Dave Klingler
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