Impressive

You can build nice engines if you speak English, this guy speaks the Queens English mind you.

and . Shame it didn't go in this as they are the same scale. I read somewhere that Barrington Hares may have built his own milling machine which he then used to build the RR Merlin.

This one is also quite impressive and the engine is fitted to the car.

It's probably too valuable to ever leave the earth.

A friend of mine has completed a Bentley and is now building a scale Merlin. He is an EXCELLENT pilot (aerobatic champ and all that) as well as an excellent machinist and a perfectionist

Yes, but I've seen some of these engines run at the NAMES show. There was a guy with a 4-cyl in-line Bentley model that ran nicely, but another guy had a 4-cyl rotary of his own design that was a total screamer, turning a 12"+ prop at over 7000 RPM. I was worried that people were standing to the side of this thing and if it lost a prop blade there would be a BIG mess to clean up. Fortunately, no such thing happened.

Jon

Hi Jon

I was under the impression that Rotary (radial) engines needed to be an odd number of cylinders. Have I remembered this wrong??

Jerry

Well, most radials of the Pratt & Whitney variety were based on

7 or 9 cyls. per bank, but there really is no reason it has to be that way. It may balance more easily or run a little smoother that way, but there's no reason it has to be like that.

This guy's rotary was nothing like the traditional rotary engines, though, I think the pistons were linked to the "crank" by a cam and a roller bearing. The pistons clattered against the cam when turning it over by hand, they apparently needed centrifugal force to hold them out against the cam.

Jon

Yes, he's quite nuts. It is not a model, the one he is currently building is

1:1. And he also attempts to get the permit of the "Luftfahrtbundesamt" (the flight agency) for use in planes (we do have *very* strict laws).

Nick