Hello everybody, new member 'ackers' introducing myself. Here is a brief resume of my activities. My main interest is in spark ignition i.c. engines and accessories. I am not a prolific builder; my main output is a scratch-built 5-cylinder radial aero engine, 25cc total displacement, to my own design. This is not a model of a particular engine, though inspired by the Bristol poppet-valve radial aero engines. 4-stroke of course and coil ignition. As a precursor to that I built a 5cc single-cylinder development engine to try out design ideas for the radial, and ended up doing a fair amount of dynamometer testing on that as well. I have also built a miniature magneto to a novel design and a proof-of-principle inertia starter which on a good day will indeed start the radial engine. I am currently picking up some of those threads after a period of relative idleness on the model engineering front. Though I built the radial many years ago there is still plenty of unfinished business to investigate, such as an embarrassingly high oil consumption and poor carburettor compensation. Amongst other things I want to carry on the inertia starter work and I have been trying to find information on and drawings of one of the classics such as the Rotax Eclipse. I am just finding my way around this site and its conventions etc and in later posts I can expand on this as appropriate.
