Do you think there is much of a future in piston engine R&D,
Before companies pour money into R&D they should take a long hard look at their current product. They would discover that for little or no increase in their selling price they could more than halve the
effective cost to their long suffering customers.How?
I'll use the IO520 as an example.New it currently sells for near Aust $50,000 and has a TBO of 1800 hours. Increase that to 3600hours and immediately the effective cost is halved. Is this possible? In the fifties and early sixties it was done with the most complex reciprocating engine ever built - the turbo compound R3350. This engine had 6 times the capacity of a 520 but put out 12 times the horse power. In cruise it achieved a specific fuel consumption of 0.4 or better .
They achieved the long life and low fuel consumption by running LOP.
All Continental has to do is sort out it's intake system and then bite the bullet and subcontract the injectors to GAMI.They should then do a deal with suppliers of engine management systems and mandate their installation. Finally they should educate their customers how to run the engine LOP.
I said more than half. The rest is fuel saving over the life of the engine With mine I save 5 litres per hour running LOP . At $2.2 per litre over 3,600 hours the saving would be $39,600 . Worth doing I think.