wrote in message
...
On Jan 14, 11:10 am, "Peter Dohm" wrote:
wrote in message

...
On Jan 13, 10:06 pm, "Peter Dohm" wrote:

At the obvious cost of proving myself a heretic regarding VWs....

We could go back into the old debate about whether a nearly stock VW
engine
could be a reliable 50 to 60hp powerplant with the right sort of
pressure
cooling system. With all due respect to Bob, a/k/a Veeduber, I am still
convinced that it can
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mybe it CAN. All I'm saying is that it never happened for me and I
gave it a pretty good go. Failures ALWAYS pointed to excessive
heating/lack of cooling.

Probably the biggest factor in folks thinking it CAN do that are the
ones that simply ran it til it dropped then built another, without
paying any attention to MTBO. I know two turbo types that thought TEN
HOURS was a good number for their heads. One of those guys swore up &
down that he NEVER HAD A LICK OF TROUBLE during a thousand hours
behind a turbo'd VW. But what he failed to mention was that those
thousand hours were accumulated on THREE DIFFERENT CRANKCASES and that
about the only time you saw his plane was at a fly-in or TORN DOWN,
getting new heads, new bearings, a new crankshaft, and so forth. But
he's right: It NEVER LET HIM DOWN. He never crashed. He never had
to land off-field (although he had a number of landings at strange
airports). And if he had to rent a U-Haul truck to get the thing back
home, why, that was just part of the game. (KR2, based in Oregon)

I don't look at flying that way.

-----------begin new post---------

I am really not dissagreeing with you--as the pressure system that I am
thinking of would use a VW type cooling fan to augment the ram air pressure.
That would be a rather obvious source of added weight and an easily visible
use of power--and would never be popular.

Interestingly, the guys I knew who broke cranks (amoung other interesting
problems) were also flying KR2s--although they were based in Florida.

Personally, that is not a level of reliability that I could accept; and I
have never considered an application that I believed would draw much more
than 40 HP continuously from a VW--even though I have been willing to
consider ideas that asserted a theoretical peak power of 60 HP.