Flying on the Cheap - Wood

wrote:
Bret Ludwig wrote:
...

Direct drive VW made sense in 1965. Not today. Use a liquid cooled car
engine and a redrive, perhaps a Honda since they are attractively
priced as JDM pulls.

Have you seen many airplanes flying with liquid cooled car
engines and a redrives?

A few.

How many with Honda engines?

Fewer.

Is the CVCC engine better (or worse) for flying than other
auto engines?


The CVCC is rarer than a Lycoming now since the Honda cars made with
it are almost all crushed out. I think they discontinued CVCC in the
_very_ early eighties. Most Honda mechanics working today have never
seen one. You must be a fossil to even remember CVCC.

The point is not what is most common today but what would offer the
best prospects for inexpensive, safe flying. If safety is the ONLY
criterion there is only one way to turn a propeller worthy of
consideration, a real aircraft engine: namely, the P&WC PT-6A.

REAL aircraft engines are turbines. If you think otherwise you are
bull****ting yourself. Lycoming and Continental are, like Harley
Davidson and Porsche, toys for people with just a little too much
money.

I only suggested Hondas as a possible solution because of reliability
and the availability of "midtime" factory assembled engines as JDM
pulls, cheap. There may actually be a problem with them but because no
one has put much effort into flying them (save, a decade or two ago,
the BD-5 guys) we don't know. Most turn "wrong way", but that's not a
major issue unless you want to turn a surplus factory prop. Even then a
gear drive could fix that.