How are things going out there in FG60R3 land?! Its a bit quiet in here so assuming all is well.
Not so on my side. I put the engine back together, with the timing ring and the induction mod from MM and thought I would get 'clever' and see if it would run on a Walbro carb. I had a spare from a DLE55RA that I had lying about, as well as the MM Walbro conversion kit. Installed on my test stand, and managed to get it running. The geometry on the throttle linkage to the servo on my stand was not good, and a quarter stick movement on the Tx was idle to full ball on the engine. I mad some changes purely for testing, but it was not ideal and at one start up, I had the throttle too far forward and the thing screamed into life and almost immediately 'dropped' a cylinder and I stopped it. I feared the worst and rotated it gently through and noticed that I definately only had 2 compression strokes. The only potential diagnoses without stripping it was either bent, or a tuck valve. There were no 'loose parts' Removing the plugs revealed no compresison on No3, and removing the valve covers revealed that one of the pushrods had come out of its adjustor and jammed the rocker open. The adjuster appeared to have stripped out. Replaced and all is well. This is an interference engine, so if that valve had stuck any further open, it would probably have bent. I think this one was lucky though....I say lucky, but I should have got the throttle geometry right, and this wouldnt have happened. Only myself to blame.
Decided to put the original carb back on, and got her started up again. It needed 6 turns out on the LSN to get it to be rich enough to run and transition, with 1.5 turns out on the HSN...There is something not right with this setup. I dont believe its the carb, so I am going to look for where it could be sucking air in. Its either at the carb fitting to the engine, the phenolic tube, the inlet manifold gaskets or now that its a negative crank setup, it could be leaking air at the breather. Will investigate and report back.
My DISCLAIMER to all of you is that you should NOT be doing all the tinkering I am doing! I am purely doing this out of interest, and in the interest of having the results somewhere for others to read. I say this because a lot of the guys at my club have suggested that I should never have done all the mods and tinkering with the engine, and should have just run it. Well, thats what I did originally, and this engine has just never.run.properly from the start. It had a good run in, it was installed properly on a plane, and correct fuel/oil ratios....and it has simply not performed at all..
So now, my fun is not from FLYING this engine, but tooling around with it. I have been out flying my Yak55M with 70cc Twin RCGF engine, so at least getting my fly-time in....