I am still flying a 1000X on my Kingcat, it has over a 1000 flights on it and it’s still going. But it was updated by Carlos so that it has all the good stuff in it (Wren NGV and turbine wheel, and Carlos’ combustor).

FWIW, my take on the demise of RAM. The real culprit was the vendor they were getting turbine wheels from. The vendor was supposed to do a full inspection on every wheel (X-ray and spin test), but it would seem this was not happening. The 1000’s just kept breaking turbine wheels. During this problem RAM received an order of 100 wheels and they did the inspection. Around half showed voids when X-rayed and quite a few more failed in a spin test. So out of that 100 something like 30 where usable. This meant a lot of engines where breaking that where built before they started doing inspections, and their reputation went down hill. After a while they started getting the wheels from Wren and the breakage problem went away, but it was just too late. If you know what to look for you can look down the tail pipe and tell which wheel is in the engine. If it has a Wren wheel the engine might be a good one, although if it still has the original combustor it will probably need to be changed, and Carlos makes a real good long life one.

Steven