Hi guys,
As we all know, inverting an engine has both positives and negatives.. and one of the major negatives is the fact that fuel can and will sit in the glow plug above the coil and cause dead sticks, and as most inverted engines are in cowled low wing planes, dead sticks can = dead plane. But even more importantly, dead sticks cause a lot of problems for ducted fan jet owners.. so after chatting to my mate down the club who flies a ducted fan jet running an OS91 in it, he was sick of trying to land when his plane went dead far from the strip.. basically he came up with a simple yet impressively effective solution to the problem to stop deadsticks occuring.

Basically if you take a 'D' size battery, it will power a glow plug.. so how bout just making the plug permantly glow with power? Simple... make a small onboard power source. So grab yaself a remote glow plug kit, a couple of rechargable 'D' sized battery's (only need one in plane at a time), grab yaself a 'D' size battery cradle from ya local electronics store (the small plastic single battery holders with positive/negative wires coming off them), a switch (can be either a normal switch as used with your radio gear or can be a switch ya pick up form the local electronic store also), and a short amount of wire.

So.. Take the remote glow plug and snip it just before the dummy plug that you normally mount to the cowl or fuselage or wherever you have them, so that you can clip the other end onto the glow plug on your engine with the two wires coming off it. Solder some more wire onto the positive end so that you have enough length to reach into the radio compartment through a small hole your drill in the firewall. The other wire will need to be a ground wire which you simply bolt to one of the bolts ont he engine mount, and also run this wire through the same hole you made in the firewall into the radio compartment (wrap the wire between the engine and firewall in some heat shrink to insulate or even some spaghetti/convoluded tubing.. Once you have run the wire into the radio compartment run the negative wire to the negative wire coming off you battery cradle. Then run the positive from the battery to the correct side of you switch, and obviously the other side of the switch to the positive wire runing to your remote glow plug.

There ya have it... you just switch it off/on when you turn you planes radio gear off/on, and the even better bit, is that it allows you to start the plane without the need for a glow plug driver, so when you hit a rabbit hole taxiing and it causes the prop to touch the ground and stall, theres no need for you to have to get out the glow plug driver and what not to get it fired up again.

The battery lasts for about 5-6 flights obviously its a good idea, to have a couple of 'D' cells charged at the field which you can simply change when needed.. but its cheap insurance to save your plane from deadsticks and potential disaster!

P.s. So far its been about 5-6 weeks now that we have run this set up and have had not one issue with the plug dieing from the permanant power source. Happy flying!!