-----------------


The ST carb is just fine in design. What the problem is is that the flow capability of the carb is too great for the available muffler pressure alone to provide sufficient fuel draw. Just about every engine made today is set up the same way. It's the horsepower race thing. HP sells engines.

There are two ways to increase an engine's horsepower. One way, the cheap way, is to increase the size of the carburetor and then let the user live with the disastrous side effects of poor fuel draw and rotten atomization. The other way, the most expensive way (Jett's, Nelson's, Rossi's) is to engineer the engine to produce the power without resorting to using a carb that is so large that it sacrifices good handling and fuel draw.

If you buy an engine that makes tremendous horsepower on the test bench, but whose tractability is so poor that you are constantly deadsticking or sagging out - what have you gained?

I would like to see engine manufacturers return to using smaller cfm carbs that provide excellent tractability without the need for muffler pressure or a pump at all. Then they could advertise their engines as being dead stone reliable. You'll never miss that few hundred rpm because you'll be happily flying your model without sagging engines or deadsticking constantly. It is time that this practice of putting too much carb on an engine ended. But it won't happen until you, the modeler, demands that it happens.

My Enya .45CX engines do not produce some of the horsepower figures that some other engines brag about. Yet, my Enyas will pull a 6.5 lbs. model through an FAI Hour Glass maneuver (vertical eight with a half roll in the middle) without protest. I've seen other "hot" engines try this and watched them sag out after the half roll. The pilot had to abort the maneuver. Yet their engines turned the same prop a little faster when flat and level than my Enya .45CX. Which was the better engine? There is no doubt in my mind. Oh, and I was running the stock mufflers - no resonant exhaust system.