Confession time, Pé kindly sent me a PM asking if I had the engine inverted, in which case my flooding could be due to the carb being upsidedown, so being the good engineer I looked at the instructions that came with the engine and removed the carb and then the back plate, turned the back plate around and put the carb back on, wait for it still upside down, it was not until Pé mentioned in one of his posts "ensure the pressure pipe is on the cast cover" that I realised my mistake, this engine now starts second flick and is pulling a 24x10 JFX wooden prop at 6300rpm on only its first tank of fuel, this thing is a beast and should satisfy my desire for a 3D plane at half throttle, I hate noise.

Mike