This engine has a gas-generator turbine wheel which doesn't produce a lot of thrust. It was originally the first stage of a helicopter, as Dean has said.

The parts for the engine were sold in 2003 to a guy called Neil Key who was producing helicopter engines. He had bought a load of parts from Dick Wallinger who was a friend of ours and was involved with the first Wren helicopter in 1999. Dick had decided to make heli engines and bought some parts from us whilst sourcing others himself, but then he went onto other projects and sold the turbine heli stuff to Neil.

The engine would have more power if the gas-gen wheel was changed for a thrust one. Dean sent the engine to us recently but when the guys saw it was in one of Neil's engine cases, with his red FOD screen on there, they declined to work on it. We don't know what's inside it but we do know that not all the parts are genuine Wren ones. We don't know how well it was built, it's an old engine and we suspect that it would need a lot of new parts to bring it up to a standard where we would be prepared to give a warranty on the work we'd done, and that would be almost as costly as a new engine. So we checked the ECU and changed some settings, we put a tailcone in the box with the engine (gasgen engines don't have one) and returned it to Dean.

If there is a homebuilder out there with time to spare who has a thrust turbine wheel, then perhaps they would be able to help.

BTW, reference Dean's comment about an "undesirable" - Neil traded as Turbine Technics and caused a lot of problems to a lot of people by taking money for engines and not providing them. We supplied parts to him from April 03 until early 04 when we started to hear complaints from his unhappy customers and stopped dealing with him.

Sara Parish
Wren Turbines

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