OK, lets see if I can catch everyone's questions....

For 66Malibu: None of the product that you mention above rings a bell. During my time, we had the TeeDee .020, TeeDee .010, and the .049/51/.09/.15 series, and of course the Conquest .15. Maybe a pic would jar my memory, but I can't imagine a brass cylinder. The metalurgies don't make sense. I'm not saying it didn't exist. Folks in engineering could do what they wanted. It's possible that it existed in that department. But given the heat expansion characteristics and wear characteristics....It would have had to be a novelty. Even Roy's old and original ThimbleDrome's had steel cylinders. I'm saying I never saw those products. We had an attic above the offices which we were allowed to "raid" and submit for company approval to purchase. Approvals were not always granted, especially for product that was never released. I've done my share of raiding and never came across anything like that.

As far as endurance tests, the drum of fuel is new to me. When design changes took place, occasionally, and only occasionally you'd go home with an engine wailing away in the test cell, and then still running when you came back in the following morning.....But that's about the extent of it. I never did that type of testing. In customer service we had one sound-dampened test cell. and in the main factory, we had I believe 4 (don't quote me on that). They were all ventilated and sound dampened. It wasn't loud orr anything like that. It was all environmentally controlled in the test cell. The folks I spoke to in engineering would do this and then a tear down. They would bluepprint the engine pre-run, and then after the run, do it again and compare notes on the high-wear item.....But to run it on a drum (55 gal) until empty or death......I don't think the glow plugs would have lasted long enough. The glow plugs in that day was a pure platinum wire. No iridium alloys or other metalurgies. I'd put a keg of beer that the 55gal drum thing was never done.

An all night run? Certainly when appropriate.

Kit who was the engine tech in Customer service in those days would occasionally do an all nighter, but they were rarer than the engineering folks. The Conquest .15 was one of those occasions. You either got one that screamed like a banshee, or ran like a turd. There was a lot of warranty repairs/returns. Kit (the tech's name) would take his dremel and jewelers files and work magic. I have a vague and probably not accurate memory of a Conquest droning all night long in Kit's test cell in Customer Service. Something had changed in design, and the returns skyrocketed. Kit was methodical. He could grab one from the engine line, and then run the soup out of it, tear it down, so he knew how to support folks over the phone, and best how to tweak the engine when they were shipped back to us. Kit was all about quality. Kit could grind the ports by eye, and turn a turd into a monster. Something I didn't learn to do for about another five years.

I owned only one Conquest 15. I played all the games on it's construction, and had a blistering screamer. I had Kit "bless" it before I bought it. It was one wild engine. Can't remember what happened to it..... In fact, can't even remember the bird it went into.

Pretty much what I do today for modelers. Take an engine, and set the curve for their flying style. Convert glow to spark, mod the carbs for gas (requires machining if a walbro can't be fit to the engine), etc. Funny, in those days, I still flew an Ohlson and Rice .19 ignition. Today, you'll see my Saito 150 4C running on similar fuels. White gas (Coleman lantern fuel) and 20:1 Valvoline TC-W3 oil. It doesn't slobber, and after I flow-port the heads, I don't loose any performance over nitro. can still run on glow (with a plug temp range change) or spark.

The all time record RPM that I personally observed was an after-hours fun test. Had nothing to do with the company. I took a reeded .049, spooked the carb up as previously documented, put the heat sink on the glow plug from one of our car models, and just the flywheel off of the dragster. In front of the engine was a fan. The only friction for the engine, was itself. I was using the "racing" variety of fuel.

After a slobberingly rich breakin...I slowly played the needle. 30k, 35k, 40k, back and forth. Our tach was a large hand-held reed tach that you held up to the engine's casing. The appropriate reed would vibrate. Once the engine was broken in, I had less than one minute before the glow plug packing material overheated and puked. I achieved 57,500 ish RPM, and then the engine basically disintegrated. Parts went everywhere. I wasn't in the test cell. I was standing outside because I was a coward and didn't feel like getting hit with flying fragments of very hot engine parts. The crank failed at the connecting rod, the ball joint and the bottom end of the connecting rod survived, but the con-rod was broken in the middle, and was discharged out the bottom of the engine rather violently. The c'case bushing area was no longer round. It was oval. Aluminum shavings everywhere. Astonishingly...the piston itself did NOT seize nor fail. And of course the packing burned out of the glow plug.




Now back to some more serious matters and back on topic.....as for resetting the ball joint. Be careful. The top of the connecting rod (the ball area) was never machined smooth. It has little rings on it from the CNC machines. If you tighten the socket too much to the point that the rod cannot move freely....It becomes a virtual file, and will carve itself clearance if you don't maintain some clearance when you do the resetting. Not pretty. The resultant copper shavings then get lodged between the piston and cylinder and damage them. They can only be replaced, not repaired or resurfaced. At those speeds, the stuff basically welds itself to the steel and gouges the piston side.


Another word for those wishing to spook up today's smaller engines: Polish the transfer ports. What seems like a miniscule imperfection to us, is a Grand Canyon to these little engines. Purchase some 8000 grit grease polishing compound from a lapidary supplier. Get in there with a dremel and a felt tip. Polish it until it is a near mirror. Follow it up with 20-30,000 grit diamond grease from the same lapidary supplier. It's going to take time. The point is NOT to remove material, just change the topography. DO NOT grind on the cylinder. Only the transfer ports.

The lubricant in the fuel forms a film, and the airflow is much smoother across these area. This means increased fuel flow, and improved scavenging efficiency. All of this equates out to increased RPM measurable at the prop. There is of course more to porting than that, but at least most folks can do that without an elongated lecture about how to tune and tweak port flow directionality and such....


Hope this helps.


Dave............