Hi,

I done a search and did not get a return. I hope there are some older engine guru's here. I have two K&B 61's that are, I am guessing about 1980 era. Both engines are NIB, that I recieved from a friend who planned to get into RC planes, but never did. I ran one in last week and was pleased at how easy it was to get it to run well. I have heard say from folks here around my flying area, that these engines produce power close to 46 to 52 size glow engines of current production. That said I have several models I could use these two engines in.

My problem is this. The needle valve doesn't have a way of extending the thumb surface to get it out of a cowel. There is no set screw or such. It is a brass unit. How did you guys extend these needle valve thumb screws. I am thinking of two ways. 1. Braise a piece of brass onto the existing part. 2. Drilling it out to allow hooking on to it.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I used shrink sleeve and a 1/4 inch wooden dowel to extend the one on this OPS .60. It extends the NV and is slighly flexible to reduce the effects of vibration if there is any.

I recently bought a used Perry carb that someone had soldered a 2" piece of brass tubing on the NV to extend it. Long extensions on needle valves can cause problems over time due to the vibrating weight on a long moment arm. Another method I've used is to add a socket head/Allen screw to the short NV that only requires a small hole in the cowl and use an Allen driver to reach through the hole to tweak the NV. A short length of fuel tubing over the NV/screw head (never needed it) might help reduce the effort to 'find' the socket head on a vibrating/running cowled engine. This slight hassle is worth it (to me) to save the carb/nv assembly as well as the looks of the front end of the airplane. Once it's set, the NV shouldn't need much tweaking for the day's flying.

Terry in LP