new engine!!!!

As much as I love my dragonfly. The maintenance required for the limbach happens a little more than I'd like. First of all this is the original engine that was in the plane in 1987. While it has been relatively trouble free other than needing a new set of heads about a year ago. I feel like having to pull the cowling off, and adjust the valves every 20-25 hours to be a bit more than I'd like. Stretching that interval to 30 hours just isn't possible. I typically adjust at 20 hours and the #3 exhaust valve always seems to need it.

So, out with the old and in with the new as they say. New to me that is. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what i can fit under my cowling without a ton of modifications. I originally wanted the Jabiru 3300, but it turned out that it was going to be a ton of work, heavier and really a lot more power than I needed. I know, there's no such thing as too much power... Basically, it was going to take a ton of work to fit under the cowling and I hat working with fiberglass.

I also looked at some auto conversions, but again heavy and I thought they were overly complex to adapt to airplanes.

Finally, I settled on the UL Power 260is. The problem with this engine was price. I was going to have to wait another year to buy a new one because they are currently $22,800 brand new plus shipping. I couldn't help but ask some questions and someone suggested I get in touch with the US distributer in case they knew of a used engine somewhere. Would you believe Ray knew of one? So, off a check went for $14,450 to Kaolin Aviation for an engine with under 100 hours on it, and a 54x50 carbon prince p-tip propeller came along with it as well.

So right now I'm waiting for weather to clear up so estes can pick it up for me. In the mean time I've roughly modeled the engine mount, talked to Lonnie at Prince Propellers, spoke with composite aviation about fabbing me an engine mount, got an update from GRT avionics that receives the signal from the ECU for engine monitoring, and I've started buying various things for the install.