Rusty,
It’s my issue all over
again.
John,
About last spring I
found water in my “new” engine that was bought from RX7 Specialties. It has been
sitting several years. I can only attribute the water to condensation as I don’t
think the shop ran these engines after they were mod’ed. When I removed the
drain plug I got rusty colored water. Not good. It took several weeks for it to
stop weeping. I intend to open the engine to see how much corrosion there is and
clean it out. Hopefully it has not gotten to the o-ring grooves. At the rate I’m
building I have plenty of time to work out any issues this
causes!
Dean
Head
Brooksville FL
Cozy
MK4
From:
Rotary motors in aircraft
[mailto:flyrotary@lancaironline.net] On
Behalf Of Russell
Duffy
Sent:
Sunday, January 02, 2005 9:24 PM
To: Rotary motors
in aircraft
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: Atkins
engine
Dave
L; I almost had the big one reading your post on Atkins engine, and the
condition of it being set up with rust. I nearly ran out to the garage,
tore the tape off the exhaust ports, grabbed a bar and turned the engine
over. To my delight, the compression is great and the rotors look like it
was assembled yesterday,
OK, take some slow deep
breaths, because you're not out of the woods yet. The rust was from water
in the cooling passages, which you can't see from the exhaust ports.
Remove the block drain plug and hope nothing comes out. It's located
on the center iron housing, on the oil filler neck side. At the bottom of
the housing, you'll see a long silly looking bolt, that resembles a long acorn
nut. Take that out and hope for the best. With any
luck, you won't be greeted by rust colored
water.
For the record, Atkins
certainly knows better than to store engines with water, and I suspect he
doesn't run them after he rebuilds them, so I don't know why there would be
water in there anyway, unless there could just be that much condensation built
up over the years. My engine was "new" from Mazda, but a few years
old. It was also full of rust because Mazda test ran them and
didn't drain the water. I still can't believe they did
that. Attached is a pic that Bruce sent when he opened it up.