Deciding To Go With an LS1
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009The decision to go with an LS1 conversion for my RV-10 started with the desire to be a little different and from a bunch of anecdotal evidence from friends who fly behind Lycoming and Continental engines. I have sure had my fill of stories revolving around off airport landings caused by the Lyc conking out in the air.
As well, I have always been a bit of a gear head and have been around racing for years helping out with a cousin’s race car.
I initially was one of the enchanted who made the trek to see the Crossflow Subaru. I sat down with Tony Howard who was working with them on a proper marketing strategy at the time. He later left the company because, believe it or not, they wouldn’t listen to his recommendations. We all know what happened with Crossflow and how they took a lot of people’s money without delivering any product.
After this adventure, I began to explore the possibility of putting a variant of the GM Ecotec engine in the RV-10. They make a 4, 5 and 6 cylinder variant of this engine. Problem was that there wasn’t any type of gear box that I could find that would fit.
This led me down the temporary insanity path of thinking that I could design the gearbox myself. If you ever find yourself in a similar position seek professional help right away. I then sought out the help of Jack Kane from EPI. This guy is vary smart when it comes gearbox design and I had the opportunity to meet him near Portland. In the end, we decided not to work together on the 4 cyl Ecotec supercharged engine as it would have to run at the very edge of its envelope to properly propell the RV-10 through the ait and get any semblence of comparable performance.
This is when I pretty much gave up on the whole alternative engine thing. I purchased the firewall forward package from Vans and began working with a local engine re-builder on putting together an IO-540 package for my -10.
I was well into this process when I came across Geared Drives and Bud Warren. I read about his gearbox and was instantly impressed having just learned all of the problems with other drives. I have since had the opportunity to see the engine package run in person at Oshkosh and I am sold.
This sale was not easily made as I had to put it by a large number of local friends (skeptics) one of which would have made the go/no go decision simply by making a comment either way.
I will talk some more tomorrow on the ramifications of making a decision change mid stream.
Dave