This winter has been a time of change, yet again, for Chippy!
I began discussions in September 2018 with Jeff Schans, the Lycoming Thunderbolt engine manager, and soon made the decision in October to upgrade to a new 300 HP engine. My 250 HP Lycoming IO-540 had been very reliable and felt like an old friend! I had been grooming it for almost 10 years, including the 5 year rebuild between 2009 and 2014, and got it to a good place – it ran cool, and nicely lean of peak with GAMI fuel injectors.
But I really wanted the reliability of a new engine, and more power to improve airshow performance – especially going vertical! Thunderbolt offered me a small sponsorship to help with many of the costs, and I was able to sell my old engine on eBay which helped greatly with the transition. It sold almost immediately to the builder of an F-1 Rocket under construction in Minnesota – it’s a perfect engine for his fast cruiser. My goal was to replace it with a 300 HP Lycoming AEIO-540 EXP (experimental) – a Thunderbolt engine identical to those on the Red Bull racers.
Through the fall and winter I made a couple of drives up to the Lycoming factory in Williamsport, PA, carrying pieces of airplane with me to trial fit them to similar engines in the factory. All Thunderbolt engines are custom built. I carried the exhaust pipes and engine mount on one trip, and the entire cowling on another trip. As it turned out, the Red Bull engine I originally targeted would not fit “under the bonnet” without major reconstruction of Chippy’s entire nose, firewall forward. Chippy’s beautiful tight cowling cheeks were formed around the size and shape of the old package.
But after a bit of head scratching with Jeff Schans and a Lycoming engineer, we came up with a configuration perfect for Chippy. It is completing build up now! It will be a standard D sump and induction system (instead of cold air induction as on a Red Bull racer). But it will have 10:1 compression pistons, up from 8.5:1 in the old engine, and turn at 2800 RPM instead of my old motor’s 2550. It should deliver about 280 HP! I’ll be able to see it in action in a week or so when Lycoming runs the completed engine on their test cell.
We are very fortunate to also have a solid sponsorship from Electroair and their distributor Smooth Power, who are providing an electronic ignition system to replace the left magneto and shower of sparks system. We have the company logos already applied to Chippy’s nose.
The name speaks for itself – Smooth Power! It will deliver easy starts, reliability and improved fuel efficiency in cruise. I’m excited to have these new partners for the 2019 air show season!
