Fun with Generic, Non-Threatening Title

First off, my original title for this thread was going to be, “Fun with Pipe You-Know-Whats, or Experiments with Eye-E-Dees”.  Eye-E-Dees standing for “Improvised Engine Docks”.  But I figured that if I put all those key words in one title, some NSA web monitoring bot would flag it and I’d be on a terrorist watch list for the rest of my life.

This thread is for my scheme for developing a simple Testors pipe bomb engine mount for an airplane as I talked about in Bob's thread.  I normally wait until I’ve completed my build or project before do a build thread so that I can either show a successful project, or just discard the evidence of failure and pretend it never happened.  But I figured I’d post as I go on this one.

Thoughts on this project:
1. The consensus on these pipe bomb engines is that they either run great, or they’re a P.O.S.
2. They obviously lack any proper mounting tabs making them re-usable after the donor model is toast.
3. The attached fuel tank is oddly shaped and gets in the way of mounting the engine.

For the hit-or miss nature of these engines.  I’m thinking it may be partly due to the way the fuel tank is attached to the body.  It is a press fit, and the only thing that makes a seal is a shallow groove molded into the case, and a small ridge around the reed housing in the tank.  This seems like a recipe for air leaks around the case back. Or not.  I may just be full of it.






The mounting tab issue.  If only Testors had just put the slotted tab on both sides of the engine instead of just the right side.  It would make for an easy mount.  The left side has no feature at all that can be used to hold the engine.  The engine will have to be encapsulated somehow.



The tank issue.  What the hell?  I don’t know who designed such a strange shape.  But just, damn…







The tank issue is the first thing I’ll tackle, as it is the biggest problem with making a compact mount.  Looking at it, I wondered just exactly how the fuel is picked up in the tank.  Since one of the tanks I have is cracked, I figured I’d just take a razor saw and hack off the back plate on the tank.  It’d permanently ruin the tank, but what the hell.  This is a “trash” engine anyway.  So, cutting off the back and looking in shows….  Ah-HAH!  A fuel nipple.  I can work with this.




A little more work the razor saw, a sanding block, and an X-Acto knife gave me this.






So, slipped into the engine case it looks like this.  I didn’t want to snap it back into case groove just yet, so it’s just loosely fit to get some measurements.






More to come,

The Non-Threatening Mark