Warbird Information Exchange

Good to know of a recommended 3350 overhaul company. My gut feeling is there will not be a need for to many more rebuilds. The one Mars ( LYK aka Phillipine) hasn't been in the water in over 2 years. The company is a former shell of itself and is pretty much only focusing and maintaining the one aircraft (LYL aka Hawaii). They haven't had an engine rebuilt in along time and have been using up all the spare engines. The only spare engines now serviceable are hanging on the wings of LYK. Before they break into those spares I suspect they may want to ferry the aircraft to a new home first. *cough* Pensacola *cough*. But thats purely speculation and wishful thinking on my part.

Do you think thats because of the not so reliable overhauled engines?

Getting back to the Sea Furies absent this year at the Reno races, here are the numbers of total Sea Furies which qualified at Reno during the last twelve years and then... this year.



1997 9 all over 338 mph
1998 8 all over 383 mph
1999 8 all over 389 mph
2000 13 all over 383 mph
2002 8 all over 391 mph
2003 8 all over 406 mph
2004 7 all over 410 mph
2005 9 all over 405 mph
2006 8 all over 404 mph
2007 9 all over 402 mph
2008 7 one-367, rest over 402
2009 7 one-363, rest over 392
101 total = average 8.4 /yr. last 12 yrs.


2010 1 (R-4360, Dreadnought)

So why is that? They all now museum pieces?

There's a reason that the Sanders brothers are making a big push to converting Sea Furies to 2800 power now.

in this day of advanced metalurgy,engineering,and design technology can we not take some of the best ideas in all these engines and design a new on that will runn on todays fuel? or come up with modern solutions to the old problems of these engines? i know that just the oil technology has come miles,you can,t tell me that there aren,t some areas of operation where these things are better than turbines.

my other question is why has there never been a turbine powered propeller class at reno seems to me that the pond racer would have been a natural for such a class and we wold still have the plane and rick brickert to boot!!!

Because the market for these big engines (R2800's and R3350s) is probably 10 or 20 engines a year and that number is in decline. So the economies of scale are such that the cost per unit would be so high nobody could afford to purchase one...

I think your way off on the 10 or 20 deal. Its pretty much that many per engine overhaul place in existance, maybe even more. So I can think of maybe 3 or 4 outfits that still overhaul the big radials. So that would be more like 120 units per year all together in the US and maybe even more. And back in the big hay days of the fire bombers even more.
And there are cases where there has been improvements done on the old iron, I think the biggest obsticle to that is the FAA. But then I wonder about the experimental classes, and the air racers, how many modifications can be done?

As far as the list of R-3350 ENGINED RACERS is concerned. A comparison to the R-4360 engined racers is not really fair since Dreadnought, Furias and the old # 57 Super Corsair are the only single engined planes running 4360's. There are probably two dozen R-3350 powered Sea Furies. Their usage has eaten into the population of 26WD engines but they have held up pretty well under race conditions. Ray Anderson apparently recovered approximately 100 engines from Vietnam and assuming that they were not left open to the elements in the Nam since the '70's, they should be good engines to run or as cores for rebuild. I understand Ray tears them down and goes over these before they are sold.

As to efficiency, I remember reading a costa analysis study that indicated that the DC-7 with a R-3350 is on a cost per ton/mile is still the most cost effective airplane to fly cargo by air and this includes jets.

i know where there are three still in the can a block away from me over hauled and pickled the owner payed $1200 bucks a piece for them!!!