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There's a little company in Sidney, B.C. that is putting the world's first 5 year or 500 hour warranty behind their liquid cooled engines. Sound unbelievable? Typically, the competition offers six months or a year of warranty and the supposedly super reliable factory aircraft engines from Lycoming and Continental come with as little warranty as the companies can get away with.
How can Firewall Forward risk such a lengthy guarantee? To find out, I visited their facility near the Victoria International Airport where they are manufacturing, modifying and overhauling a series of engines they offer. Firewall Forward conducted a serious due diligence program on the original CAM 100 engine when they bought production rights from Canadian Airmotive. They were very impressed with the quality of the original offering but also found a few components they modified to ensure a long-lived reliability.
The recent warranty announcement comes after the tear down inspection of a 700 hour engine the company bought back from one of its customers. "We knew the engine was good, but we had no way of knowing precisely how good," admitted company manager, Bob Masters, "and the only way to prove what random field checks predicted ~ that our engine would show very little wear ~ was to open up one of the engines and take it apart piece by piece." The 700+ hour engine chosen had served in one of Snobird's Aircraft's gyrocopters. Snobird President, Dave Noack claims the CAM 100 is by far the smoothest and quietest experimental aircraft engine he has ever flown. Before making the CAM 100 their engine of choice, Snobird tried several other engines and despaired of finding one that would meet the "wear and abuse" their flight training schedule punishes engines with on a daily basis. This abuse included operating with an undersized radiator that resulted in engine overheating episodes that left a trail of steam and running the engine out of oil ~ plus other abuses Noack prefers to leave to the imagination.
Noack explains, "Unlike the airplane, the gyroplane operates at a much greater power setting with most of its flight time at higher rpms, much of it over 80 percent. Probably the most demanding thing we put the engines through are the slow flights and constant throttle manipulations. During slow flights we don't have the airspeed to generate additional cooling for the engine. Sometimes we slow flight to less than 10 mph and full throttle (this can be extremely demanding of both the engine and the cooling system). Many of the maneuvers we frequently perform require the throttle chopped back to an idle and abruptly brought back to full throttle (also very demanding of any engine)." "With the abuse that we can offer, I am happy to say the CAM 100 engine has withstood the greatest test of all ~ TIME!"
Masters and CAM 100 technician Al Wilson tore down the engine and showed me the results:
If this engine had operated under perfect conditions, you might expect it to have very little wear, but according to Noack, quite the opposite occurred. "...we flew the dickens out of our aircraft. We used it mainly for flight training and demo rides. One passenger I took up weighed 360 pounds. A gyroplane already demands a lot more power to fly than your conventional, fixed-wing counterpart so this was a real feat but not a problem." Masters quickly adds, "one engine and one application does not a warranty make." Nonetheless, the variety of satisfied customers is overwhelming evidence for the company to dedicate its surprising warranty offer to purchasers. (Yours truly saw a number of these strongly worded kudos ~ but space doesn't permit publishing same.) "Our competition is well established," Masters mentions, "but frankly we don't think their engines stand up to ours. So, instead of matching the 6 month or one year warranties they offer, we're making a real commitment to stand behind our products by offering the 5 Year 500 Hour Warranty! Everyone talks about the quality of their conversions, but thus far only the CAM 100 producers are prepared to put their customers peace of mind and satisfaction at the top of the list.
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