Siezed low-time neglected turbocharger

[kevinh]

I have an Aervovee turbo on my WIP waiex (first flight in 6 months) and I'm fairly happy with how Sonex has handled this. Thanks.

I built my RV7 and flew it for 500 hours, I'm totally familiar with how service bulletins occur.

[Gordon]

The Turbo Fiasco......?

This is an unfortunate situation for both Sonex and the customers. I think Sonex put the Turbo on the market "in good faith" and the customers bought that product "in good faith". As we know now the situation has "went sideways". I don't have a "dog in this race".......I have a Hummel engine......but in support of Mark at Sonex, we as customers should never think Sonex has the "deep pockets" of General Motors or Ford for example.

My Silverado (Duramax diesel) has "bumper to bumper" warranty for 3 years and I expect GM to live up to that agreement. I would not expect the same from Sonex......just saying.

No disrespect to you Robbie....this has cost you money and aggravation....I am not in your shoes but I do feel your pain.

For the record.....my Silverado (2014) has NEVER been back to the dealer for ANYTHING.......GM has a much larger research and development department than Sonex.........nuf said.

I am glad to see Sonex is working hard to fix the problem.............to be continued.

Gordon.....Onex......Hummel 2400

[Onex107]

One comment, one concern.

Start with the comment:

For those who claim other companies make you pay for SB services and parts, that’s not always the case. I know this for a fact.
My hangar buddy is completing his RV-7A project. He’s got a brand new Lycoming engine that has not run yet.
Perhaps some of you might have heard of a recent Lycoming mandatory SB affecting a certain batch of engines, if I remember correctly it had something to do with the wrong bushings having been used on the conrods ?
Anyway, the engines affected required partial disassembly, inspection and perhaps replacement parts if they are found to be faulty.
My hangar buddy's engine was one of those and since he bought his Lycoming through Vans and they will be paying for this, but I’m sure they will in their turn claim back their cost from Lycoming.
Anyway, it might depend on the circumstances but here’s at least one example I know for a fact where the supplier pays for services and replacement parts caused by a mistake on their part.

Now more importantly, one major concern I have with the proposed solution:

That electric fan. Those things are very sensitive to moisture and they do short out when exposed.
I know this from experience because I was a Bitcoin miner and owned an Antiminer S9 up until a month ago or so when I sold it.
If you don’t know what an Antminer looks like, just google it. You’ll notice they have 2 very similar 4.5” fans on the front and back of these units, 6000rpm on the front and 4500rpm on the back (they produce a lot of heat so require serious cooling).
Anyway, my miner was set up in the garage and because of the heat and noise these things produce. I had my miner draw air from the outside through air conditioning ducting which I had running uphill and I also had a filter in the system to minimize moisture.
Still, in the space of a couple of months I’ve had to replace the front fan of the miner twice because moisture had crept into the centre coils/electronics and shorted out the thing. This would happen after a foggy or rainy day so I stopped running the miner on those days.
Now we know the Sonex cowl is not weatherproof, at least not my older vertical split version, so, to ensure this time things do not happen “outside the scope of testing”, can I suggest you fly the test aircraft sufficiently through foggy and rainy conditions and see what effect it has on this fan?
After all this, the one thing you would not want to happen is have your customers stuck with a solution where they have to replace the fans of these units every couple of months.

I suggest that you don't pick apart the research/development Sonex is doing before it's complete. In order to do good development work you change one thing at a time and test and document the results. This takes a lot of time. Be patient. They haven't been able to test in 90 degree ambient temps. yet. It's cold in Wisc. I don't expect any postive conclusions until 2018 Oshkosh.

[rizzz]

One comment, one concern.

Start with the comment:

For those who claim other companies make you pay for SB services and parts, that’s not always the case. I know this for a fact.
My hangar buddy is completing his RV-7A project. He’s got a brand new Lycoming engine that has not run yet.
Perhaps some of you might have heard of a recent Lycoming mandatory SB affecting a certain batch of engines, if I remember correctly it had something to do with the wrong bushings having been used on the conrods ?
Anyway, the engines affected required partial disassembly, inspection and perhaps replacement parts if they are found to be faulty.
My hangar buddy's engine was one of those and since he bought his Lycoming through Vans and they will be paying for this, but I’m sure they will in their turn claim back their cost from Lycoming.
Anyway, it might depend on the circumstances but here’s at least one example I know for a fact where the supplier pays for services and replacement parts caused by a mistake on their part.

Now more importantly, one major concern I have with the proposed solution:

That electric fan. Those things are very sensitive to moisture and they do short out when exposed.
I know this from experience because I was a Bitcoin miner and owned an Antiminer S9 up until a month ago or so when I sold it.
If you don’t know what an Antminer looks like, just google it. You’ll notice they have 2 very similar 4.5” fans on the front and back of these units, 6000rpm on the front and 4500rpm on the back (they produce a lot of heat so require serious cooling).
Anyway, my miner was set up in the garage and because of the heat and noise these things produce. I had my miner draw air from the outside through air conditioning ducting which I had running uphill and I also had a filter in the system to minimize moisture.
Still, in the space of a couple of months I’ve had to replace the front fan of the miner twice because moisture had crept into the centre coils/electronics and shorted out the thing. This would happen after a foggy or rainy day so I stopped running the miner on those days.
Now we know the Sonex cowl is not weatherproof, at least not my older vertical split version, so, to ensure this time things do not happen “outside the scope of testing”, can I suggest you fly the test aircraft sufficiently through foggy and rainy conditions and see what effect it has on this fan?
After all this, the one thing you would not want to happen is have your customers stuck with a solution where they have to replace the fans of these units every couple of months.

I suggest that you don't pick apart the research/development Sonex is doing before it's complete. In order to do good development work you change one thing at a time and test and document the results. This takes a lot of time. Be patient. They haven't been able to test in 90 degree ambient temps. yet. It's cold in Wisc. I don't expect any postive conclusions until 2018 Oshkosh.

Just sharing a bad experience I’ve had with these types of fans, making sure they don’t overlook this potential problem.
If it doesn’t help, it surely won’t hurt either.

[WaiexN143NM]

Hi all,
Rizz just passing on some knowledge, not criticizing. Sun & Fun coming up mid april. Maybe sonex will be going with red one. Good X-C to pick up some more testing data. April in florida plenty warm.
Good luck with their testing and solutions. I surely hope this is wrapped up and turbo owners flying by osh 18. Plenty of turbo fliers will be happy.

WaiexN143NM
Michael

[John Monnett]

"Now we know the Sonex cowl is not weatherproof, at least not my older vertical split version, so, to ensure this time things do not happen “outside the scope of testing”, can I suggest you fly the test aircraft sufficiently through foggy and rainy conditions and see what effect it has on this fan?"
What? "Test fly in foggy and rainy conditions"... are you serious? This has nothing to do with the condition of flight only the post shutdown heat soaking of the turbo and coking! If a fan would fail on the ground so what?
As to flights to Sun N Fun, our turbo Waiex has made that flight with no apparent problems. It is well known we learned long ago that flying from Oshkosh to Lakeland at that time of year was very iffy and risked not showing up at all after spending thousands of dollars for display space, therefore we don't fly there... because our aircraft are designed for fun in VFR conditions and not equipped for IFR! Not understanding that is just crazy to me. Sonex staff and I continue to work at improving our aircraft and related products with over 800 AeroVee engines in the field... that is the number one reason that at nearly 75 I am still involved at the heart of this endeavor.

[rizzz]

What? "Test fly in foggy and rainy conditions"... are you serious? This has nothing to do with the condition of flight only the post shutdown heat soaking of the turbo and coking!

Sure, but I can see a number of ways moisture builds up under the cowl during flight and gets into this fan after shutdown.
And what about the ones who don't have hangar space available and store their Sonex outside?

If a fan would fail on the ground so what?

I thought this was supposed to be a set and forget system, you could walk away after shutdown and assume the fan will run until the system has cooled down enough?
So if the fan fails after a minute, how are you going to know before your next flight that has happened if you walked away? How can you be sure your turbo was adequately cooled after shutdown and the coking has not occurred?

And, lets ignore that for a second, assume you do know if/when it fails, I believe my last sentence was pretty clear on the "so what" of this as well:

After all this, the one thing you would not want to happen is have your customers stuck with a solution where they have to replace the fans of these units every couple of months.

But in the end John, there is really no need to get so defensive.
All I'm doing is sharing a bad experience I've had with these types of fans, although the application was very different, the fans appear to be quite similar and as I tried to explain in detail I had a setup where I actually did all I could to mitigate moisture getting into my device. Yet it did and broke the fans.

Anyway, take it for what it's worth, only trying to help here.

You have tremendous experience with VW aero conversion engines, no doubt. But these engines do not usually involve such electric fans.
I have some experience with those things and it wasn't good. Just thought it might be worth sharing. Perhaps next time I better keep my mouth shut.

[wlarson861]

Can we all take a step back here? I was one of the first affected by the turbo issues yet I am not throwing stones at the company. The first 13 or so pages of this thread were about Sonex not doing anything about the problem. After Mark said they were doing something we all jumped on and wanted to know why it isn't done already. Jeesh give it a minute. Onex107 is a friend and I agree that a test should involve one variable at a time . We are the example of why the factory doesn't tell us everything they are working on. We get wind of something and demand answers to questions that haven't even been asked yet. The AeroVee turbo was awesome when it worked and I really would like it to be the engine of choice. As for me I am moving on to the Jabiru 3300 because I can afford to do so. But will support the efforts at AeroVee to bring the turbo to it's final place as a viable engine. Sonex is as hoodwinked by this problem as the rest of us and I think they should get the leeway to solve the problem as much as is possible.

[Brett]

Perhaps in the better interests of all involved we could take a step back, delete this whole thread.... entirely,,,, and move on as fellow aviators.

[lpaaruule]

Fan design is something to consider. I can speak from experience in a test engineering lab. We had attempted to use muffin type fans to pull air through vehicle air meters while in an environmental chamber. They didn't last long.

We eventually started buying vehicle radiator fans, and using them instead of the muffin fans. They were the only fans we found at the time that would last.

It's been years, and I can't remember if we were doing humidity testing, or just power/temp cycling. I think it was just power/temp.

Of course, they might make the muffing type fans better now days.