Raven Redrives Geo/Suzuki conversions

[cluttonfred]

I have had my eye on the Raven Redrives Geo/Suzuki (http://www.raven-rotor.com/) conversions for many years, but you don't seem to hear much about them. As I am most interested in smaller, lighter aircraft usually designed to take VW conversions, their Geo/Suzuki conversions are very appealing. Does anyone have any first-hand experience with the company or their products? Thanks, Matthew

[Eric Witherspoon]

You could try the Yahoo group - flygeo. It's not exclusive to Raven because there is at least 1 other company doing PSRU's for Geo/Suzuki-based engines. I have seen that the Raven company has presented a forum at the Copperstate Fly-In the past 2 years. I wasn't interested 2 years ago, and last year, I just missed them. From what I can gather, they seem to be more used on trikes than more conventional aircraft. Not sure why.

[DanH]

Raven makes a solid, proven system for the 3-cyl. The friction damper in parallel with a soft element is quite clever.

The engine itself has a balance oddity. It's an inline 3-cylinder without a balance shaft, so its block vibration is a pronounced wobble around its crank center. Imagine holding a pencil between thumb and forefinger, at the middle of the shaft. Now move the pencil in such a way to describe circles with the ends. That's the way an inline three moves on its mounts. No problem in a car, but it wobbles the entire prop disk in our application. So...keep the propshaft as short as possible, and the mount structure as stiff as possible.

Dan

[cluttonfred]

I did not know that, thanks much.