Absolutely. Creston, can you pin Chuck's post too?
Here's some timeline to illustrate.
* Sep 13, 2005 Harry Schoell starts filing patents for the Mark 5. The applications have fully detailed assembly drawings.
* November 17, 2008 WHE system sold to Bent Glass Design. It was finally reported running on December 14, 2010, but years later Cyclone admitted removing it after a couple weeks.
* July 30, 2009 First two Mark 5 engines are sold to Phoenix Power with a quoted delivery time of six months. In the intervening four years Cyclone had not been able to make the much simpler WHE engine work.
* September 12, 2011 Cyclone enters a contract to sell two Mark 5s to Combilift, this time with a quoted delivery of 9 months. Cyclone had already been paying $25,000 per month late delivery penalties to Phoenix.
* December 2011 Shareholder Open House where Harry tells investors the technical problems had all been solved. No engines were demonstrated running because of "the insurance".
* April 2012 Phoenix had collected the contract maximum of $400,000 in late delivery penalties from Cyclone.
* February 2013 Cyclone hires Ohio State University to "assist in commercialization" of the WHE engine. OSU's real goal is to make the WHE run for 200 hours under part load to get a progress payment from Phoenix.
* September 30, 2013 Phoenix cancels order for Mark 5s.
* February 23, 2015 Cyclone posts a "progress" video of the Mark 5. It shows about of minute of the engine turning but not powering anything and the speed going up and down uncontrollably, just like in the March 2010 video.
* May 2016 Q2Power ends work on the WHE engine without having gotten the 200 running hour progress payment from Phoenix.
So, what have we got?
Engines were not run at the 2011 Open House because of "the insurance", but all the videos Cyclone has posted show people with no more safety equipment than a cheap plastic face shield, and many without that. Obviously a face shield is all "the insurance" really requires. Harry wouldn't let the engines be run because it would quickly demonstrate he was lying about technical problems being fixed.
Contracts were signed (and continue to be signed) to deliver working engines knowing they had no working engines and no idea how to make the engines work.
Cyclone didn't start to build a Mark 5 until four years after the patents had been filed. All the performance claims and awards came literally before any real hardware was built, let alone tested. Videos of Harry from the period show him pointing to the engine mockups and claiming performance as if the mockups were real engines. He never let on they were just mockups.
We're now seven years past the initial promised delivery of the Mark 5 and Cyclone has not provided a word of explanation as to why.
The work Ohio State did was solely to make a prototype engine run for 200 hours. They didn't succeed, nor did Q2Power with a couple more years of work (using real engineers). Cyclone has been claiming for year having engines completing Alpha, Beta and Pre-production stages, but the truth is they do not yet have a proof-of-concept prototype of anything.
Yet they continue to sign contracts to deliver working engines.
Their "One Engine" delusion had for years focused on building auto engines. If you figure car engines will last for 200,000 miles and average 40 mph, that means a typical car engine lasts for 5,000 hours. Industrial engines, for instance in generator sets, quote design lives of 60,000 hours and more.
Has any Cyclone engine survived running for one hour? Considering they spent hundreds of thousands on that land speed record car, did huge bragging on it, and have never run it even though the engine only needs to run for less than five minutes, Harry and Frankie know fully well they are nowhere near proof-of-concept, and never have been. The whole stream of claims of being market-ready and production starting has been fraudulent.
