Hey Tom, I agree completely with your analysis.
I started digging into the details to find out of small steam systems just aren't viable, or if Cyclone's execution was the problem. After figuring out that nothing Harry says is true, the pieces started coming together.
I used to think Harry's problem was monumental ego. As in having the arrogance to design a complete engine far different than anything that's been built before, and just expect it to work.
My opinion has now changed to the problem being he has no idea just how clueless he is. For instance, the first Mark 5 was sold to Phoenix in July 2009 for delivery in January 2010. It still hasn't been delivered.
Now can you imagine spending more than five years trying to make the Mark 5 work? Other than the new rotary valve, that five years was spent trying to make the design in the patent work.
And it's not like there was a lack of resources, he was burning millions of dollars per year.
We've figured out that the water lubrication doesn't work, that the valve design can't work, that the condenser is far too small and that trying to make a small supercritical steam system work is its own complete can of worms.
But Harry still believes in all that stuff. He's in way over his head and clearly has never had any idea of what to do. So he tinkers and guesses and tries things. And after five years there's no progress at all.
A month or so ago there was a discussion on the steam car club forum about the Army generator. Karl Petersen, who was Cyclone's VP of engineering for maybe a year, said he bought the first pressure sensor for measuring what was going on inside the engine. I think he had also bought the first dynamometer to measure engine output. (Some people got pretty critical of Cyclone and this discussion was deleted.) He posted a graph of measured engine power output, but apologized because the RPM of the engine was going up and down over a big range. He attributed that to their home-made boiler.
Harry was working, for years, without knowing what the engines were actually doing. When you see pictures of at test setup, you see mismatched gauges from boat instrument panels and Harbor Freight Chinese multimeters duct taped to the test stands.
How can anyone spend millions on engine development without an instrumented test cell? If you are developing a steam engine, how can you not have a commercial boiler that provides steam at a fixed pressure and temperature for engine testing?
One of the correspondence schools in Popular Mechanics many years ago had a motto: "The man who knows HOW will always have a job. The man who knows WHY will always be his boss."
Harry knows how valves and condensers and bearings work, he just has no idea why they work.
AI
