Hi Terry, I actually agree with you. If you look at one of my early posts on this board I also said that biomass fuel is THE potential market for steam engine technology.
And, wow, was I off the mark with "Dinosaur juice isn't going to get cheaper or more plentiful in our lifetimes. "
I still think there's huge potential for steam engine technology with biomass fuel, even if petroleum is not in a temporary glut.
I'm not a big believer in magic or hope when it comes to if a technology will work, so I started to read whatever I could find about the Cyclone engine.
Harry wrote a lot in the steam car club forum. Advanced search for author "Harry Schoell" brings up his posts from 2002-5 and for "HLS" for posts after that.
Then add in the PRs, website claims (the Internet Wayback machine at archive.org stores older versions of the website) and the financial reports.
My impression of Harry has evolved from him being a sincere, although inept, "inventor", to being an egotistical prima donna, to being an outright fraud.
Jaundiced eye? I suppose so. The patterns over the many years are always the same: Claims of working hardware far better than the technical state of the art, boasts of how fantastic the performance will be and the accomplishments soon to come, dismissal of anyone who says different, failure to disclose that claimed performance is all based on speculation rather than actual measured results, and silence once the predicted result fails to appear.
The Mark 5 engine was first ordered in July of 2009 for promised delivery in January 2010. Phoenix Power was the customer, and they were clever enough to put in a late delivery penalty clause. They got $400K in stock in penalty payments for their $100K up front license fee. Good deal for them, bad deal for the stockholders who paid for that.
Cyclone still has not delivered a working Mark 5 although they've been continuously working on it since. The latest was the "success" of the rotary valve. Notice that the engine isn't powering anything, doesn't have the steam generator, condenser, fans, pumps, "regenerative Schoell cycle" or much else covered in the patents. And still it's struggling just to turn itself.
That's as far as the Mark 5 has come four and a half years after the original promised delivery date.
James Landon did not last much longer as CEO, and there was never again mention of these contractors.
But, the key fact is that Cyclone management has known for a long time that there are very serious design flaws in the Mark 5 that they do not have the expertise to fix.
Yet they have continued promising one delivery date after another, knowing they had no idea how to fix the problems and had no reason to think any of the promised delivery dates would be met.
So that's the fraud part. Extremely material information that has not been disclosed by management.
Will Cyclone Power continue in the steam engine business? No. Their technology just doesn't work. Will CYPW stay in the pink sheets and eventually be worth something? Could be. For instance, Harry could go back to designing drug smuggler boats.
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