Cyclone Power Technologies, Inc. (fka CYPW)

[BuddyWhazhizname]

Ironically enough, the "Unadulterated self delusion" Jim Crank refers to probably includes Harry Schoell believing that Jim still supports him and his "ingenious invention".

(Jim Crank's quotes are at the bottom of this post.)

His summary of the situation

Correct, no Cyclone engine has ever powered any vehicle and never will.
Put it down to a pathetic lack of engineering knowledge about steam and what it takes to make a successful expander. Then couple that with a monumental ego and narcissistic belief that you have really invented a new system, ready to be mss produced from the initial sketch on a napkin. Unadulterated self delusion.

fits the history quite well.

Harry filed a bunch of patents before ever even trying to build and test prototypes to see if his theories even worked. The basic engine patent was filed in 2005 and the drawings show every detail was finalized, right down to the last nut and bolt. Cyclone stuck with this design until late last year when Harry started taking all is inventions off.

Once he got the patents he started selling licenses. He went to Society of Automobile Engineers meetings in 2006 and 2008 with a booth full of fake engines. I'll bet every single engineer that talked to Harry ended up saying "Yes, of course the mock-ups are very pretty, but do you have any working engines we can test?"

It's probably safe to say that every company in the world that manufactures piston engines has known since then of the Cyclone engine, and nobody has touched them with a 10 foot pole.

So Harry sold licenses to outfits that had never built any engines. There was Revgine who bought a license to build lawnmower engines, Renolavia Energy for solar engines and Great Wall Alternative Power for engines for the Chinese market. They got engine plans from Cyclone, but it was up to them to build the protoypes and make them work. Each of them took their losses and disappeared.

These were examples of Harry Schoell believing that his "cocktail napkin sketch" was suitable for immediate mass production.

It turns out this wasn't the first time for Harry. In the early 1990s he invented a radial gasoline engine. It got into Popular Mechanics as the modestly named Schoell Rolling Radial Engine. The reporter only saw a static model on display, but Harry claimed it ran exceptionally smoothly. (Sound familiar?)

I haven't been able to find any other mention of this engine. Harry let the patent lapse in 2002 for lack of maintenance fee payment, so it was obviously a dead end, too.

Now that was with a gasoline engine where you could buy parts from the local Napa store. Harry spent a bunch of his own money on this one and either he couldn't make it work, or he did make it work but couldn't persuade anyone in it. Either way, it was a dead loss.

So after writing that one off, he invents a radial steam engine which is something that he knows even less about than a radial gasoline engine. And his business plan stayed the same: get a patent and sell licenses without actually having a working engine.

This time, though, he got hooked up with some penny stock promoters so he could waste lots of other people's money.

Construction of the first Mark 5 engine started after the Phoenix Power order of July 2009. The Q2 2009 Quarterly Report (note 2) said Cyclone then had an operating loss of $6,431,254 cumulatively since inception. This had increased to $21.3 million attributable to actual operating losses by Q3, 2014 (the last report). That means $15 million has been spent by Harry and Frankie trying to get the engine to work.

OK, that's an exaggeration. By far most of this money has been spent on "General and Administrative" expenses, whatever those are.

So it all fits in with Jim Crank's assessment that Harry Schoell has no understanding of how to make a steam engine work but an ego grandiose enough to believe he deserves lots of other people's money for his 'vision'.