Agree Marlin, the spending priorities have always been wrong at Cyclone, to a large extent because they believe they have an "ingenious inventor". Why spend money on systematic R&D when you've got a genius on staff?
One example comes from many years ago when Harry Schoell was still posting on the steam car board (he hasn't in a long time, but then people had stopped fawning over the Cyclone engine and started saying things like "Stop telling us what it's GONNA do, tell us what it has DONE.") The ceramic ball bearings used in the engines quickly failed. What Harry described was a textbook lack of lubrication failure. He then went on to explain that ball bearings are really tiny electrical generators and without oil to insulate the parts the electricity they generate cause the bearing surfaces to fail.
It seems in more than a century that ball bearings have been in mass production by companies worldwide, all the engineers working in all those R&D labs had completely overlooked this failure mechanism.....
So, because Cyclone was being run by a self-proclaimed technical genius, there was no systematic investigation of lubrication issues, and they just kept building engines the same way and watching them quickly fail. Even after they hired Ohio State University to make the WHE engine work and the engineers there concluded no known bearings will survive in a Cyclone engine with water lubrication and proposed building a bearing test machine to develop new bearing materials, Harry Schoell's response was to ignore that and design new engines that fail in exactly the same ways.
If a working Cyclone engine is ever developed, it will be purely by accident rather than by intent. Given the history, though, lottery tickets are a far better investment than CYPW.
AI
