Hey everybody welcome back to the shop. A couple of interesting tidbits just for fun. I've been installing the ignition system on 2621 and We're going to switch over soon on the patreon channel for a couple of weeks to finishing off 2920 and putting in a test cell, but then this one won't be too far behind But one of the things of what I do is what I do to make sure the engine is going to work. Before we take it to the test cell, I want to make sure that the ignition system works. So we're going to supply it with power.
right to the power input right here. And we're going to listen for and watch for sparks, lightning bolts, terrifying electric explosions. Not like the lawn mower and not like your car. These things are very dangerous sparks.
You never want to get anywhere near them. The whole system is jacketed. The outer jacket of the ignition line is the ground. And the stainless steel is the ground.
steel jacketed, Teflon lined with a steel core down the middle. I don't think they're R-type igniters and so you you're probably going to get a lot of radio interference when this is going off. But again the ignition on a jet engine is only it's only turned on during starting and as a precaution against flame outs which are extremely rare as we discussed, oftentimes the ignition will be set to continue on takeoff. Mainly because it's not more likely to have a flame out on takeoff.
It's just that if you lost power in one or all of your engines on takeoff, the consequences are completely disastrous. The worst thing that can possibly happen. So if you can prevent that or reduce the chance of that no matter how insignificant the chance is, why not?
I've got this all hooked up. I've removed the lead to the sparker for the number five, or is it the number two? It's the number two can.
It's the one that goes that way. This is number five right here. And we've put in an extra lead to a igniter right there.
The ignition box takes 26 volts DC, 26 to 28. We're going to give it 25.5, I'm sure it'll be fine. So let's move in a bit and take a look at this. Alright, sparkers here.
It doesn't need a ground wire on it because like we said the outer jacket is the ground. I've got two car batteries connected in series right there. So I'm going to be at the power leads.
Your job is to keep an eye right there and see if you can see the tiniest little spark. Little teeny spark. Little purple blue spark.
You can also listen to it because due to the shutter effect of the camera, it may not show up that well. Let's just give that a go, shall we? Here we go.
Power going on. Yeah, I thought it worked. Very cool. Alright, I hope you noticed that, and I hope you also noticed why you never want to lick one of these.
Good thing they're inside the engine. Anything that sounded like maybe an echo in the shop could have been an echo, but was more of an echo. more likely igniter number two which is still in the engine and it's hooked up.
So there's two independent circuits in the box so it'll go like that. Anyway that was pretty cool. Speaking of which, this is an aircraft engine. Just down the street, they're building at Turbolon Turbines, they are building, we're building an industrial Orenda OTF 390, which is the exact same engine without all the stuff on the outside.
The only thing it has is an oil pump and an ignition system. Everything else is supplied by the installation, and so it's much simpler on the outside. And this is Cerakote Silver.
and they decided to paint their combustors Cerakote green. So they're the new green combustors. It's really cool, it's a good looking engine.
It was in the test cell over the last couple of days. So I went there and I think I caught a start. Not terribly exciting because it's running on natural gas and natural gas is a near perfect fuel for jets. They start up with, you can't even tell, there's no flame, there's no woof, no smoke, no nothing. So it just starts.
And, uh... I got the start showing the instrument screen and you can tell the moment of ignition of fuel because the temperature which is on the left hand side of the computer monitor screen it goes from 100 or so because the air gets compressed, it gets warmer and it's only about 5 psi at start in here. So the flame makes the temperature just start to climb.
BANG! BANG! BANG! And we got to medium power.
We got to high power at one time, but I wasn't in the control room. So what I wanted to do, I wanted to go way, way back behind the engine, and I wanted to film... I wanted to see right up into the turbine to see if I could catch any Glowing from heat or anything like that now there were two difficulties with that One of them being the distortion of the heated air and I was like a hundred and hundred and twenty-five maybe, 125 yards, 120 meters behind the engine, way back there, way back there, zoomed all the way in. I think the cameras got a 42 times zoom and we were max.
So we're looking right up the back of the engine. Interesting when it's running it almost looks like it's turning like this but again just like with the Spark the camera's shooting at 60 frames per second so somehow the speed that it was running at was some multiple of that. and so it looked like the engine was only turning like this, but trust me it was turning around At least 3000 rpm for idle and max is 75 so it was somewhere in there Then I thought I was seeing smoke because I'm zoomed right into the tail cone of the engine. And remember jet wash alley is a deep trench and it's full of water. So once the power comes up the water gets stirred up a lot like the spray on the ocean in a storm.
So I'm looking through that. Not a lot of footage but very interesting. It's always cool to see a jet engine test and the thing looks pretty cool with green combustors.
The custom paint job that I do on these engines is the silver mid frame. I guess the custom paint job Turbolon does is one of Turbolon's company colors is green. They're green white and black so it looked pretty cool. Very, very cool engine.
I hope you like it. From Jet City Turbines at the edge of the known universe working on two, they look like science fiction power packs but they're real, they're real turbojet engines. Thanks for watching.