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Needleye engine company manufactures a twin cylinder four cycle aircooled engine for light aircraft. The engine can be used in either tractor or pusher configurations.
The engine is 100 cubic inches or 1660 cubic centimeters and produces 52 horsepower at 2750 rpm.
Currently the engine is flying on a Thunder Gull aircraft designed and produced by Earthstar aircraft company. This is a single seat pusher aircraft. |
| UPDATE February 2005 |
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To all our prospective customers:
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Over the last few years, Needleye has been developing a 100 cubic inch four stroke engine for the ultralight and new sports plane market. As of this writing, actual flight hours are 300 with more testing to be flown.
The prototype engine was completely disassembled and inspected for wear/problems around the 250-hour mark.Everything looked great and the engine was reassembled for further flight testing. We have identified minor changes we would like to incorporate in the castings prior to public release. Tooling for the castings will need to be upgraded to reflect these changes.
Our current test bed utilizes the Earthstar Thunder Gull and will soon to be joined by one of the original Q-200’s from Quickie Aircraft Co. Additional test beds will be required in the future to develop installation packages and any help in this regard will be greatly appreciated.
Our desire is to start taking orders by offering this new, improved engine version around Sun-N-Fun time with 90-day delivery schedules.
Once the upgrades are finished we will be able to structure our pricing.
Flight testing for now, will continue in an effort to determine reliability and TBO number possibilities. Currently a minimum of 1000 hour TBO appears to be completely in line with our 250 hour inspection. This decision is one of many we have to make in the very near future. At this present stage of engine development, we are confident that Needleye will be offering a reliably built, quality assured and reasonably priced engine to the light plane market.
We thank you for your interest and patience.
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