WOHM NUMBER 2 RADIAL ENGINE RESTORATION

Here is the WOHM no. 2 radial engine as received by Mr Hoepfner, needing a new crankshaft as the original shaft was bent. The engine was dismantled and inspected.

A new crankshaft blank was duly machined up and is now in the process of being indexed out in readiness for machining in the big end journals.

Below is the crankshaft progress, first step, rough out the big end journals.....

Finished crankshaft with all the big ends ground to size and polished. We left the webs as full circles as this keeps everything correctly balanced. The new shaft also has a 12mm diameter rear main bearing to take a 12x21x5 ball race. This is to give adequate support to the rear of the shaft, which originally had only a small bush, which is what lead to the original crank failing in the first place.

Next step is to clean all the case components and reassemble the entire bottom end of the engine, finally....

Now we have the prop driver, prop shaft and spinner nut all cleaned and final assembled.

Now its onto cleaning the piston/liner and cylinder assemblies ready for refitting to the engine................

Here are the 3 cylinder assemblies all cleaned and assessed for reassembly. Unfortunately the pistons are completely worn out in the gudgeon pin area with the holes being quite oval, Oh dear.

We also felt to check the rods for alignment too as the bent crank was likely to have twisted them or damaged the big end holes. The compression fit was also checked and found to be somewhat lacking so the decision was made to replace the 3 rods, relap the cylinders and fit new gudgeon pins and pistons.