Russian VA .020 engines

Kris, I believe it was you that mentioned the piston rod assembly on the .020, is it the same as the .049? This design in my opinion is the shortcoming of the VA engine. While it serves a valueable purpose it doesn't last long at high rpm's. I trashed two MK II's as a result of that damn thing. From then on, I used red Loctite on them. I can't imagine that setup being long lived under diesel power. There's no fixing the problem once the wrist pin elongates that piece other than to replace it with a new part. We essentially tried to keep the .049's in the upper 28K range for longevity. The bottom line is that these engines were NOT designed for combat but for freeflight runs of only a few seconds at full power. When run for a full duration of a 1/2A match, the lifespan can certainly be decreased as the Gudgeon pin and landing wears out quickly and begins snapping and clicking. I do enjoy them and I love running them other than they bite fingers worse than any 1/2A engine I ever owned and that's wearing a glove.

I think the .020 has the same construction as the .049, but I haven't actually been able to take mine appart....
I simply cannot get the conrod to slip off from the crankpin, like one normally would (with the liner out).

On the MkI it was easier to separate the piston parts and then lock them with locktite. I haven't done that on my only MkII engine yet, need to do that, thanks for the reminder.

Just a little update on this nice little engine. I have now made a muffler from an old aluminium-body white-board marker (used Alutite to weld/solder it). The muffler has a bit of a tuning effect, so it cannot be too short, but with enough header length I'm seeing about 5000-21400rpm on the Cox 4x2.5 prop (and 10% nitro).

I have made a plane for it too (with four channels), and it is ready to be covered:

In video not much quitter with muffler, but I imagine you have better directional slime splatter control with the muffler.

That’s awesome. I need one of those

Many of us were fortunate to purchase the .020's as there were dozens of them offered at the time. The VA engines are high quality pieces and are quite rare to find especially new examples. Unfortunately, there's no parts support. The VA MK II .049 is one of my favorite combat engines.

Ken Cook wrote:         Many of us were fortunate to purchase the .020's   as there were dozens of them offered at the time. The VA engines are high quality pieces and are quite rare to find especially new examples. Unfortunately, there's no parts support. The VA MK II .049 is one of my favorite combat engines.

Are they made by the same company that makes Norvel’s ?

To say that there's no direct ties between the engine manufacturers wouldn't be totally accurate. A thread that recently surfaced on another forum made suggestions that engine A and engine B are totally different and share no commonality. Almost all of the small Russian engines made were designed at the St Petersburg polytechnic university. The VA designs were also a result of this. VA is the initials of the designer himself Valentin Aloshkin. One thing notably different in terms of design was that the VA engines stood out above and beyond the others.

All of the other designs were essentially based on one design. Norvel is what eventually formed in the end. Stels engines were designed by Alexander Guevski. It's been noted that Alexander has left the building and no one knows where he's located. Some of these engines were used as school projects to teach machinists the trade. I could be mistaken, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union left a lot of aerospace engineers without a job. Many used their skills to design some of these jewels. It seemed like a lot of these engineers were in competition with each other to build a better mousetrap.

Looks great Kris!
You are the first person to step into the .020 territory with a viable header / tuned exhaust system!
Nice low weight pipe look forward to hearing it fire up on the plane.  The small wheels DIY?

roddie wrote:Is the air-frame your own design?

Thank you for the positive comments.

It is based on a larger plane ("Zipp") designed for an entry level pylon class, "Sting-pylon", with .10 engines. I really like how that plane behaves in the air, I think it mostly comes from the wing which is a "laminar flow" profile and about 9% thick. So the wingprofle is direct scaling (58%) but I changed the tail feathers slightly to get a rudder and I prefer to have a fixed wing etc. The firewall had to be slightly narrower and higher, compare to the larger scale, in order to fit the VA on its side.

I choose the scaling from the engine size (.020/.10)^1/3≈58%, which gives me a wingspan of about 19.5". I hope it will work, everything has been very small to make, but it looks about right I think.

Ken Cook wrote: The VA designs were also a result of this. VA is the initials of the designer himself Valentin Aloshkin. One thing notably different in terms of design was that the VA engines stood out above and beyond the others.

I have also understood that Valentin made parts for the Arne Hende miniature series. Another testament to the high quality of production that Valentin could do on even the smallest scale.

[quote="1/2A Nut"]Looks great Kris!
You are the first person to step into the .020 territory with a viable header / tuned exhaust system!
Nice low weight pipe look forward to hearing it fire up on the plane.  The small wheels DIY?
[/code]

Thanks!
I cannot really imagine that I would be the first ever, but possibly one of the first ones since internet forums became popular...?

It was really the work on AndyW on RCU (+10 years ago) that got me back into the small engines again. Having had my share of BabeBee engines as I grow up and learnt RC. AndyW was very active on RCU and also wrote several articles about RC carbs for the small engines. Since then I have wanted to see how far "down" one can go with "full-house" controls.

The landing gear is a DIY job, including aluminium wheel hubs (with M1.6 thread) and plastic wheels that I've turned in a lathe. I've put a taper of the wheels (in pizza-cutter style) of about 5° in order to save weight:

I apologise for all the late replies here, it is the time difference that prevent a more direct discussion...

I was really just intending to make a muffler that doesn't take away too much power, but it turns out that the length will tune just like any other tuned pipe. I haven't checked if I'm getting any power gain over an open exhaust (cannot do that in my back yard) but I would be quite happy if it matches the open exhaust power. We have to use mufflers at our field and I don't want us to get in any type of trouble at our airfield, even though large gassers are a much larger noise source.

Here is a little graph to show the length versus rpm dependence, here the length was varied with a simple silicon hose, rather than a solid tube, but the readings readily match up to other engines. I've neglected difference in engine timing here, but it will in general simply shift the whole curve up and down:

Yes never seen wheel set that small in pizza cutter style slick lovely work / choice of material.
Overall weight is fantastic at 6.41g what is the wheel material and diameter?
Hays has some black 1/2A pylon wheels no tapper 1.5" dia.

I have done quite a bit of digging looking for piped .020 engines there simply is no
data out there on record. Andy achieved a well mannered VA .020 with a GM .03 carb
adding a air bleed with adjustment screw that hit in the 5.5k - 19k + range. I imagine
you have seen the posts and vid. Published on May 28, 2006 (13yrs. ago)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_wZRw5dKT0
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/1-2-1-8-airplanes-70/4328120-throttled-va-020-a.html

I have gone through all his posts on RCU nothing farther than adding a muffler to the engine.
I did some messaging with Japman, he did a ducted fan effort but no completion data nor
did he pursue a header / pipe combo.

There was no class racing of this displacement back in the day only FF. Had there been
we would of likely had some wonderful data to review. If we could tap into the Russians
forums that would be the only possible chance to source data. I imagine the VA engine was
used for FF and perhaps miniature CL combat would be plausible.

Therefore Kris based on my searches your effort is it and with a clear photo.

About 11 or 12 years ago, before I knew that VA had built .020 engines, I bought a new in the bag ( the way it was sold) VA MKI .049 with a wooden Rev Up 4 1/2 x 7 prop from an ex president of the NFFS.
Since I like to always get some spare parts for any engine I buy, I contacted AndyW on RCU.
He evidently had connections to get the newest of anything the modeling world had to offer.
He had produced an article in Model Aviation Magazine I believe (I have a copy of the article somewhere) where he modified a VA.049 to full RC with a custom OS.10 carb and a pressure tap muffler.
Since he was moving away from modeling due to other personal reasons, he sold me the custom carb, custom prop spinner, pressure tap muffler, a spare con rod, wrist pin, piston collar and copper piston shim, and full set of instructions.
AndyW was the VA  guru until VA dried up.

Andy is back getting into the RC scene again on RCG.

Found it !!
AndyW's article was in the May 1997 issue of Flying Model Magazine as an "FM How To" called "Kitbashing 1/2/A Carbs ".
I didn't get the VA.049 engine but I got all the other parts shown.
FWIW

Yes, that is one of his articles. I only have a poor copy of it:

1/2A Nut wrote:Yes never seen wheel set that small in pizza cutter style slick lovely work / choice of material.
Overall weight is fantastic at 6.41g what is the wheel material and diameter? 

It is simply plexiglass. I have used non-tapered ones on larger models (.10) and on our grass field they have held up fine. I don't think it would work on tarmac as the material is quite brittle.

I made these 30mm (≈1.18") in diameter, it is simply a direct scale down from what I had on the .10 model. Don't know how well these will roll on grass, it needs to be short-cut and dry I think. I have used 31 mm ones on a peewee powered cub, and that work when I managed to land on worn and dry patches in the grass.

Ken Cook wrote:              To say that there's no direct ties between the engine manufacturers  wouldn't be totally accurate. A thread that recently surfaced on another forum made suggestions that engine A and engine B are totally different and share no commonality. Almost all of the small Russian engines made were designed at the St Petersburg polytechnic university. The VA designs were also a result of this. VA is the initials of the designer himself Valentin Aloshkin. One thing notably different in terms of design was that the VA engines stood out above and beyond the others.

          All of the other designs were essentially based on one design. Norvel is what eventually formed in the end. Stels engines were designed by Alexander Guevski. It's been noted that Alexander has left the building and no one knows where he's located. Some of these engines were used as school projects to teach machinists the trade. I could be mistaken, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union left a lot of aerospace engineers without a job. Many used their skills to design some of these jewels. It seemed like a lot of these engineers were in competition with each other to build a better mousetrap.

Thanks Ken, The Knowledge that some of you guys on this forum astounds me. I need to Study up.

Kris, I know this thread is old but I finally got mine up and running. I took out a plug today and I have only one spare. I knew I should've added another head gasket to this engine when I first started it. My rpm's though were low and I can tell the engine is tight. Did you alter the deck height by adding or removing the piston carrier shims?

I have this engine too and asked Kris what the thread size is for the
adapter he made for use with the turbo plugs on his Youtube post.
Threads for the head clamp are M12 x 0.75

Kris what is the thread size for the venturi? I want to use a RC carb.