WAR Corsair Update 5/10/2026

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:01]Hello everyone. Donna Don back with another progress report on Warhorse Air.

[00:00:05]It's been like this all day. Absolutely gorgeous. And I don't think it hit 50° all day. You can barely even feel the heat from the sun.

[00:00:17]Just another cold day in Erie County.

[00:00:20]And rain last night, rain the night before. We just can't get away from this damn cold weather. I don't think the temperature supposed to get above 60 for the foreseeable week. Uh some on and off sunny days, cloudy days, rainy days.

[00:00:35]Same mix of trash garbage. So I remember years ago, if you watch my videos all the way back, probably 10, 12 years ago before I had this garage finished, the floor poured and all the insulation and roofing, it was just a metal shell. Um that one year I wasn't able to get out here till June to work on the plane because of weather exactly like this. So people talking about commenting about flying and not flying and like today been a nice day to fly but it would be cold. So all right. Um not a lot to report other than waiting on the parts. Uh yesterday, this elbow I'm waiting for was in Pittsburgh, PA, Saturday.

[00:01:23]So when it's in Pittsburgh, I usually get it the next day, but since yesterday was Saturday, today's Sunday. The post office doesn't deliver mail on Sundays around here. I see them on Sundays running around, but I don't know what they're doing. They've never stopped at my house on a Sunday. Um even when I have little packages coming, I never get them. Uh so I expect to get that tomorrow. And then also the tracking for the rebuild kit on the carburetor, the new carb setup. Uh that and the jet kit I ordered from the same vendor out of um Ebron, Kentucky. Uh they're in Pittsburgh as well. So So tomorrow I should have everything, but unfortunately our mail doesn't show up till at the earliest 1:00 in the afternoon. So I won't see it until afternoon sometime. But I still need to go and see if I can find some rubber couplings for a two and a quarter inch locally.

[00:02:19]So, uh, otherwise I'd have to find something to try and get it together cuz it's literally ready to hook up and run other than I have to pull pull this fuel line off of the regulator here and put a hose barb in it and take this out and run a hose all the way to the carb. So, I'll probably have to go buy a piece of uh hose for that. I think it's might be 5/16. Let's see real quick.

[00:02:48]The new kit comes, like I said, with this 90° elbow. Yeah, it's 516.

[00:02:54]So, I have to buy about 2 ft.

[00:02:58]All right. So, the last couple days I was last time you saw me, I was talking about reversing the the distributor.

[00:03:06]Well, there it is. It's all done. What I ended up doing is I reused the original cover for the hole. I just boarded it out to uh it's like 1 in 60 thou for the diameter of the distributor and I modified the stock clamp. It had a basically a Zband in it. So I flattened it all out and the hole was too far out.

[00:03:28]So I welded it shut, ground everything down and redrilled it to this position and trimmed it off. So, it needs to be stripped of its plating. I'm going to put a shorter bolt in. It doesn't need to be this long. I'll put a little short tube in there. But, uh, this is what you loosen up so you can turn the distributor. It doesn't hold it in by this. It holds it in by this bolt. So, let me drop the cap and break it.

[00:03:58]This is a uh original Bosch cap, and that thing's barely got any wear on it.

[00:04:04]Hardly. You can just barely see a little carbon track on those terminals. The only thing is there's a little chip on it here, which is has no problem whatsoever. So, and again, this is it's now locked to the cam. And that's the timing advance right there. That's all it is. It should give, you know, about 20°. We pop this off and we get to where I'm going to put in the uh adapter for the electronic.

[00:04:34]And I mentioned that it needed to be hooked up to power and ground. Well, it doesn't get hooked directly to power and ground. You hook it to the positive and negative terminals on the coil. Uh the old coils were the round canister coils they call them. They were oil filled canister coils and they had two studs sticking out of the top. And that's what you wire that to. Red positive, black to negative. Then you run a positive wire from your ignition switch to the positive side of the coil and it powers up the coil and it powers up this um this sensor gets its ground. It basically just sends a trigger to the um trigger to the coil to fire the coil.

[00:05:13]I don't know if it relies on a ground through the distributor on the body or because the negative I don't know if you can ground the negative side. I have to It's been a long time since I've worked with uh old coils. Then I mentioned about having to buy a coil. Well, I don't need to buy a coil. I've got two of them right here. Dual coils. Uh I have new plug wires. Like when I bought these plug wires, they're three pin. You got center ones power and the two outside ones are the triggers for the coils. I was like, well, that'll be perfect. I take this and use one of these. I got, like I said, another plug.

[00:05:46]I can wire it up right to the distributor and might have to use this one over here and run the wires across to it to to try and use this to get get it run. But first, when I get everything hooked up, I'm going to run it the way it is. And then this will just sit there and spin. And then to hook this up, all I got to do is unplug it, wire it directly to the distributor, and wire power to it, and I should be able to fire it up off of this, and then use one lead to come to the instead of going to the plug, it'll go to the center of the cap to put the signal, put the voltage right through here, and then out to each spark plug. I have to get plug wires as well to make up custom plug wires. Um, I'll probably end up using 90 degrees.

[00:06:30]So, they come off the cap at 90. So, when this thing is on there, like so. Like these two will go over there. These two will go over here.

[00:06:40]However, the firing order requires. But the idea is trying to get get it lined up. So, number one is over here. One and three can be because it does fire to be one uh two three four or no it's one cylinder one cylinder um three 42 or 1324 1342 is for a inline four cylinder but for a flat cylinder like this because it fires cylinder one then three then two then four because the way the crank throws are. But on a four cylinder, it would fire one, three, four, two.

[00:07:25]So, it's a little different. Or like a Honda that's engine sideways. Doesn't matter. They they have a different firing order because of their throws on the crank. So, uh I got it all on there.

[00:07:37]It's hooked up. Make sure that works.

[00:07:39]Let me just hit this thing. I'll just jump it and you can watch watch the distributor spin.

[00:07:49]Nothing's going to spark because it's not hooked up. There's no electronics in it. So, that works great. So, I'm happy with that. And I got the original I cut off 3/4 of an inch off of the housing and 3/4 inch off of the shaft. And when I went to drill the hole for the shaft to center, I used the center punch to indicate where I need to drill it.

[00:08:10]Wouldn't touch it. Just flatten the center punch. And then um grabbed a file and hit it with a file. A file wouldn't even touch it. That baby was hardened, tempered. I was like, "Oh, that's great." And it was the last thing I had to do was drill the hole, cut it off, and it was done. And it would not would not drill. Wouldn't touch it. So I was like, "So let me try to take the temper out of it, heat it up with a torch." So I clamped it up in the vise and I heated just the end of it down to where the hole need to be, just from there up. And because the end the very end of the shaft where the original hole was, you could drill that.

[00:08:43]It was soft. So I heated up with a propane torch, which took a while because it's that thing is a/ inch in diameter at least somewhere like that, 7/16 to 1/2 in. So I heated up till it finally started getting some glow to it and then I stopped and I just let it air cool down to room temperature. Uh, meanwhile, a friend of mine called up yesterday and asked if I could take a look at it. His garden tractor. He has a John Deere with a V twin Briggs 724cc motor and said it wasn't running right.

[00:09:18]So, yeah, bring it over, drop it off.

[00:09:20]I'll look at it when I got time. So, because I couldn't do anything with that, and I said, "Let me take a look at it." So, I pulled the carb on it intake and went through the whole thing and it was perfectly clean cuz what problem he had was his surgeon. And I was like, well, that's a lean condition. It's it gets up there and leans out and dies down and recovers and just this the uh governor was just rum rum. And that's a typical sign of lean. I said, well, you probably got some garbage in there from getting it out from sitting all winter.

[00:09:48]So, I pulled it out and that thing was spotless inside. Nothing was dirty. And then when I I checked the fuel filter, it was clean. Looked blowed through fine. The pump the fuel pump worked fine. And there is absolutely zero adjustments on that carburetor. The only adjustment on that whole carburetor was the throttle stop screw that would allow you to adjust that position of the throttle. And that was it. There was no uh no high-speed fuel adjustment, no idle feed adjustment, no changeable jets. All the jets were pressed in uh brass jets that weren't removable. That thing was, you know, they're trying to do emission compliance for these small engines now from California but uh you can't adjust it. And I said, "Well, there's nothing I can do about it. About all you can try is maybe running alcohol-f free gas." But again, he just uses the 87 with the 10% alcohol and it it will um it takes more fuel to run that stuff.

[00:10:45]It has to run at a richer mixture. So, it will run lean in an older motor. So, I said, "You can try some premium. It's premium alcohol-free 90 octane, no alcohol." And I says, "See if that works and if it runs better, then it's it's the lean condition from the fuel." But what I didn't think to tell him was as it warms up cuz it's only been 40s and 50° here and he's been trying to mow in this cold temp. You got to cuz the grass is growing like crazy now. Um once the once it starts warming up, getting up into 70 80s, it'll run fine. uh the air the air will thin out and the thinner air will help with the lower thin uh low mix air fuel ratio and it'll it'll run normal again. So I said it's fine. I I mowed my whole backyard with I had a foot of grass back here and that 25 horse man that thing just purrs. It's a nice running motor for brakes. So I said well if you got I said just run it. He asked me oh if I use that premium gas do I have to use it all the time? Said no just use it if you want to try it and test and see. es, but it'll probably run better because it's the correct fuel for air fuel ratio. But it's just going to boil down to temperature. Now, if you took that lawnmower up to 5,000 ft elevation in the mountain somewhere, it would probably run just fine because as you go higher in altitude, the fuel mixture does the fuel doesn't change, but the air density drops and then you have to lean it out just like an aircraft carburetor. But if you took it up high in the mountains, it run fine today. Well, I says, "But it runs fine when you're mowing it. There's no surgeon when you're mowing. Just when you're shut off the mower deck and driving it back, it hunts. I said, "Well, I said it'll probably clear up, but you just got to wait for the temperature to change. Wait for this stupid ass weather." I mean, right now, we should be in 70° minimum every day.

[00:12:33]And it's still dropping in the 30s at night. It was last night I got up. This morning it was 47. Fur when I got up, it was uh 40, I think. So, it was probably in the upper 30s before I got out of bed. Well, anyway, with the weather, I'm just trying to explain why, you know, we're not getting anything done around here. It's just stupid ass weather. Um, so, uh, get this thing coming tomorrow, get this hooked up, and hooked up, get fuel hooked up, and get her running again and see what happens.

[00:13:05]And hopefully that carb's going to do its thing. Uh, somebody asked about the jetting and it's it's going to need I'm sure it's going to need to be jetted richer. U, they recommend a 78 jet for engines bigger than 100 and some inches and this is 134 inch motor. So, it's probably going to need the bigger jets and that's why I got the jet kit coming.

[00:13:26]And then the rebuild kit just replaces all the basic hardware and again it doesn't come with any jets or nothing.

[00:13:33]It comes with a new needle and seat and then the uh 90° elbow. I mean, they don't even come with any of this stuff for It comes with all these new rods for the pump rod or the enrichment valve.

[00:13:44]Comes with all that stuff. Comes with this. It doesn't come Some of them come with this new bracket. Um, it comes with this little rubber cap and all the springs and screws. So, I still need to get the screw for the accelerator pump right there. It's missing. But I'm kind of excited to see how this thing's going to work. And I I have a good feeling about this setup. That thing there, I don't know what to think about that. So, uh, oh, and then the other thing about this distri, uh, this, uh, dual coil pack is, um, years ago at Oshkosh, there was a company, NSI Propulsions, that was selling, uh, gear boxes for these Subaru motors, these EJ22s, and they had all kinds of uh, dual ignition hookups for them. And what they did is they had this block with three tower pins on it, three male pins. Um, I don't think Yeah, it'd be like Yeah, they'd have pins like this and have three of them. You'd hook one coil to one pin, one coil the other pin, and those two would go to a third pin for your out. And then that would go to the distributor or from the from the block.

[00:14:54]It was a three pin block. Two coils would hook to these two and they're tied to a third one and that goes to the distributor like it would come here. But they had towers like that. And I remembered MSD used to sell one of those. So I went and looked it up.

[00:15:09]Didn't know what to call it. Finally found it. And it it probably isn't, you know, much bigger than this with three pins on it. They want $1 like $10 for that stupid No, $210, excuse me. $210 for that damn thing. And it's designed for running two complete MSD ignition boxes, two coils, and then the coils hook to it. And that wire goes to a single distributor input right here.

[00:15:35]$210 for this. I'll make one. I've got I've got that Delin plastic stuff left over. I'll I got some brass. I can machine machine the pins out of brass.

[00:15:46]Put it in there and then tie them, you know, hook them all together with brass.

[00:15:51]That's a little hard to be cutting down.

[00:15:52]I probably go buy a brass bolt, like a 3/8 inch bolt, turn that down to the shape and and attach it to a bar and put it all in plastic and make my own block.

[00:16:02]But the idea is you could hook these two trigger wires up to a switch like a magneto switch, left mag, right mag.

[00:16:11]uh you wouldn't run it in both configuration because you're firing two at the same time and that's not uh not intended for that application. But the idea is you could go out start the airplane up for a takeoff and then switch it from mag from coil one to coil two and check for make sure they're both working and then take off. Then if you're out flying around and the engine goes to die and you suspect coil, you just flip the switch and see if it'll restart. So it give you a coil redundancy and I can do it with my rocker switches like I had for my fuel pumps. I had two fuel pumps in the tank before for the fuel injection. So I have fuel pump one, fuel pump two. So I can hook up two of these switches to ignition one, ignition two. It' be coil one, coil two. Or you could put a uh toggle switch two position toggle switch on on and no matter which whichever way you put it turns on coil one or coil two. So so I can run a dual dual coil with a single input selector and um it'll it'll still get triggered by the distributor.

[00:17:22]uh the electronics in the distributor will trigger the coil and the coil will it'll fire one or the other. So that's that's a nice idea there. And this is simple. And if I went this route, if I don't go that route, I take this off and have to make a plug to plug that hole up. But uh I'm probably I'm going to give this a try cuz if this works, that's probably going to be more dependable than, you know, electronics like that. But again, I like this because of the data logging. I can log manifold pressure, timing advance and all that. And then this just has to be set to give me, you know, around 32 degrees of timing at, you know, all in by like 3,000. So you adjust it till you get set the engine 3 grand, time it till you get to about 30°, 32° and then idle it down and see what it drops to because there's not a whole lot of movement there.

[00:18:14]That could I mean remember this has to only move half for the crank.

[00:18:19]So when the crank spins, this crank will spin 20° to the or 40° to this 20° out output here because this has to spin 720° to complete a complete engine cycle. All right, so that's all I got. Um, that stuff will be here tomorrow. I'll get that all hooked up. I got to find a cable. I was looking them up on I get them on eBay, but I don't know if any motorcycle shops around here sell generic cable kits where you because I need longer than a typical motorcycle cable. Uh again, this thing is 4 foot.

[00:18:57]So, it's not going to work with a 4ft cable, I don't think. Plus, I have to go around the back side of the throttle quadrant because I need it to pull. When you push this throttle, the cables up here and it pushes it forward, pulls it back. So, I have to come in. Well, this is going to be in my way now, too.

[00:19:18]Cuz I was thinking of coming in underneath with the cable and hooking it into the back. So, it hooks to this arm in there and then pulls forward. So, this I didn't remember this being there.

[00:19:28]So, so some way the other option is you'd have to have this tab hanging out down here to swing to do a pull motion.

[00:19:36]Now I got to give that some thought so I can fit this particular way. Um, yeah. Oh, I'll think about it right now.

[00:19:46]I just want to get her together and get her running. So, I should have another video up for you probably by Tuesday cuz I don't think I'll get this all done tomorrow because of the late uh postal delivery.

[00:20:01]But I should have something for you Tuesday. Uh the weather, like I said, for the next foreseeable week, I don't think it's supposed to get in the 60s.

[00:20:10]It might hit 60, but it's uh kind of depressing. All right, everybody. I guess that's going to do it for this update. I had pulled the plugs out so I could roll it over.

[00:20:22]Kind of take it easy on the battery for now. All right, as always, everybody, appreciate taking time to watch my videos. Feel free to leave any comments, questions, or concerns. And as always, don't be afraid to leave any comments. I think that's about uh nothing really else to talk about other than a few people. Oh, he just wants to work on he's never going to fly it. And so I had to straighten the guy out. Told him says, you know, a lot of people said that before and he had to end up eating crow. I told him says, go back to October of 24 if you want to see this thing fly. So anybody that's new, listen to me right now. This plane has flown. It's been a year and a half ago because last year I had vertigo all year. Couldn't fly if I wanted to. So that's why I was doing all this extra work on the plane while I have the time to do it. I could work, but I definitely couldn't fly. So So that's why I've been into this stuff hot and heavy. And now the weather's just been so crappy. I still can't fly.

[00:21:18]All right, that's going to do her. I will catch you guys again most likely on Tuesday. So for now, this is D or done out.