Yes, I noticed that Jet-Joe is advertising the 3000 on his website a couple of days ago, I can find no price for it thought. I haven't finished my testing, evaluation and modification of the one I have as yet either!! I hope he hasn't "jumped the gun" somewhat. So far it looks to be quite a robust engine, considering some of the early JJ engines were a little "fragile" to say the least.
The factory balance job done to the particular "pre-production" engine I have, (it doesn't sport a serial number!?) was actually very good, I did a "core check balance" on it just last week and was quite surprised to see numbers in the very low "teens" on the mg-in scale on my Schenk CAB960H machine, very encouraging indeed and much needed on the 70mm turbine wheel, I only needed to give it a small touch-up to bring it into single figures, bare in mind however that numbers below ~28mg-in will give a very nice result, we're talking 0.001 of an oz-in on the grind radius that we're using, very small numbers indeed. I consider the balance of the rotatives to be one of the most critical items on our model turbine engines.
Jet-Joe (Jeff) himself has asked me to make any modifications I deem necessary to make the engine run nicely and to be honest, I can see maybe just two or three items which need attention and I have already given Jeff my thoughts as to my findings, just some minor things which I believe will help make the engine perform a little more reliably.
One thing which I would like to see is a later model FADEC/ECU unit, the one supplied is the Nades AU-540, although it works well, is a little dated and I believe ceased production nearly 4 years ago! The supplied fuel pump is the nice Flightworks 400-B unit and suits the engine nicely.
I've done a few test runs up to full noise so far, (115k) and I can tell everybody that this engine does indeed make the claimed 30lbs of static thrust, in fact I measured three clear runs of well over 31lbs with EGT's in the 620-630c range, not bad at all. The acceleration rate has been the sticking point and originally the engine would not run up as nicely as one would like, bare in mind though that ten years ago it would have been classed as a rocket!!.... but after some "modifications" to the combustion chamber and other little "secretive" items and some tweaking of the ECU I have been able get a very respectable 3.2 seconds from idle to max rpm, not bad at all.
The sound of this engine is quite unlike any that I have heard to date, I guess it most resembles the Jet-Central Rhino but is still "different" and has a noise all it's own, for those who love turbine engines....its a beautiful noise!! I have measured the fuel consumption at ~465ml/min and although it is just slightly higher than the quoted figure on the JJ website (16oz/min~455ml/min) I can't really fault it there.
I will post further updates as I progress, but at this point, although nowhere near the Wren, Jet-Cat or Jet Central for quality... the JJ-3000 looks to be a reasonably good engine.
Cheers,
Smithy.
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