Builders,
I occasionally get questions about my 5th bearing design, which is Group 3200 in our manual numbering system. I developed it about a decade ago, thinking it might serve in special applications. Over many years, it has been conclusively proven that the Weseman 5th Bearing, (Group 3000) actually covers all common 5th bearing needs, and does so far more cost effectively than my design does. For this reason, my design is not in production, and all the production engine I build use Weseman bearings. The photos below are of my own personal 3,000 cc Corvair engine being assembled.
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Above, My bearing is a non-splitting design, which moves the thrust bearing to the prop end of the engine. The bearing is the actual aluminum plate, machined to the shape of a 3.375″ diameter bearing with thrust faces that are 4.375″ across. The plate in the bearing area is coated by Poly-dyn in Texas, but it also flew 100 hours with no coating. Some people said it would never work, but you can tell they never saw the inside of a Lycoming, as the thrust faces on 180-200 hp 360 cid Lycomings are the crank running on the bare aluminum case.
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