Visit to Mistral Engines, engine production

05 Feb 2006 Visit to Mistral Engines, engine production

Here is a view of a customer engine. I’m always amazed at the small size of the rotary engine. Note the machining for the engine mount. They have designed the engine to use the standard lycoming type dynofocal engine mount.

Here is another view of the same engine.

Here are some parts of the engine ready to be built. Mistral currently makes all the parts with the exception of the rotor and the stator, which are made by Mazda. They would like to stay with the Mazda parts, since they are excellent quality, but for FAA certification, they are required to provide full manufacturing tracability, which would require a lot of cooperation from Mazda – very unlikely. So, they are going to be manufacturing 100% of the engine themselves.

More parts to go into the engines.

Here you can see where the production facility is getting a little bit of an upgrade. As you can imagine, with two engine test cells, it might get a bit loud from time to time, so they are building a small office in one corner so the guys can have a reasonably quiet place to meet with suppliers and other visitors.

The production engine test area is in the back of this picture. All customer engines will have a dyno run.

Note the huge piston at the entrance of lab. A tribute to a different technology.