Big radial engines always seem to have a character of their own. Our Dakota engines, in the true tradition, always like to leave a small pool of oil when left parked in one place for long.

The Dakota is maintained in ground running condition after a long and varied career over many decades. This last summertime, we noticed that one engine was becoming more reluctant to start, so was scheduled for winter investigation.

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A compression test showed that one of the cylinders was down on compression, so a replacement barrel and cylinder head for that cylinder has been fitted by our volunteer engineers over the last few weeks. Just like internal combustion engines the world over, just replacing the parts is the easy bit. But removing and refitting all of the associated ancillary parts can be time consuming.

The engine work is almost complete now and we hope to be ground running the Dakota very soon as a test ready for this coming summer’s events.