All Metal 5 Cylinder Radial Aeroplane Engine Demonstration Model Build

[Jim Dobson]

All Metal 5 Cylinder Radial Aeroplane Engine Demonstration Model Build
This is something a little different for me.
Radial Engines have always completely fascinated me. Man's ingenuity to engineer and machine such complicated engines so long ago with the tooling they had available at the time is just incredible.
They made them up to an incredible 18 cylinders with them arranged in two banks of 9, how did they time these? How did all those parts move in harmony at extreme speeds? It honestly just blows me away. 
As I said a little different for me, not a steam engine, not a hit & miss engine it's a non-working cut away but I enjoyed every minute building it.
Anyone every had anything to do with radial engines?
Has anyone got any ideas how I could mod this so that a small red LED could 'fire' when the piston is at the top stroke and in the order that a radial engine fires?

[AdeV]

Has anyone got any ideas how I could mod this so that a small red LED could 'fire' when the piston is at the top stroke and in the order that a radial engine fires?

MikeC would probably be the best guy to confirm this - but from my limited understanding (if I was listening properly at MMEX earlier this year), all radials fire when the cylinder is at the top of the circle (I guess that would be the bottom if the aeroplane is inverted!). I haven't watched your video yet, so I don't know if you've built the ignition setup - if not, you'd ideally need to do that, then you can simply run 2.5v up to the "spark plug" using the spark wire(s) themselves.