Originally Posted by
Glenn Coates
3 cyl Konig
Mark, I remember seeing a picture of this engine along with Deiter Konig testing in Florida in a magazine. I'm thinking an issue of the APBA Propeller from about 1956 and no later than 1961. For me it's too many moves with too many boxes so that I can no longer find my copy of the magazine with this picture. My wife thinks that I have shown her the picture so that it may be in the basement yet. About 1975 or so the engine arrived at Bill Wright's as a collection of parts that he had obtained from John Dertinger. Bill assembled the engine as a display engine and sold it to John Porter.
The engine is a 3 cylinder, 30 cu. in. deflector piston engine. In the 1950's Konig built stock outboard racing engines based upon their fishing motors. We raced them here in Canada in both B and C stock. The engines were 2 cylinder and shared common crank, midshaft and lower unit assemblies. They had different piston, cylinder and head assemblies. The B motor was 20 cu. in. while the first C motor was only 25 cu.in., and later enlarged to 27.4 cu. in. .
I think that the 1956 3 cyl C engine that you now have may be a one-off racing engine that Deiter built so that he could have a 30 cu.in. motor. It was built with many common parts from the existing 2 cyl B stock deflector piston engine. This was just prior to Deiter developing the 2 cylinder loop-scavenged FA,FB and FC engines with which he had much sucess.
I think that this 3 cyl C racing motor may be as significant as the Hans Krage 6 cyl motor or the Marshall Grant 8 cylinder motor. All may be one-off attempts by Deiter to to build larger displacement motors using existing components.
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