[Patrick Dolan]

I have not owned a Tiger for…GEEZ 40+ years, but I have lurked around the community for much of that time.

Back in the dark ages, there simply were no mods available to improve performance, so we had to cheat a little. Rigging, remove steps, a lot of careful sealing of seams with silicone, etc. helped a lot. Biggest bang for the climb was to remove the baffles from inside of the muffler (the spot welds would break on their own making it easy to hook them out through the exhaust pipe). Believe me from decades of building high performance engines for cars, trucks, boats and planes – the “short and straight” stock exhaust is a long way from decent flow.

I do know a fellow with a AA-5B locally with a Powerflow, and I know his maintenance engineer as well. When I asked them collectively about the Powerflow system, the comments were that there was some small gain in performance, but there were a lot of maintenance issues due to the pipework vibrating, the slip joint needing constant cleaning, cracks, etc. That is one airplane that flies off of a lot of dirt and gravel strips, so I could not attest to the status of its propeller balance (would be CRITICAL to so much potential resonant hardware). This is a “short stack” version. As he owns usually 10 or more airplanes, and restores some very significant (historically) airplanes, I take his comments at face value as someone who is quite objective about maintenance issues.

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