First Flight of 2021 lasted about 15 minutes.
The rear piston on my Kawasaki 440a decided to melt or break at the exhaust port. Temps all looked good so not really sure what caused it but the result is a dead engine.

I was about 850AGL above the runway so at least it happened at a good time time and place!

Managed to capture the whole event on my camera:
https://youtu.be/St7Y-F36X2U

Good save. Well that s***s!

That was a excellent out come to a bad situation. GREAT JOB! As they said in the movie " you can be my wing man any time".

Glad you got it down o.k., nice flying.  Should be relatively easy to diagnose once you pull here down and have it analyzed.  J bird should be able to assist there.

It appears the wind was light. Why not do a 360 from 800' agl and land on the 3000' runway instead of the 180 at 200' agl and land on the 1400' runway? It would also appear your best glide speed is greater than 50mph.

Good Job ULbuilder! I can state from experience, the point at which you lost your engine is to me the most annoying! facing an immediate 360 to kill altitude for a high /fast downwind landing or try and make the pattern from a not real advantageous starting point! you did great getting her down, and in the process proved to yourself you have what it takes to handle it next time it happens.

I flew a Jbird 440 conversion for about 6 hours in a himax and had 3 engine outs in that time. Twice the front piston seized as a result of poor airflow around the cylinder body due to Jbird's big clunky redrive blocking the air. The third was a failure of the prop pulley bearing, allowing the pulley to creep aft and weld itself to the faceplate. I still have the engine, fresh from its last rebuild 10 years ago, but I doubt I will ever fly behind it again.

Chris

Winds were 220@6 I landed on runway 9.

I did start the 360 at first but it just did not seem right, was afraid I would either not loose enough altitude or end up short and land in the very unforgiving field on the other side of the road.

Next I decided I'm either landing in the field between the trees or make a 180 and land on the short runway. The hard part was timing the start of the turn, too early I overshoot the runway, too late and I eat trees. So I waited until I felt if I waited any longer I could not clear the trees. It seemed more instinct than a decision like I did not need to decide what to do I just knew. No panic, not scared and always felt like I was in complete control.

The one thing that made this difficult is I found the rudder to be much less effective when the engine is not running.

After I came to a stop I saw the owner of the airport, Bill, driving down the runway to come assist. He said he heard the backfiring and came out to see what was going on. He went and got a rope and towed me back to the hangar.

Regarding the Kawasaki 440, I think something came apart in the bottom end and the debris made its way into the combustion chambers. I pulled the cylinders and found shards of metal that look like parts of a bearing cage in the front half of the case. I think it is the very front crank bearing but I've not split the case yet to confirm.
The redrive on mine is configured so the prop hub is below the bottom of the engine so it is not blocking the front cylinder.

I'll wait to pass judgement on the engine until I know for sure what the cause is. Sometimes crap just happens. And at the moment I am more inclined to believe this is just bad luck than some inherent flaw with the engine.

Well, this is something I'll be paying close attention to since... same engine!!    

I wish you luck figuring out what happened.  How many hours do you have on it?

I shipped the engine off to J-Bird last week. I'll post an update once I hear what they have to say. I have somewhere around 50 hours on in since I got it from J-Bird.

Good job on the deadstick.  I would have preferred to see you clear those trees by another 100 feet but good is good.

I've got about 9 or so forced landings over my last 25 years and all successful so far.

The front crank bearing was destroyed and pieces of the bearing cage were found all throughout the engine.

Both the front and rear cylinder heads and pistons looks like they had debris, likely the bearing cage pieces, bouncing around in the combustion chambers.

The top rear cylinder piston ring was broken, found a piece of it in the exhaust. The rear piston had melted down pretty well particularly where the missing piece of ring was.
The top of the piston right above the pin the prevents the ring gap from rotating was damaged.

The best theory I can come up with is a piece of the bearing cage made its way into the rear cylinder and damaged the piston allowing the ring gap to rotate into the exhaust port. The ring caught on the exhaust port and snapped off. The blowby from the broken top ring, combined with it being in the hottest area at the exhaust port caused excessive heat to build up and the piston to melt resulting in loss of compression.

The crankcase halves, crank, rods, pistons and cylinders were all damaged beyond repair.

Just bolted the new engine on yesterday and should be in the air again soon.

Pictures
The piece of ring found in the exhaust sure looks like it broke off before the excessive heat and meltdown, not as a result of the excessive heat.
That combined with the piston damage at the ring retaining pin, I think, is the smoking gun to back up my theory.

That looks gnarly!  I wonder what caused the bearing cage to fail?  I wonder how one can check for that kind of thing before a maiden...   Glad you made it out okay!  And glad you got a new engine!  Did you use another 440a?

WOW that is a mess and no warning at all. I hope the second time around works better for you. Thanks for posting .

The engine was from J-Bird, I sent it back to them and they sent me back a different engine. They transplanted the good parts from the broken engine such as the ignition, intake and redrive.

As far as detecting such issues before a flight. It is possible to get an inspection camera in the crankcase through the intake. You cannot see much but if chunks of bearing cage are floating around you might see them and if you have a magnet attached to the camera the chunks are likely to end up on it. That is how I found the chunks of metal when I was tearing it down to determine what happened.

I do not think the bearing failed and all the other damage happened on this one flight. I suspect the bearing may have been broken for a few hours and had just gone unnoticed.

its a shame that they don't have an oil pan with magnetic plug and filter to catch all these things before they eventually bounce and find their way into something important..