While studying another matter at the West Coast Patent Library in 1991, Jim first came across the patents on Fairchild's Caminez radial cam engine. This discovery eventually led him to his long association and friendship with Professor Antoni (Toni) Oppenheim.
At their first meeting, a few months later Jim explained his thoughts about revising Fairchild's radial cam engine concept using a CNC and a better cam profile and linear guides rather than the linkage arms of the Caminez engine. Professor Oppenheim, always the teacher, had 16 file drawers full of combustion and engine-related files and a copy machine in his office. Jim left with articles on several cam engines, a scotch yoke engine, his 1982 SAE paper, and enough reading material to fill a month of spare time reading. Thus began a long friendship and mentorship between Jim and Toni.
A few meetings later Jim agreed to do his best to fulfill as his time and resources would permit to develop a more ideal IC engine as envisioned by Professor Oppenheim, to take up his challenge as it were.
Pursuing this goal has been a long and challenging adventure. It has led Jim to also seek help from Smokey Yunick, whose hands-on mechanical expertise was much less theoretical than Professor Oppenheim's, as it came from years of personal experience. Smokey's comparison of the constant acceleration dynamic to the dynamic of a crank, as shown in the third image to the left, led to its adoption. Over the years, there has become a long list of other people, institutions, and companies in many parts of the world that have contributed their technical skills and ideas to the project.
Jim's history as an advocate of conserving energy stretches back to the early 1970s. His early work in solar heating led to an invitation to be on the speaker's bureau of what became the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, giving technical lectures at universities, community groups, and companies on methods and benefits to society of saving energy. In 1981, he was offered an engineering position by a Solar panel company in Silicon Valley, where he lived for 28 years.