The Turbomeca Turmo engine was developed by the French SAFRAN group and was used to power the Puma and Frelon Helicopters. I believe this example may have come from South Africa as Puma helicopter variants built by Armscor were used extensively by the SADF.

This Turmo I actually obtained several years ago and had been lying idle in the garage because of the usual problem: no starter!

In order to start this engine we would have to either source an original Turmo starter from somewhere or come up with an alternative plan.

Starter motors like all jet engine starters are expensive and difficult to find unless you have the original part number. In this case we came up with the idea of using a winch motor as an alternative.

Above is a picture of the winch motor that we used to start the Turmo. The winch motor is rated at about 6 Hp and is able to crank the engine to about 20% RPM which is more than enough for a light-off. My friend Andrew, an engineer machined up an adapter for the gear box–stunning job!

Apart from some re-wiring and building a control box it was relatively straight forward to get running once the starter motor problem was solved.

Here’s a link to the video of the test run