resosys wrote:Bruce is a con artist, folks. It's plain and simple. He may have enough brains to backyard engineer a working pulsejet, but he's no rocket scientist and he isn't making any leaps and bounds in pulsejet technology. X-Jet == vaporware.
I have to disagree to some extent. Bruce may have turned into a con artist. But, he goes way back.
He was (and may still be) a publisher of a very interesting Internet website on science and technology news. A long time ago -- when the Internet was still big news -- he sold it for a nice amount of money and retired. This is not a mark of your usual con man.
Look at the dozens and dozens of details of his big website – there’s far too much well-considered detail for someone who is a con artist. Compare it to people like Windspire. Do they really resemble each other?
As I keep telling people, his first X-jet, the valve-equipped version, is the most ingenious original pulsejet I have seen. (By original, I mean something devised from scratch, rather than found in a research paper from the 1950s.)
I have followed its conception, development, building and testing and I know very well it was not a fraud. It was an honest-to-God pulsejet that
rocked! No con man would have done that piece of design.
Bruce joined the Junkyard Wars team (a very hard-nosed bunch) not by approaching them and selling himself to them, but on my say-so. I was asked by the company producing the show to give suggestions and I told them (among other things) that Bruce was the man to have if they were to use pulsejets in the show. They probably had more opinions than just mine – stands to reason -- but mine was certainly in the game. They must have checked him well before entering a contract. They have very good lawyers.
Anyway, they thought about it and hired him, and they sure got their money’s worth from him. Bruce engineered the thing for them – not reverse-engineered, but designed -- a _big_ sonofabitch of a Lockwood, built and tested it and used it on the show to score a victory for his team. Would a con artist do that?
No, Bruce is pulsejet-mad like the rest of us. He’s much more talented and inventive than most, too. He is also amazingly persistent.
As a businessman, he’s a walking nightmare. I won’t judge his morals here – you and most other people have already made a judgment on that anyway. There’s not much to say. I am certainly not defending that part of his personality. So, maybe he is a con man now.
But, saying that that’s all there is to it is not right. It is just not true. I fail to see why his pulsejets work has to be artificially diminished or dismissed as irrelevant.