Editorial Policy

This page sets out how ModelEngineFans.com decides what to cover, how it ranks what it covers, and where the money comes from. It is written so you can judge how much weight to give anything else on the site.

How Products Are Selected

A product earns a place on a list by being one of the better available answers to the question the page asks — not by paying, and not by carrying the highest commission. In practice the filters are:

• It does what the category claims. A hit-and-miss engine has to actually govern by skipping firing cycles. A Stirling engine has to run on a temperature difference. Models that reproduce the shape of a mechanism without the mechanism are excluded, or flagged as display-only.
• It is actually purchasable. No perpetually out-of-stock listings and no products that have quietly been discontinued.
• The specifications are documented well enough to assess. Where a manufacturer will not say what something is made of or how it is cooled, that is itself information, and it is reported.
• It differs meaningfully from the others on the list. Ten near-identical kits from the same factory make a longer page, not a more useful one.

What the Ratings Mean

Star ratings are editorial judgements about a model relative to the alternatives in its own category and price bracket, not absolute scores. A five-star $60 Stirling engine is not the equal of a five-star $900 turbofan kit; each is the best answer to a different question.

The factors behind a rating are build quality and materials, mechanical fidelity (does the mechanism work the way the real thing does), how well the assembly is documented, value against directly competing models, and how reliably owners report getting it running.

Ratings are not aggregated customer review scores, and they are not supplied by manufacturers.

Testing, and the Absence of It

Most products on this site have not been physically tested by me. This is stated plainly rather than buried: the engines cost hundreds to over a thousand dollars each, and buying every one would not be possible.

Research is built from manufacturer specifications and manuals, video of engines running, owner build reports, and the mechanical principles involved — which is often the most useful filter of all, because it exposes the difference between a working governor and a decorative one, or between evaporative cooling and a dummy water tank.

Pages that are specification breakdowns rather than tests say so at the top. If that ever stops being true — if I buy and run something — the page will say that instead, and say what happened.

Affiliate Links and the Conflict They Create

The site earns a commission when a reader buys through one of its links, at no extra cost to the buyer. Links appear through the Amazon Associates Program, the Awin network (Stirlingkit, Enginediy) and some merchants directly.

The honest part: commission rates are not equal. A direct retailer typically pays several times what Amazon does on the same engine. That is a real incentive to steer readers toward the better-paying link, and it is worth you knowing it exists.

How it is handled here:

• Nobody pays for inclusion, position, or a rating. No sponsored posts, no paid reviews, no gifted-product arrangements.
• Where a product is sold by more than one retailer, the choice of which to link is based on price, stock and shipping — and where a retailer is not Amazon, the merchant is named on the button so you can see where you are going.
• Every page carrying affiliate links discloses it on the page, not only in the footer.
• A product is never added to a list because a programme opened or a rate improved.

Prices and Availability

Amazon prices shown on the site are fetched live. Prices quoted for other retailers are checked when a page is written or updated and are static between those times, so they can fall behind. The retailer’s own checkout is always the authoritative price — if the two disagree, believe the retailer and please tell me.

Corrections

Errors get fixed as soon as they are confirmed. Anything substantive — a wrong specification, a mistaken claim about how a model works, a rating that changes — is noted on the page rather than silently rewritten. Typos and broken links are just fixed.

If something here is wrong, tell me. Manufacturers and retailers are welcome to correct factual errors about their products; that is not the same as influencing a rating, and the two will not be confused.

Independence

ModelEngineFans.com is not owned by, funded by, or operated on behalf of any manufacturer or retailer in this industry. It is independently published by Stefan Florin.