jetdriven

This is the brake fluid from a Cherokee 180 that we own. I noticed that the brakes appeared to drag and release very slowly, and I thought it was a combination of old brake fluid and brake caliper slide pins that were not lubricated, but this is absolutely astounding. The stuff has the consistency of mayonnaise. Now, if you change this 5606 out for Aeroshell 31 it won’t do that anymore because the synthetic fluid lasts longer and is better at colder temperatures.

Because the lifters get little spots of rust on them and they form little pits and then pits turn into spalling and then spalling turns into cratering and then cratering wears down the camshaft. The cam is a symptom. It’s not the cause. Continental engines we frequently pull the lifters out of them whenever we change the cylinder and sometimes just preemptively look for a pre-buy. They always have little micro pits and some are pretty torn up actually, and the cams are always good, and then you swap out new lifters and you pretty much save the engine. Where lycoming is more of a hopes and prayers kind of Strategy.

It’s not the cam. It’s the lifters.

I had a client took his plane to a shop at another airport in the DC area, and they handed him a discrepancy list of like $25,000 worth of stuff, but looking at the list it looked to be about 4000 bucks of stuff. When he showed him, the documentation that a few of the write ups were trivial and actually allowed by the manufacturer, or how you could treat the corrosion on the rear wing attached fitting without pulling the wing off, the shop rolled his plane outside told him to go F himself and then faxed the discrepancy list to the Washington FSDO and told him the plane had to leave on a trailer. I fixed the three discrepancies that were legitimate on the ramp and then we ferried it over to my shop and fixed the rest. The FSDO guy said he’s not giving a ferry permit, even though I had inspected the aircraft, so we got the DER that he hired to engineer the wing skin crack repairs to state that it was safe for not more than 100 hours of flight time. Then he called the FSDO and got into a fight with the inspector because he still refused to give a ferry permit saying it was unairworthy, even though the DER says you don’t get to tell me that it’s not airworthy because I’m actually a designated engineering representative of the FAA and I’m telling you that it is. But it was really crazy how that went.

The engine shop cut your engine life in half. But at least they saved 50$. but seriously I put this in writing and verify it before taking delivery. It’s that important.

Into the accessory case.

Well, you can’t get to it from the dipstick hole in the case because you have to make 160° turn, go thru the slots where the case halves come together and get past the crankshaft and then you have eight lifters and six cam lobes to view. You can’t really go up through the drain port where the oil comes out because of the same issue, you have these quarter inch wide slots that are on the center line of the case halves that you have to go through and then go around the crank and then bend back towards the middle of the case to see the cam lobes. You can however, pull a cylinder off and you can see all of them pretty easily, but that’s the only way I know of.

does that make it a major alteration?

Minimizing distractions is key for safety. In 2-pilot airline operations the F/O will announce heads down to enter something into the FMGC or to write down something like a clearance. We also don’t do any reconfiguring during taxi, exception being the after landing flow at taxi speed once clear of the runway. There is a reason for this.

We had one last year. They had fantastic metal numbers, but we wanted to change a cylinder and my coworker ran the bore scope down the top of the cam and the very last cam lobe was about half the height. The cratered lifter literally polished the lobe down over the course of probably a couple hundred hours. Interestingly, the previous annual, a MSC put a longer pushrod on the exhaust of #4 because they said the lash was way too great. That was a missed opportunity. This engine had 1200 hours on it.

Crank cases work harden then crack when they get a bunch of hours on them, and then more hours they have, the more likely they are to crack. And especially if it’s been welded on before. I wouldn’t risk it. Aluminum work hardens and cracks. A new case is what you want. The continental and superior lifters are both garbage. They both spall and pit and then work on the cam and I don’t know what to say except for at about 5 to 10 years, you may have to change them all again. We’ve had two low time continentals just come through our shop that they each needed a complete full set of lifters. Pitting and spalling on all 12. The service letter from Continental says you can let a lot of this minor pitting and spalling go, but I’m not putting it back in an engine.

If you want the best overhaul get it from Powermasters engines in Tulsa. We’ve quoted a few overhauls at Penn Yann and they can’t articulate why they’re always the highest quote but the fact they say superior lifters are better than DLC factory Lycoming lifters gives me pause. Now that the core is disassembled mostly the core charge is baked into the factory engine price, not sure about Continental but once a Lycoming is disassembled there’s no core credit.

It depends on the car and it depends on the trip and it depends on what’s available for charging. But unless you buy a Ford excursion diesel with tanks strapped on the back, there’s no vehicle that does 100% of your needs. But for 100-150 mile range around home which are 95% of peoples trips, the right electric car can make a lot of sense. I switched over from a 2009 turbo BMW to a 2023 bolt, and I went from 200 bucks a month in gas to $36 in electricity. But really the money doesn’t really change things, but the complete silence and the fact that I never have to go to a gas station or an auto repair Shop is cool. If I put 100,000 miles in this car, it was free for the gas ive saved, 20 grand. But if you have a 360 mile one-way trip, a model three can do that trip easily by stopping once at the midpoint to charge up for about 15 minutes. And then charge it in the destination town. Most people if they’re driving that far in one direction, they’ll stop halfway anyway, so burden wise, it’s no different. The mooney isn’t the right airplane for a transcontinental trip, but if you only do the trip once or twice a year, it still makes sense. Otherwise, you have a bunch of unused capacity that you don’t need, and that cost money too.

I drive a 2023 Bolt EV, Bolter. don’t laugh, these are really good cars.

Yes, because in the JPI you just said it to eight cylinder engine and it cuts the pulses in half. Same thing with the 830. But the Garmin has no setting and I emailed them trying to get them to do it and they said since it wasn’t TSO they weren’t going to anyway.

It counts double RPM and they’re no way to halve it. You Have to use the P-leads. The single magnetos the JPI RPM sensor works great

The labor is the same, but one radio is three grand and one radio is 4800.

Maybe the relay is getting old and it’s getting slower to open when you apply power to it. Strange things happen, we had a twin Comanche decided to dump all the hydraulic fluid and nitrogen onto the ground from the right main gear housing, as it turns out it was a crack propagating, and it finally reached the pressurized nitrogen part of the strut. This piece is 57 years old and it waited until it was on jacks for the annual to eat itself.

Yes, but when the airplane is sitting there powered off the avionics master relay is resting and it’s closed. When you turn the master switch on there is power applied to the radio bus for a brief second, until the avionics master switch Powers the relay and it opens the circuit so it briefly pulses it and it triggers things like the 275 number two turning on in reversionary mode because it sees power enough to trip it to turn on and then the other one is not on so then it starts up in reversionary mode.

There is also this Tom sb651 dual magneto capacitors..pdf

If you want a good SL30 we have one that came out of our plane for a GNC215.

Do you have a PMA for those magneto base gaskets? It’s a little concerning the usage of a rubber gasket underneath of a magneto.

I would check P-lead grounding to start

Its in vogue right now to only have a backup COM radio, but I'd strongly advise having a secondary NAV/COM radio. Lots of planes with 90K worth of radios, you pull one circuit breaker and you have no nav capability. The GI275 and the G500Txi manual has you wire up the HSDB through the 500Txi first, then the GI275. But if the Txi screen goes dark, you have no NAV on the GI275, it doesnt pass through. Trek Lawler said the STC says "find the nearest VFR". Unless your backup plan is to always have some 1000/3 within 30-60 minutes away at all times, you need some sort of backup standalone NAV

The engine itself it going to be nearly 40K, and some shops will be over that. Then the rest.