Dead Mag

[jnisley]

 

Several weeks ago after returning from a cross country flight (by habit) I checked my mags before shutting down, to my suprise my left mag was dead. As I thought back over the flight things that had puzzled me started making sense.

 

1. About 1/2 hour into the flight I thought I detected more vibration then normal, all the gauges showed normal so I contributed it to the "auto rough" feature that kicks in when over rough terrain (West Virginia)

2. About one hour into the flight I decided to go from ROP to LOP, I was at 8000ft so I expected my last cylinder egt to peek at around 1440, it didn't, it kept climbing and the engine ran rough before it peeked. So I went back to ROP. Puzzling it was....

Our mechanic removed the left mag and found nothing wrong with it ( Slick mags with 300 hours) a new ignition switch solved the problem.

 

 

[FloridaMan]

I lost a mag on my return/dual insurance requirement flight with Parker. EGT en-route would skyrocket and performance seemed to fluctuate as well. The mag would run ok-ish at idle, but would be dead on runup. In our case, it ended up being a coil.