Low time engine.

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PilotDAR
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Location: Near CNJ4 Orillia, Ontario

Re: Low time engine.

Post by PilotDAR »

You see it all over. Its pretty disgusting to be honest!
Yeah, sometimes it seems like the school yard bullying which my 12 year old tells me about. But don't worry, behind the "front" of AvCanada, there are effective back channels - with polite mentoring, and no bullying! It's just a shame that the public bullying and one-upsmanship suppress the public presentation of the useful back channel information sometimes!
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Taiser
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Re: Low time engine.

Post by Taiser »

culver10 wrote:One of the wonderful things about Lycoming engines is that they rarely have a catastrophic failure that will turn you into a glider. I had a Supercub fly in here many years ago for a restoration and the cam was so worn down from corrosion that the valves would barely open! It still flew in. It turned out the crank was cracked and most of engine was toast, but it still flew. So if you want “piece of mind”, buying a 4 cylinder Lycoming is part of it. So if you buy this plane and it has corrosion on the cam and lifters, it will eventually show itself in oil analysis or maybe even by examining the oil filter internals. You can do a corrosion repair to the bottom end instead of a complete overhaul, and then keep flying.

One of the reasons I went with my Lycosaur. They are tanks!!! Did my homework, as best I could for basically an e-bay engine. Heard a video of it running, including the start and stop. It came with the engine logs which were well written and all the AD's to date complied with. I looked over scans of them before buying. Took a chance and bought it. No issues to date. I've put over 40 hours on it since summer.

Drinks maybe 1/4 quart of oil every 10 hours, no leaks. Idles and runs beautiful... considering it was built in 1949 (rebuilt in 1997) that's pretty impressive. You have to be careful of course but IMHO some guys are over paranoid on these things, especially over an engine that's been sitting for a while.

PilotDar is right, you have to accept some risk but in my experience, you can usually tell when an engine has been abused or neglected! With just a bit of homework you should be fine and be able to weed those ones out.
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