Maintenance

Most small aircraft depend on air-driven gyro instruments powered by vacuum produced by an engine-driven air pump. The vacuum system is a simple one, and it should be reliable and trouble-free. Too often, though, it isn’t. Figure 1 shows the vacuum system in a typical single-engine airplane. Ambient air enters the system through a central […]

I‘m not a licensed A& P mechanic, but I play one on TV. Actually, I’m just a maintenance-involved owner who spends quite a bit of time hanging around the shop swinging wrenches on my Cessna 310, and I get to see a lot of other airplanes coming through the shop. I’ve concluded that most light […]

My 310 is annualled every March. This year, the engines had reached 500 hours SMOH, so I decided it was time to pull all four magnetos and perform the 500-hour inspection as called for in the Bendix magneto service manual. The annual also involved overhaul of a sticky wastegate, replacement of a prop control cable, […]

Twenty years ago, in the heyday of piston powerplant production, things were different. Lycoming and Continental were working three shifts, cranking out three thousand engines a month, mostly brand new engines for brand new airplanes. When powerplants got old and tired, they would almost always be overhauled in the field. Factory remans were available, but […]

In a press release on June 10th, Mobil announced that it had decided to permanently withdraw its AV-1 fully synthetic oil from the market, and was recalling existing stocks of AV-1 from its distributors. In recent months, both Mobil and TCM became aware of a number of cases in which severe deposits of lead sludge […]