Ownership

Oil is the lifeblood of your engine. To achieve maximum engine life, it is crucial to choose the correct oil and to change it regularly at the correct intervals using the correct procedures. If you were flying behind a turbine engine, the choice of oil would be easy. You’d simply choose the slipperiest, longest lasting […]

The most important adjustment your mechanic can make on your fuel-injected Continental powerplant is to set the fuel flows properly. There are four separate adjustments, two at the fuel pump and two at the fuel control unit. Perhaps the most important adjustment, known as high unmetered fuel pressure, determines the fuel flow at takeoff power. […]

It was late Friday afternoon, the first day of our month-long vacation trip to the East Coast. We were somewhere between Albuquerque NM and Dalhart TX, headed for Tulsa, cruising at FL180 to stay above the ice. My wife was fast asleep in the back of our Cessna Turbo 310, bundled tightly in her security […]

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 […]