Oil Change
It was time to take the Cheetah down to Galveston for an oil change. I said something to my wife about having a mechanic at Pearland do it, but she really trusted Bill and didn’t want anyone else working on the plane unless we just couldn’t help it. Fair enough. Being around Bill was always fun and he was great about letting owners learn to do the work themselves. So, when the weather cleared last Sunday, I went down to the “carport”, performed a pre-flight, and then called Bill on my cell phone as I sat in the cockpit ready to start the plane. When he said, “I’m here,” I cranked up the Cheetah, ran through my checks and checklists, and took off toward the scattered Galveston skyline.
It was a sunny day with almost no clouds and good visibility. I leveled the airplane off at at sixteen hundred feet (the NASA T-38 flying-into-Ellington-altitude), set the throttle at 2500 RPM and cruised toward the ragged coastline south, listening to Houston approach busily route airplanes I couldn’t see. I could see cars and homes and businesses and small towns below; and as I approached the towers, spires, and flat, round metal tanks of the Texas City refinery, I flipped my radio over to the frequency for Galveston Tower as I dialed a second radio in to listen to automated winds and weather. Once I had the winds and weather, I told Galveston Tower I was about eight miles north for landing. They cleared me for a left downwind to runway 35, which I acknowledged as I checked the directional gyro to confirm my angle off. I had it just right, already perfectly set up for a recommended forty-five degree entry. I pressed in. My airspeed indicator showed 125 mph and my GPS groundspeed showed 118 knots.
Just inside five miles out, I ran my Landing Checklist but waited to pull the throttle back until I was about three-quarters of a mile from the runway and rolling into a right turn. As I leveled the wings, I reported downwind to the tower, and they cleared me to land. I kept the flaps up until I rolled in on final, adding a few touches of power to carry me across the threshold where ym airplane and I touched down past the numbers but short of the instrument landing marks. Rolling across runway 31/13, I was just beginning to wonder where the tower wanted me to get off when they asked where I was going. When I replied “the north hangars”, they cleared me to get off at taxiway Delta or Echo, my choice. Both were a bit down the runway, so I gave the Cheetah just a little throttle to expedite off and then turned us onto taxiway Delta. Stopping just past the “hold short” lines, I completed the Post-Landing checklist and then called Ground and told them where I was and where I wanted to go. They cleared me “to parking”, so I turned her left at taxiway Alpha and taxied north until it was time to peel off and head directly for Bill’s hangar. I swung the Cheetah partially around and stopped about twenty feet outside his hangar door which was filled with a red and white Cessna 172.
After I shutdown the airplane, I pulled on the canopy latch to unlock it but it was locked closed. DAMN! (This had happened to me once before and will be the subject of my next blog.) Hoping Bill could get me out, I sat and waited until I could signal him, hoping he’d understand. As a last resort, I could pull out my cell phone and call him; but he saw me and understood. Grabbing a large metal hoop filled with airplane keys, he hopped up on my airplane and used one of them to unlock my canopy. I climbed out as he headed back into his hangar to talk to two women near the back and looking at a red Pitts S-1. I followed him back where he asked me to push my airplane away from the hangar a bit so he could get the 172 out and reposition the Pitts to the front. Walking back to my airplane, I pushed the airplane back about twenty feet, and turned to find Bill had already attached a tow bar to the nose of the 172 and was hauling it out. As soon as he finished parking it parallel to the hangar doors, he retreated back into the hangar to fetch the Pitts. The women studied it as he pulled it into position; they were there to attach some sings to this little red showbird.
A Cessna Cardinal RG carrying two pilots taxied past, whipped back around, and shut down. One of the pilots was going to pick up the 172. Bill went out to meet and greet them; as he did, I heard one of them ask him if the airplane was ready. He answered it was, even though it had been rebuilt from the front firewall forward. It belonged to a flight training school out of Dallas, but it had been left in Galveston after its pilot had rammed it into a fuel truck. The good news was that no one and no other airplane got hurt.
None of us were quite sure what made the 172’s student pilot decide to hand prop the airplane after he landed and gassed it up. (Bill thought an alternator wire might have come loose in flight, leaving the guy with a dead battery.) In any case, after he fueled the airplane, the battery would not turn the engine over. The pilot decided to try to start the airplane on his own. Big mistake, especially with no chocks or tie downs holding it back. He set the throttle, pushed the mixture in, turned the magnetos to ON, grabbed the prop, and pulled it through. The engine started right away and jumped to the three-quarters throttle! The Cessna lunged forward like a race horse as he clutched a strut to stop it; and though some folks feel he turned it away from other airplanes, he and his steed smashed head-on into the FBO’s 100 Low-Lead Avgas-toting fuel truck. Luckily, the prop chewed into the truck’s front plastic and metal cowling rather than into its full fuel tank, and no fire broke out. Needless to say, both the truck and the airplane’s front ends were smashed. Bill had been working on it ever since, including installing a factory-rebuilt Lycoming engine in it. The pilots were here to pick it up and fly it back; and, understandably, Bill walked off to talk to them and give them the airplane’s logs. I decided to rock back and wait, hoping it would not take too long to kick them out the door and get airborne.
It really wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before one of the pilots got back in the Cardinal RG, cranked it up, and taxied it out, heading for the fuel pumps. The Cessna 172 pilot, a black-headed young man in his middle-to-late twenties and carrying a medium build, walked around the Cessna to preflight it. Once done, he shook Bill’s hand, climbed in, and on the second attempt, got it started. As he taxied away from the hangar, Bill walked back over to me, told me to pull the Cheetah closer to the hangar so we wouldn’t get oil out on the ramp, and disappeared toward the back of his hangar. I pulled the Cheetah back up, being careful not to get too close to the Pitts lest I accidentally hit it. Bill brought out a bucket, placing it just behind the nose of the airplane, and told me to go into the hangar and to look for a hose with some safety wire on it. My airplane was equipped with an oil quick drain. All I needed to do was hook the hose onto it and push up until it clicked open. Sounded simple enough. But, then, it always does…
I scoured the hangar and hangar floor to find three hoses, one black and two green, with safety wire wrapped around their tops and sticking out from them to form a hook like you’d make by bending a piece of clothes hangar. The hoses seemed to be about the same size, but the black rubber one looked a bit bigger than the others and the most likely to fit over the quick drain’s snout. Hauling it out to the airplane, I popped open my engine cowling to give me the best access to the engine compartment and then threaded the hose down through the bottom of the cowling until it rested over the top and inside of the bucket. Or so I thought. Leaning in, I pushed the hose up against the nozzle of the quick drain but it didn’t fit over it like I had hoped though it was just wide enough to slide onto its bottom. I pushed harder and felt the drain give a little but didn’t see any oil hitting the bucket. That’s when I realized the other end of the hose had slipped over the top of the bucket, and I was spilling oil onto the tarmac. I quickly let go, and the oil stopped but not before the hot, black liquid had flowed over my hand. OUCH!
Cursing, I plopped the other end of the hose into the bucket and then walked into the hangar to find some paper towels to wipe my hand clean. After getting somewhat cleaned up, I went back to my airplane, felt the quick drain and looked at it the best I could to understand what I was feeling, placed the hose under it again, making sure the other end was IN the bucket. I pushed up on the quick drain again, this time putting some snap in it and heard it click open. Holding the hose up to it while the rest of the oil in the case drained out, I stayed there until not even a drop was leaking out of the hose. Once I knew I could safely I move away, I removed the hose and pulled down on the quick drain to lock it back in place. SNAP!
Bill was back in the hangar talking to the women. I told him I had finished draining the oil and asked him if he had any “kitty litter” I could use to clean up my mess. He told me we’d worry about that later as he left to fetch 6 quarts of AeroShell 100 oil and a new oil filter. After placing the items down near the airplane, he returned to a tool box and got me a rather large open end wrench and a pair of safety wire pliers. He told me to go cut the safety wire off the oil filter and use the wrench, if needed, to remove it. My oil filter was wired around the base of the oil pressure sensor, and it took a bit of twisting and turning to get the pliers in there just right, but I did. Clipping the wire off, I put a box end wrench around the end of the oil filter and gave it a tug, and the filter loosened up. A small gush of oil flowed out of it as I took it off. I asked Bill what he wanted to do with it. Grabbing it, he emptied the filter into our oil waste bucket and then took it to a workbench in the back of his hangar.
“We’re going to cut it open,” he said.
“Ahhh,” I gushed, “to look for metal particles that might be coming from the engine.”
“Correct!” he replied.
We heard an airplane taxi by in front of the hangar and spin around to stop in front of it. Its pilot ran its engine up and then we heard the engine’s speed drop as he did a “mag check”, except the engine’s smooth firing was replaced by a staccato of pops. They were coming from the red and white Cessna 172 that had never departed. Its pilot shrugged his shoulders and then shut the airplane down.
“I was afraid of that,” Bill said, as he walked out to greet the man.
“Is that lead fouling?” I asked.
“No, oil. It’s very common with a new engine.”
“It’s got less than 50 hours on it?”
“More like fifteen minutes…”
Immediately, I understood what was happening. The engine was brand new, and the rings in the cylinders had yet to seat. Because of that, more oil was blowing by the rings than usual and fowling the spark plugs. With time, assuming the rings were properly seated, the problem would go away. But what happened now was largely dependent on the pilots who flew the airplane. Rings seat best when new engines are flown at 65% power or better (and 70%-75% power is best) for about the first fifty hours, and then eased back to lower power settings (which I won’t do since I typically cruise at 75% power!). You have to know that or you’ll make the mistake of treating the airplane engine like a car’s and ruin it by taking it too easy. There are horror stories of pilots who wound up overhauling cylinders again at only a hundred or two hundred hours of flight time. Throwing an additional $6,000 after a $17,000 outlay has gotta hurt!
Bill pulled the cowling off the airplane and removed the lower spark plugs off the left side, brought them into the hangar and cleaned them off with a sand-blasting machine, checked the spark plug gap, and then took them back out to the airplane. He installed them, replaced the cowling, and the pilot crawled back in and started his airplane. After just a moment, he ran the engine up again and did another mag check and got the same result…almost. The malfunctioning mag had been fixed but now the other mag was misbehaving, sputtering and popping like the first.
Bill ran through the whole cycle again. As he did, I was hunting around the hangar for some solvent Bill claimed was in a five gallon black can. I was supposed to use it to clean all the spilled oil out of my airplane. I hunted, and I hunted, but I found nothing. Bill took a look, too, when he brought the next set of spark plugs in, but he couldn’t find it either.
“Take some solvent out of the parts cleaner,” he said as he headed out to the Cessna again.
I figured out that the “parts cleaner” he was talking about was a metal sink hooked up to a solvent can and an electric pump operated by a switch on the unit’s side. But what did I put the solvent in? I found a wide, empty yogurt cup in a nearby trash can and filled it about three quarters full of solvent. Back at my airplane, a hose hooked to a compressed air pump laid on the ground with a nozzle trailing a small, plastic hose hooked into the thing. Picking up the nozzle, I carefully placed its hose down in the yogurt cup and pulled the trigger. Solvent hissed out of the nozzle, chasing oil out of the airplane and onto the cement tarmac. Keeping my head back so I didn’t breathe the stuff anymore than I could help, I used it to clean the oil off all the compartments and parts I could see and then clean off my nosewheel and tire. Once I had done all I could with the solvent, I pulled the hose out of the cup and continued blasting everything that needed drying with cleanly polluted compressed air.
Behind me, Bill finished reinstalling the cleaned plugs and the cowling; and the young man from Dallas hopped into the flight school’s 172 and started it again. He ran it up, checked the mags, and gave Bill a “thumbs up”. Bill waved him off as he taxied out for what we hoped would be a permanent trip north.
Meanwhile, the women were finishing up with the little red Pitts. It was being flown by an airshow pilot, and he wanted the plane to look the part. “Mike Smith” was now surrounded by two white stars, all in flowing white decals underneath the rim of the small cockpit. That looked pretty cool, and the woman doing the work said it was “dirt cheap” to do. Which made me wonder if I could talk my wife into letting me do the same with the Cheetah. Of course, my name would be on the left side and hers on the right, since that’s where she normally sat. But a small voice said that if she ever really did get her pilot’s license, it could start eating at her after a while. Deciding that cowardice was, in this case, the better part of valor, I decided not to say anything. Though the devil in me roared back that it might get her off her ass…
The Cessna left and the women left and the sun was going with them. Bill felt he needed to apologize for the whole thing taking so long; but, even though I had hoped the whole thing would go faster, I hadn’t been and wasn’t in a hurry. He came over and we opened up the new oil filter and he applied a silicone lubricant to the filter’s rubber seal. He wrote the airplane’s N number, the date, and engine tach’s reading on the filter with a black marker, saying:
“Put this on hand tight and then go one revolution more. That’s all. Use some of the writing on the filter to tell you when you’ve hit one rev.”
Taking the filter out to the airplane, I did exactly what he said, using the big open end wrench to help me get the extra one rev. As I finished, Bill appeared beside me with safety wire and safety wire pliers, and wired up the oil filter with safety wire to make sure it didn’t rotate off. I had hoped to do that, but I’d ask for that next time.
As I pushed the airplane back and buttoned it up, Bill dumped some kitty litter on the oil I had spilled. I then climbed into my cockpit and started the engine up. The oil pressure came up immediately. That was a good sign. I shut the airplane down and we both looked inside the engine compartment for any leaks. It looked good, and there hadn’t even been any smoke.
We went back to the rear of the hangar and cut open my oil filter. To my surprise, I learned that the filter element was made out of paper. To my relief, the filter had not one speck of anything in it.
Grabbing my log books out of the airplane, I took them to Bill and he signed off the work we’d done. The airplane was good now for another 50 hours. The next 50 hours would put us over 1000 hours on this engine since it was lat rebuilt, and it was supposed to live only a maximum 2000 hour life before needing another. SEVENTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS! Connie and I (especially I) needed to start saving NOW for that future expense! It might be arguable we’d keep the airplane that long; but better to be safe than sorry.
For the moment, though, I had more immediate concerns. I climbed back in the airplane, we said “goodbye”, and I started the Cheetah back up. Couldn’t help but glance at my oil pressure gauge a little more than usual as I ran through my checklists, taxied out, and completed the takeoff checklist. After getting clearance from the tower, I pushed the throttle forward and the Cheetah roared down runway 35 to lift off over the homes and shorelines of Galveston Bay and fly for, at least, another 50 hours.
Her oil was fresh, and its pressure was holding up just fine.
On some days, you can’t ask for any more than that.
It was a sunny day with almost no clouds and good visibility. I leveled the airplane off at at sixteen hundred feet (the NASA T-38 flying-into-Ellington-altitude), set the throttle at 2500 RPM and cruised toward the ragged coastline south, listening to Houston approach busily route airplanes I couldn’t see. I could see cars and homes and businesses and small towns below; and as I approached the towers, spires, and flat, round metal tanks of the Texas City refinery, I flipped my radio over to the frequency for Galveston Tower as I dialed a second radio in to listen to automated winds and weather. Once I had the winds and weather, I told Galveston Tower I was about eight miles north for landing. They cleared me for a left downwind to runway 35, which I acknowledged as I checked the directional gyro to confirm my angle off. I had it just right, already perfectly set up for a recommended forty-five degree entry. I pressed in. My airspeed indicator showed 125 mph and my GPS groundspeed showed 118 knots.
Just inside five miles out, I ran my Landing Checklist but waited to pull the throttle back until I was about three-quarters of a mile from the runway and rolling into a right turn. As I leveled the wings, I reported downwind to the tower, and they cleared me to land. I kept the flaps up until I rolled in on final, adding a few touches of power to carry me across the threshold where ym airplane and I touched down past the numbers but short of the instrument landing marks. Rolling across runway 31/13, I was just beginning to wonder where the tower wanted me to get off when they asked where I was going. When I replied “the north hangars”, they cleared me to get off at taxiway Delta or Echo, my choice. Both were a bit down the runway, so I gave the Cheetah just a little throttle to expedite off and then turned us onto taxiway Delta. Stopping just past the “hold short” lines, I completed the Post-Landing checklist and then called Ground and told them where I was and where I wanted to go. They cleared me “to parking”, so I turned her left at taxiway Alpha and taxied north until it was time to peel off and head directly for Bill’s hangar. I swung the Cheetah partially around and stopped about twenty feet outside his hangar door which was filled with a red and white Cessna 172.
After I shutdown the airplane, I pulled on the canopy latch to unlock it but it was locked closed. DAMN! (This had happened to me once before and will be the subject of my next blog.) Hoping Bill could get me out, I sat and waited until I could signal him, hoping he’d understand. As a last resort, I could pull out my cell phone and call him; but he saw me and understood. Grabbing a large metal hoop filled with airplane keys, he hopped up on my airplane and used one of them to unlock my canopy. I climbed out as he headed back into his hangar to talk to two women near the back and looking at a red Pitts S-1. I followed him back where he asked me to push my airplane away from the hangar a bit so he could get the 172 out and reposition the Pitts to the front. Walking back to my airplane, I pushed the airplane back about twenty feet, and turned to find Bill had already attached a tow bar to the nose of the 172 and was hauling it out. As soon as he finished parking it parallel to the hangar doors, he retreated back into the hangar to fetch the Pitts. The women studied it as he pulled it into position; they were there to attach some sings to this little red showbird.
A Cessna Cardinal RG carrying two pilots taxied past, whipped back around, and shut down. One of the pilots was going to pick up the 172. Bill went out to meet and greet them; as he did, I heard one of them ask him if the airplane was ready. He answered it was, even though it had been rebuilt from the front firewall forward. It belonged to a flight training school out of Dallas, but it had been left in Galveston after its pilot had rammed it into a fuel truck. The good news was that no one and no other airplane got hurt.
None of us were quite sure what made the 172’s student pilot decide to hand prop the airplane after he landed and gassed it up. (Bill thought an alternator wire might have come loose in flight, leaving the guy with a dead battery.) In any case, after he fueled the airplane, the battery would not turn the engine over. The pilot decided to try to start the airplane on his own. Big mistake, especially with no chocks or tie downs holding it back. He set the throttle, pushed the mixture in, turned the magnetos to ON, grabbed the prop, and pulled it through. The engine started right away and jumped to the three-quarters throttle! The Cessna lunged forward like a race horse as he clutched a strut to stop it; and though some folks feel he turned it away from other airplanes, he and his steed smashed head-on into the FBO’s 100 Low-Lead Avgas-toting fuel truck. Luckily, the prop chewed into the truck’s front plastic and metal cowling rather than into its full fuel tank, and no fire broke out. Needless to say, both the truck and the airplane’s front ends were smashed. Bill had been working on it ever since, including installing a factory-rebuilt Lycoming engine in it. The pilots were here to pick it up and fly it back; and, understandably, Bill walked off to talk to them and give them the airplane’s logs. I decided to rock back and wait, hoping it would not take too long to kick them out the door and get airborne.
It really wasn’t more than a couple of minutes before one of the pilots got back in the Cardinal RG, cranked it up, and taxied it out, heading for the fuel pumps. The Cessna 172 pilot, a black-headed young man in his middle-to-late twenties and carrying a medium build, walked around the Cessna to preflight it. Once done, he shook Bill’s hand, climbed in, and on the second attempt, got it started. As he taxied away from the hangar, Bill walked back over to me, told me to pull the Cheetah closer to the hangar so we wouldn’t get oil out on the ramp, and disappeared toward the back of his hangar. I pulled the Cheetah back up, being careful not to get too close to the Pitts lest I accidentally hit it. Bill brought out a bucket, placing it just behind the nose of the airplane, and told me to go into the hangar and to look for a hose with some safety wire on it. My airplane was equipped with an oil quick drain. All I needed to do was hook the hose onto it and push up until it clicked open. Sounded simple enough. But, then, it always does…
I scoured the hangar and hangar floor to find three hoses, one black and two green, with safety wire wrapped around their tops and sticking out from them to form a hook like you’d make by bending a piece of clothes hangar. The hoses seemed to be about the same size, but the black rubber one looked a bit bigger than the others and the most likely to fit over the quick drain’s snout. Hauling it out to the airplane, I popped open my engine cowling to give me the best access to the engine compartment and then threaded the hose down through the bottom of the cowling until it rested over the top and inside of the bucket. Or so I thought. Leaning in, I pushed the hose up against the nozzle of the quick drain but it didn’t fit over it like I had hoped though it was just wide enough to slide onto its bottom. I pushed harder and felt the drain give a little but didn’t see any oil hitting the bucket. That’s when I realized the other end of the hose had slipped over the top of the bucket, and I was spilling oil onto the tarmac. I quickly let go, and the oil stopped but not before the hot, black liquid had flowed over my hand. OUCH!
Cursing, I plopped the other end of the hose into the bucket and then walked into the hangar to find some paper towels to wipe my hand clean. After getting somewhat cleaned up, I went back to my airplane, felt the quick drain and looked at it the best I could to understand what I was feeling, placed the hose under it again, making sure the other end was IN the bucket. I pushed up on the quick drain again, this time putting some snap in it and heard it click open. Holding the hose up to it while the rest of the oil in the case drained out, I stayed there until not even a drop was leaking out of the hose. Once I knew I could safely I move away, I removed the hose and pulled down on the quick drain to lock it back in place. SNAP!
Bill was back in the hangar talking to the women. I told him I had finished draining the oil and asked him if he had any “kitty litter” I could use to clean up my mess. He told me we’d worry about that later as he left to fetch 6 quarts of AeroShell 100 oil and a new oil filter. After placing the items down near the airplane, he returned to a tool box and got me a rather large open end wrench and a pair of safety wire pliers. He told me to go cut the safety wire off the oil filter and use the wrench, if needed, to remove it. My oil filter was wired around the base of the oil pressure sensor, and it took a bit of twisting and turning to get the pliers in there just right, but I did. Clipping the wire off, I put a box end wrench around the end of the oil filter and gave it a tug, and the filter loosened up. A small gush of oil flowed out of it as I took it off. I asked Bill what he wanted to do with it. Grabbing it, he emptied the filter into our oil waste bucket and then took it to a workbench in the back of his hangar.
“We’re going to cut it open,” he said.
“Ahhh,” I gushed, “to look for metal particles that might be coming from the engine.”
“Correct!” he replied.
We heard an airplane taxi by in front of the hangar and spin around to stop in front of it. Its pilot ran its engine up and then we heard the engine’s speed drop as he did a “mag check”, except the engine’s smooth firing was replaced by a staccato of pops. They were coming from the red and white Cessna 172 that had never departed. Its pilot shrugged his shoulders and then shut the airplane down.
“I was afraid of that,” Bill said, as he walked out to greet the man.
“Is that lead fouling?” I asked.
“No, oil. It’s very common with a new engine.”
“It’s got less than 50 hours on it?”
“More like fifteen minutes…”
Immediately, I understood what was happening. The engine was brand new, and the rings in the cylinders had yet to seat. Because of that, more oil was blowing by the rings than usual and fowling the spark plugs. With time, assuming the rings were properly seated, the problem would go away. But what happened now was largely dependent on the pilots who flew the airplane. Rings seat best when new engines are flown at 65% power or better (and 70%-75% power is best) for about the first fifty hours, and then eased back to lower power settings (which I won’t do since I typically cruise at 75% power!). You have to know that or you’ll make the mistake of treating the airplane engine like a car’s and ruin it by taking it too easy. There are horror stories of pilots who wound up overhauling cylinders again at only a hundred or two hundred hours of flight time. Throwing an additional $6,000 after a $17,000 outlay has gotta hurt!
Bill pulled the cowling off the airplane and removed the lower spark plugs off the left side, brought them into the hangar and cleaned them off with a sand-blasting machine, checked the spark plug gap, and then took them back out to the airplane. He installed them, replaced the cowling, and the pilot crawled back in and started his airplane. After just a moment, he ran the engine up again and did another mag check and got the same result…almost. The malfunctioning mag had been fixed but now the other mag was misbehaving, sputtering and popping like the first.
Bill ran through the whole cycle again. As he did, I was hunting around the hangar for some solvent Bill claimed was in a five gallon black can. I was supposed to use it to clean all the spilled oil out of my airplane. I hunted, and I hunted, but I found nothing. Bill took a look, too, when he brought the next set of spark plugs in, but he couldn’t find it either.
“Take some solvent out of the parts cleaner,” he said as he headed out to the Cessna again.
I figured out that the “parts cleaner” he was talking about was a metal sink hooked up to a solvent can and an electric pump operated by a switch on the unit’s side. But what did I put the solvent in? I found a wide, empty yogurt cup in a nearby trash can and filled it about three quarters full of solvent. Back at my airplane, a hose hooked to a compressed air pump laid on the ground with a nozzle trailing a small, plastic hose hooked into the thing. Picking up the nozzle, I carefully placed its hose down in the yogurt cup and pulled the trigger. Solvent hissed out of the nozzle, chasing oil out of the airplane and onto the cement tarmac. Keeping my head back so I didn’t breathe the stuff anymore than I could help, I used it to clean the oil off all the compartments and parts I could see and then clean off my nosewheel and tire. Once I had done all I could with the solvent, I pulled the hose out of the cup and continued blasting everything that needed drying with cleanly polluted compressed air.
Behind me, Bill finished reinstalling the cleaned plugs and the cowling; and the young man from Dallas hopped into the flight school’s 172 and started it again. He ran it up, checked the mags, and gave Bill a “thumbs up”. Bill waved him off as he taxied out for what we hoped would be a permanent trip north.
Meanwhile, the women were finishing up with the little red Pitts. It was being flown by an airshow pilot, and he wanted the plane to look the part. “Mike Smith” was now surrounded by two white stars, all in flowing white decals underneath the rim of the small cockpit. That looked pretty cool, and the woman doing the work said it was “dirt cheap” to do. Which made me wonder if I could talk my wife into letting me do the same with the Cheetah. Of course, my name would be on the left side and hers on the right, since that’s where she normally sat. But a small voice said that if she ever really did get her pilot’s license, it could start eating at her after a while. Deciding that cowardice was, in this case, the better part of valor, I decided not to say anything. Though the devil in me roared back that it might get her off her ass…
The Cessna left and the women left and the sun was going with them. Bill felt he needed to apologize for the whole thing taking so long; but, even though I had hoped the whole thing would go faster, I hadn’t been and wasn’t in a hurry. He came over and we opened up the new oil filter and he applied a silicone lubricant to the filter’s rubber seal. He wrote the airplane’s N number, the date, and engine tach’s reading on the filter with a black marker, saying:
“Put this on hand tight and then go one revolution more. That’s all. Use some of the writing on the filter to tell you when you’ve hit one rev.”
Taking the filter out to the airplane, I did exactly what he said, using the big open end wrench to help me get the extra one rev. As I finished, Bill appeared beside me with safety wire and safety wire pliers, and wired up the oil filter with safety wire to make sure it didn’t rotate off. I had hoped to do that, but I’d ask for that next time.
As I pushed the airplane back and buttoned it up, Bill dumped some kitty litter on the oil I had spilled. I then climbed into my cockpit and started the engine up. The oil pressure came up immediately. That was a good sign. I shut the airplane down and we both looked inside the engine compartment for any leaks. It looked good, and there hadn’t even been any smoke.
We went back to the rear of the hangar and cut open my oil filter. To my surprise, I learned that the filter element was made out of paper. To my relief, the filter had not one speck of anything in it.
Grabbing my log books out of the airplane, I took them to Bill and he signed off the work we’d done. The airplane was good now for another 50 hours. The next 50 hours would put us over 1000 hours on this engine since it was lat rebuilt, and it was supposed to live only a maximum 2000 hour life before needing another. SEVENTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS! Connie and I (especially I) needed to start saving NOW for that future expense! It might be arguable we’d keep the airplane that long; but better to be safe than sorry.
For the moment, though, I had more immediate concerns. I climbed back in the airplane, we said “goodbye”, and I started the Cheetah back up. Couldn’t help but glance at my oil pressure gauge a little more than usual as I ran through my checklists, taxied out, and completed the takeoff checklist. After getting clearance from the tower, I pushed the throttle forward and the Cheetah roared down runway 35 to lift off over the homes and shorelines of Galveston Bay and fly for, at least, another 50 hours.
Her oil was fresh, and its pressure was holding up just fine.
On some days, you can’t ask for any more than that.
posted by Andy Foster at 11:01 PM
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