Aluminum chips or flakes found inside the oil filter are not really conditions of concern so disassemble a cylinder without prior investigation of the causes, a follow-up through subsequent inspections to determine if these chips or flakes increase or decrease is appropriate. The motor manufacturer clearly specifies how many chips are acceptable to keep running and for how long in hours. Of course, each operator decides what level of security they feel comfortable with and chooses to do what most reassures them. It is also clear that entering the worn condition of an engine with evidence of chips means that something is causing premature or improper wear, which requires attention.
Ask the flying reporter…..
I’m going to have a go a brain surgery tomorrow, after breakfast. If anyone wants to know how it goes, just ask me.
Peter wrote:
This guy (an ex BBC reporter trying to make money from Youtube videos, and sponsorship) is going to spend ~10k now
His idea seems to be to collect the 10k from Youtube and us watching the crude story …
How about a discussion on Quality Control on YT?
I think we did some of that here.
What I hear is that people make more from product promotions than from YT moneytisation. I can well believe that, because you can negotiate the advertising income up front, whereas YT will pay you only afterwards, on some per-click basis and you need an awful lot of viewers to get significant money.
But hey there is no such thing as bad publicity and here we are feeding the clicks 
Well, you also have to figure in the tax position of a YouTube channel.
And to be clear, I’m making no comment on the case referred to above (of which I have zero knowledge and I don’t follow the channel), just the general idea of monetisation of a YouTube channel.
You have an expensive hobby such a flying. You decide to try to make some income from it via a YouTube channel. There isn’t really a downside assuming you are still doing it alongside your main income, and not giving up your main income.
Because if you make money from it then it’s a success.
If you fail to make money from it, you were going to spend that money on your hobby anyway, and now you’ve got a contribution to some of the costs of your hobby, and the deficit now becomes a tax loss which (depending on the country) may be used to reduce the tax on your other income. So effectively with a loss making channel, you get some income towards your hobby and a tax deduction for the overall deficit.
Where problems start is if you give up your main source of income or start to incur additional costs over and above your hobby expenditure which exceed the benefits mentioned above.
Again this is nothing about the channel mentioned above, of which I have no knowledge whatsoever. It may indeed be a very profitable channel.
He must be crazy to let them just start pulling the cylinders like that.
I’m really surprised they let him film it all though, because they must have had a decent idea that they weren’t going to find anything that warranted doing it.
I’ve not watched the second video yet but the first one didn’t make the engineers look much good.
It’s a nice bit of reverse engineered publicity for the engine shop.
New video up now, explaining that the last clinder removed showed a piston plug having come loose and was wearing.
SO, now that we see a gudgeon pin end is disintegrating, causing the metal in the filter, is it correct to say the maintenance organisation were right to pull the cylinders?
Even without the gudgeon pin failing, did the internal corrosion found by the boroscope inspection warrant engine disassembly? No dog in this fight, just genuinely interested in what level of engine distress warrants what level of remedial work.
I would say that piston plug would have left a mark in that cylinder, visible with a borescope at BDC. So they could have gone straight to that one.
There may also be this option.
Corrosion is a funny one. If you don’t know about it, you are legal (same is true for most things, provided compression, oil burn, oil filter containing no more than a specified % of the camshaft, etc are within MM limits). But once you do know about it, you aren’t legal More specifically, corrosion on some parts is absolutely not airworthy (con rods are one). This means that once an engine is opened up (within a “legal maintenance environment”) and corrosion is found, it cannot be reassembled and signed off. It could go only into the uncertified market.
That said, I know of one UK engine shop (gone years ago) which would and did reassemble a corroded engine (worse than the above one; see post further back) without saying a word, and a guy there told me years later they did that if there was no prospect of Lyco covering their rehone etc costs under warranty. Now why would Lyco not cover their costs? Because they knew (and this shop knew, because anybody could phone up Lyco and ask them the shipping date) the engine was improperly stored (for too long) and went rusty, and the airframe mfg forged the engine logbooks 
Apart from not using a borescope properly (I can scope all six pots in 30 mins, top cowling off only, measured into the hangar and out of the hangar) I can’t say the engine shop acted excessively. Especially given the metal in the filter. On that one, you can determine which type of piston plug your engine has (unless a previous shop has lost a work pack, which happens, for various reasons, not necessarily nefarious) and if it turned out to be brass and not ally, perhaps a different action may have been taken since the metal was ally (wait until the next service interval?).
