zuutroy wrote:
Now faced with £10000 to get my 1000 hr engine back or £20000 to get it overhauled. Can’t really afford either so more actively pursuing the sale of a share or two now!
No point in worry about what’s happened or how it happened. The bigger question is where to from here. If you don’t have a betterment provision in your policy and you have a choice of spending 10k or 20k at 1000 hours… its a really tough call.
I would go with spending the least amount possible get it airworthy and carry on. The engine could do another 1400 plus hours from here once it’s been stripped, inspected, those issues in the photo’s remedied and the top end is refreshed with new rings etc. If you sold some 25hr or 50hr blocks of dry hours to the right non-equity people you could start to put aside decent money. That engine will probably get you 10 years or more down the road doing 100 hours a year. I expect your parking/maintenance/insurance/fuel costs you quite a few quid already. I’d say its more about getting it back on the road now, and getting some decent use out of it.
Plus if you divide the overhaul cost by the engine potential and put that onto the hourly rate as a provision for an engine fund, you can get other folks to pay for the next overhaul also. So say €30ph out of the group hourly is going to be set aside for the next ten years that is the overhaul covered if all goes to plan. You could also take out betterment on the group policy, because if one of the new guys bends it for you… you may also end up with an overhauled engine. https://eu.visicover.com/faq/about-my-aircraft-cover-options/what-is-betterment-cover.aspx
Just my passing comments
WilliamF wrote:
I would go with spending the least amount possible get it airworthy and carry on. The engine could do another 1400 plus hours from here once it’s been stripped, inspected, those issues in the photo’s remedied and the top end is refreshed with new rings etc
Or maybe more hours than that, if done carefully, and what’s described is a major engine overhaul, or very close. The mandatory parts replacement for a Lycoming overhaul is here. All the rest need only be brought within service limits – as per the legal definition of overhaul documented here with a major overhaul described as follows:
Major Overhaul. A major overhaul consists of the complete disassembly of an engine. The overhaul facility inspects the engine, repairs it as necessary, reassembles, tests, and approves it for return to service within the fits and limits specified by the manufacturer’s overhaul data. This could be to new fits and limits or serviceable limits. The engine owner should clearly understand what fits and limits should be used when the engine is presented for overhaul. The owner should also be aware of any replaced parts, regardless of condition, as a result of a manufacturer’s overhaul data, SB, or an Airworthiness Directive (AD)
Bold added by me.
Interesting to note, for people running past manufacturer-recommended TBO (so, most people?), betterment cover, as described by Visicover, doesn’t cover any past-TBO part at all. So, insurance-wise, with or without betterment cover, you are running on borrowed time: the insurance will in no circumstance cover any repair or replacement of the past-TBO part!
What insurance? 
My Lycoming is 37 years past calendar TBO and I have no need to buy hull insurance.
BTW, scanning the Lycoming mandatory replacement items at major overhaul, and comparing with the OPs engine minimum rectification needs, the only additional item that jumped out at me was mandatory replacement of exhaust values and valve guides on the three cylinders that might be overhauled. The one with the ding in the head looks to me like a strong candidate for replacement.
Just by way of an update, when the final quotes came in it pointed to overhaul being the best decision regardless of what I plan to do with it. I put up an ad looking for partners but no joy so far, though plenty of interest in buying it outright! I’d be a bit sickened to get rid of it just when it becomes a fully known entity with firewall forward and airframe being tip top. On the other hand I have to dig into what, in my mind was ‘do not touch!’ money to get it airworthy. I might just get it back, keep the share advertised, look to sell some hour blocks, and fly it for a year before making a decision.
I probably won’t fly too much in order to replenish reserves a little. In case its just me flying it for a year, is flying say 2x a month in summer and 1x in winter with camguard added to the oil likely to cause any damage?
I understand your concerns Zutroy, I am in slightly different circumstances but again, can’t commit to the kind of hours common to be seen by many on flying forums.
However despite the general consensus that those hours are edging to be too low, there is a huge percentage of aircraft owned by people who are both not on forums and not doing 60-100 hrs a year.
Some are based at airfields I’m familiar with, and they don’t all seem ti be having major engine premature death. But it can happen.
I would not sell, accept the hours available but just try as much as possible to increase them where you can……..same as me.
You don’t need to be doing 60-100hrs/year to fully protect an engine from corrosion – even a post-overhaul one running on straight oil and with Camguard not allowed for first 50hrs or whatever.
Flying once every 2 weeks is just 26 flights a year, and taking 1hr as the minimum to get the engine and oil nice and hot, that’s just 26hrs (airborne time) per year.
You log 26hrs in the airframe and engine logbooks, and you log that plus taxi time in your pilot logbook
This is basically what I do through the winter, though I try hard to fly once a week, and only rarely the wx makes that impossible. Then I sneak in a few longer trips here and there.
The problem is that the majority of owners don’t really care about their plane. They are just not invested. So absolutely loads of planes have had long periods of doing absolutely nothing, in the region of 6-24 months. Of course, long before you bought the plane… One 200k+ plane just popped up for sale which, looking at the prop overhaul times and hours, hasn’t flown much in 2 years. For sure somebody will buy it, probably with a dodgy prebuy…
Also human nature tends to be pretty consistent so if the airframe is corroded, tacky, etc, the chances of the engine having been looked after are nil.
Yep, agree with Peter.
Peter wrote:
This is basically what I do through the winter, though I try hard to fly once a week, and only rarely the wx makes that impossible. Then I sneak in a few longer trips here and there.
that’s pretty much what I do in winter. It is hard to get to places for travelling so I try to at least fly my airplane once a week for about minimum 30-40 minutes and I fly it hard with high power settings. All this effort and I managed to put barely 14 hours on it since end of October. If I wait too long not flying, I get nightmares of oil dripping off the cam lobes on my lycoming, until they get bone dry.
