zuutroy wrote:
though plenty of interest in buying it outright!
Well, if the price is right, sell it. One headache less.
zuutroy wrote:
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?
Top Gear have The Stig. I have Keith. He flies with me everywhere, he’s gone from PPL doing odd jobs to Aer Lingus. If you need someone really hot to fly it I will lend him out at no charge. He can land the Airbus so smooth he gets the ECAM warning because the oleos haven’t compressed. He can hand fly in IMC and chat away as if he was in a coffee shop. Get someone good like that just to put the fuel in it and fly it. The costs remain the same. Parking, maintenance, insurance. At least the new engine will get flown. Also, you need to break that in like I’m doing with the 206. High power, rich, long flights until the rings seat. Otherwise 
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.
Yep, agree with Peter.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
