PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:
How did you do then ?
Ask the waitress in the café 
How did you do then ?
In that case, it happened at Tarbes, at the Socata factory. They diagnosed a faulty starter motor and sold me another one for €1400, which (having been a roughly 10 year old stock, no grease) seized a few weeks later. But it did manage to just about start the engine at Tarbes. When I got back home the battery failed properly, was replaced with a Concorde, and I fitted a Skytec 149NL starter.
Unfortunately, there are many things which could ground your plane and result in huge hassles – unless you stick to flying between say Shoreham and Bembridge, or Le Touquet, as many do. So pilots who travel a lot to distant places need to have a very picky attitude to maintenance.
Peter wrote:
In that case, it happened at Tarbes, at the Socata factory.
You were lucky so. Have had a battery failure at LFHO (1 hour flight from LFMA) and was helped by my maintenance facility, who was flying around in a Citation… With a startpac. That was a saturday before christmas, 5h by car, no life on the field.
Peter wrote:
They diagnosed a faulty starter motor and sold me another one for €1400,
!!
Was it really faulty or the diagnosis bad ?
Peter wrote:
But it did manage to just about start the engine at Tarbes.
Don’t understand: how could that be if the battery was flat ? The new starter needed less energy ?
I think the battery was marginal and yes the replacement starter drew a bit less current.
I got a partial refund on the starter, a long time later.
There is a lot of old stock sitting on aviation shelves…
I know that 24v has advantages but you can’t beat 12v for practicality. My plane has automotive terminals so pretty well any car battery will fit it in an emergency. An Optima AGM battery costs only about £160, and you get 850amp ccc off a 50ah battery. Its amazing how much extra you have to pay just to get a battery with different shaped terminals (whose idea was that anyway?).
One of ‘my moments’ occurred when we had a flat battery in a friends Piper Archer, winters evening, stuck in remote airfield. We really needed to get back to base. So……we spied a car in the adjacent car park, found the driver, sourced a set of jump leads, brought car to aeroplane, and jump started it.
Worked a treat, and a bemused car driver left to relay the story over a pint in a bar somewhere….the day I…..
In my experience putting the battery on a normal trickle charger will keep it topped over winter.
