Big long thread, skimmed through it, but nobody seems to have mentioned the most important thing about making a box to ship an engine to the USA.
1) It needs to be made from heat stamped, or reworked timber. The wood that the pallet is made from will have the familiar ISPM stamp. Anything that goes onto the pallet needs to be plywood, chipboard or heat treated. Otherwise, your pallet will get rejected.
What is ISPM15: ISPM15 (International Standards for Phytosanitary Measures No. 15) is an International Phytosanitary Measure developed by the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) that directly addresses the need to treat wood packaging materials of a thickness greater than 6mm, used to ship products between countries. Its main purpose is to prevent the international transport and spread of disease and insects that could negatively affect plants or ecosystems.
2) Airfreight will be the most effective, and you will need to produce a purge certificate to state the engine is completely flushed.
I am sending big awkward stuff abroad regularly. I work with a guy who can and has sent a Tiger to Tehran, or a stage for U2 to LA. In my local tooling and bearing supplier, they get boxes in from USA for great big rolls of chain. For 20 quid I can get a big palletised box that is ISPM heat treated and can take a TCM520 or similar.
Sure there are companies which wriggle out of warranties.
Lycoming and Continental are the two best known ones 
OTOH I have heard of many cases where Lyco paid for a repair which they clearly didn’t have to pay for.
In Europe, very little gets posted on forums – presumably for the usual reasons i.e. people try to look after a relationship first and foremost. In the US, you often hear about names of US engine shops which did, or didn’t, behave properly.
I think that if your engine blows up a week after delivery, every engine shop will have to sort it out. But this is extremely rare (I did once see a Bonanza engine with a great hole in the crankcase, right after an overhaul, in the UK). The more usual problem is that you get something like sticky valves a couple of years from overhaul. It’s going to cost you say 1k to repair a cylinder (the “old rope trick” with grinding paste is really just to get home; it’s not a long term fix) and I am sure very few shops would pay for it.
IMHO warranties are way too short in this business to be of much use. It’s like a 1 year warranty on a house…
We have lots of great old threads here and most of the people in them are still here. Those who aren’t have probably dropped out of flying.
The engine shop mentioned above appears to have gone bust shortly after the post saying it was a great shop It appears to have been in administration 2 months before the above mention. For sure you won’t get a warranty there.
@Peter,
you are right about many things, foremost that I missed how old the posts were ;) and the hassles which no warranty can ever cover. What I was trying to say is this, among the shops which survive the winds of change over years, there are some with fake warranty, and some with real warranty. If your engine fails in flight, it ain’t matter. But, if it fails the next annual in the shop you wish you had selected the stand-up shop.
The above thread is more than 6 years old, BTW.
There is a thread here on engine crating and shipping. I have recently found some services which are a lot cheaper than one would have paid a few years ago, so the shipping costs are worth checking out carefully.
Regarding warranty, I think a warranty on an engine is worth as much as a warranty on a parachute. It is better to get an engine done by a reputable shop. Any hassle with an engine results – at best – in a load of hassle. For example my sticky valve cost “only” £700 for the cylinder repair (which would have been done under an engine warranty, if I had one) but no warranty will cover the extra £xxxx spent on avgas, flying ROP for the next 50hrs or whatever until the re-honed cylinder stabilises. And the inability to do higher altitude IFR flights (unless the engine is turbocharged).
And I have never heard of an engine shop in Europe for which there is a solid customer feedback. One frequently recommended one, in central-ish Europe, managed to produce an engine which seized up after not many hours (I am told this happens if the crankcases are not properly machined at overhaul and the bearings get clamped too tight, rather than slipping bearing shells which is harder to do on a Lyco because the shells are pinned) and then they went bust…
Unfortunately the US route will not give you a usable warranty. In extreme-cost cases you can usually come to an agreement for a local firm to rebuild the engine and the US firm will pay something towards it. But this is rare; the engine normally has to go back to the builder.
Ben wrote:
Use a reputed shop in the UK or Germany and you might save yourself lots of agro.
@Ben
I know this post is about shipping (destination selected), not selection of the best shops. But your response puzzles me. European engine OH companies have had their fair share of problems in recent years. Not all due to bad spare parts from Lyco or Conti. Just call any flight school in need to overhaul one engine every year or more. Troubling examples abound, for almost every household name in engine OH. If Beechflyer blindly followed your well meant advice, both he and you may be very unhappy in the end. It’s pure chance.
@Beechflyer
Read Peter’s report (see above) carefully. As every shop makes a bad engine every now and then, the best engine comes with warranty, warranty, and more warranty. Talk to several engine shops and have them explain their warranty clauses. In particular what is excluded. A 100%, all inclusive, super-duper warranty (in big print) limited to “these” parts and "those"parts, while excluding labor (fine print on page 7) is a good reason to walk away.
Good thing we have these reliable engines from 1940 that every mechanic knows his way around and can overhaul in his/her sleep... What if these were diesels, they might last only 50 hours or so... yikes!
I certainly agree that any company can get caught by a defective component, but if defective components were that common we would see GA planes falling out of the sky all over the place, with bits of camshafts etc inside their oil filter.
The fact they they obviously don't do that at all often suggests that the vast majority of major mechanical problems (which admittedly are themselves thankfully rare) are due to poor workmanship.
My view is that by going to an engine shop in the USA, which processes perhaps 10x more engines than a UK one, one is going to benefit from a higher standard of workmanship.
It doesn't always apply, for sure. For example I know of a US instrument overhaul company which does some or all of its work in Mexico - presumably because Mexicans are cheaper than Americans. And I have had some real crap from them... a KI256 which lasted 200hrs being one of them. Obviously I would not use a US engine shop which rebuilds its engines in Mexico...
If you send e.g. a magneto for an overhaul to here the work will be done right there and I have even spoken to the very man who did an overhaul on a D3000 mag of mine. The mag I sent them was "overhauled" immediately beforehand by a UK firm (with an "interesting" reputation) which refused to send me a copy of their work pack, after which I drew the obvious conclusion...
Peter
I prefer not to name the shop, they took responsibility, re-overhauled the engine to ‘0’ hours and asked me to pay for the shipping only, that is if i don’t mind. All if this was done under warranty that required them to repair the engine, not to re-overhaul. Per my request they have installed all new cylinders, camshaft, lifters and the rest.
We carried lots of work in the UK to find out the problem (I was with Marshall at the time). Cyl #6 had worn rings with sharp edges, the exhaust valve was stuck to the valve guide and both were pushed in the cyl. Head. The lifters were worn and the cams were worn and uneven . Cyl. #4 showed the same symptoms as #6 but was in a slightly better condition. The shop suggested that the camshaft had bad metal that caused it.
When the engine faild for the second time a tooth came off the double gear (the one that drives the camshaft and the L/H magneto), in the photo that was sent to me a dark spot could be seen in the base of it so maybe there was some manufacturing defect, I will check to see if I still have the photo. During this repair the shop have dismantled the engine and inspected all components, they also paid for the shipping to and from the US (they did not have to do it).
The reason that I don’t want to name the shop is because people will think that they are rubbish, i don’t think so. They have treated me fairly and protected their reputation. Even if it was them who were at fault, any one can have a bad day and everyone can screw up from time to time. However, the lesson was to use top European shop rather than ship the engine forth and back and fighting customs in between (they wanted £££££££££££££££££ because the agents didn’t fill the paperwork correctly).
Another shop with good name is Aero Engineering and Powerplants http://aepengines.com/
Ben
Grotesque overcharging is not uncommon in the piston GA world, either.
One very well known UK company is well known for inflating its bills by 2x, only to reduce them if the customer makes a fuss. However, most of their clientele are people who left a pre-signed blank cheque on the seat anyway...
The problem, as you perhaps suggest, is that you can't use them again because you know they will claw it back on the next job, only using a better disguise.
