Maoraigh wrote:
Will something solid dropped into the oil filler end up in the sump?
In a Lyc. IO-360, yes.
I am sure the vast majority of owners have no means of connecting mains power and that includes the majority of hangared owners (I personally know one pilot in N. Germany who does have it). In the 14 years I have had my plane, hangared the whole time, I never had an opportunity to connect mains power continuously.
Excuse me for raising an eyebrow – in my hangar there are power outlets (230V~, single phase, at least 6 amps and probably 16) freely available, and some planes have a trickle charger semi-permanently attached with croco clips on the battery. Now of course I can’t be sure about other places but I have no reason to think my situation exceptional. Rather, I see another confirmation for the UK’s oddity – and more and more I respect those who CAN manage to own and operate a plane in such an uncouth environment 
Will something solid dropped into the oil filler end up in the sump? I had the dipstick break, and the rod fell in, but something prevented it falling right down, and I could reach it with my fingers. (O200).
PS up till then I never checked the dipstick before flying, just the oil level on it.
Oh boy, you propagate here, that with an Experimental you have to be prepared to tinker all the time
With certifieds, being a tinkerer is optional, not always possible (politically or legally), but saves you a lot of money if you can do it. Easier to do it on N-reg.
With non-certifieds, being a tinkerer (in fact, being a competent mechanic + avionics designer and installer) is mandatory if you are to achieve the cost savings which the owners like to mention, while having a relatively safe and reliable aircraft. If you take your RV / Lancair / whatever to a dealer for everything (a 50hr check, €500, an Annual, €5000, etc) then what have you got? All you have is a different sort of plane, not available as certified. Well, you get much cheaper avionics (and a cheaper engine – I spoke to one RV10 owner the other day) but that is a one-off cost.
But this is OT here because any device attached to the exhaust or to the breather is removable, so there isn’t an issue.
What surprises me is that nobody seems to make a battery powered thingy. I am sure the vast majority of owners have no means of connecting mains power and that includes the majority of hangared owners (I personally know one pilot in N. Germany who does have it). In the 14 years I have had my plane, hangared the whole time, I never had an opportunity to connect mains power continuously. In fact I would get chucked out of the hangar instantly had I tried that.
Oh boy, you propagate here, that with an Experimental you have to be prepared to tinker all the time 
Engine dehydrator threads here and here
Here is a corrosion case.
I started making a device which would push dry air up the exhaust, but never finished it. It contained 0.5kg of silica gel and the battery driving the fan would last a week.
Probably, pushing dry air up the breather pipe and letting it escape out of the oil filler would be better. I reckon that if you used non-dried air (i.e. ambient air) in this case, it would be best to stop the fan after say an hour or two.
AnthonyQ wrote:
2) run a dehydrated air line into the oil filler venting at the breather….there are a few home-made devices or Aircraft Spruce also sells a unit…some advocate also blocking the exhaust pipe with a rag and perhaps a sack of silica gel…
Be careful with home-made devices. We had one and a pipe came loose and fell into the oil sump. Luckily the pilot removing the device from the aircraft made the connection between a missing part and the possibility of a foreign object in the engine. The pipe was located using a boroscope and we fortunately managed to wiggle it up the oil filler tube without having to take the engine apart but it was a close shot!
I read that internal corrosion is only really a problem when the relative humidity is >50%…. which it nearly always is in most parts of Europe…. added to that is the moisture trapped in the sump as described by Arne… I believe a good strategy is to:
1) open the oil filler immediately on shut down and allow as much of the vapor as possible to escape, and
2) run a dehydrated air line into the oil filler venting at the breather….there are a few home-made devices or Aircraft Spruce also sells a unit…some advocate also blocking the exhaust pipe with a rag and perhaps a sack of silica gel…
3) use Camguard
Peter wrote:
one reason put forward for car engines not corroding readily is that the sump breather is fed back into the inlet manifold (so the engine burns up any muck coming out of there) and is thus a lot less exposed to fresh air.
Piston rings are not absolutely tight in any engines, all engines get combustion gas blow-by from the combustion chamber into the crankcase rather than producing useful work and going out the exhaust pipe. Exhaust gases are CO2 and water in much greater proportion than outside air ever will even in a cloud. In operation the crankcase is full of an oil mist and exhaust gases going through, some sort of crankcase ventilation is necessary to preserve all the gaskets. In flight you get a permanent flow through a hot engine, water stays as vapor until it goes out (might materialize shortly as white vapor at the exhaust pipe if the air is cold, until it dissolves in the much drier outside air). But when you stop the engine or generally cool it down that vapor will condensate inside the crankcase and mix with the oil that will thoroughly spread it around the whole engine.
Blow-by gas takes with it some oil droplets flying around in the crankcase on the way out, closed crankcase ventilation (CCV) on road-going vehicles sends them back to the inlet because emission regulations are so low the blow-by cannot be released directly. Nowadays on trucks for example the oil mist is filtered out of the crankcase ventilation flow so only gases are fed back, because burning engine oil would exceed the emissions limit. The oil level not going down is a nice side-effect.
If people looked for corrosion marks inside a 12 year old car engine run every other week they would find some. The car would not be grounded for it though.
That and advances in materials used in said road-going vehicles.
