MT paint problem

rgarrett7 · #1 06-12-2010, 10:34 PM

About a year ago, I had my MT prop overhauled. Amazingly, it had been 6 years. The prop life is time-limited, I believe because grease gradually seeps out and there are no grease fittings to replace it. Grease certainly has come out of my prop and sure enough some of the internal bearings were wearing and had to be replaced.

Now for the problem ... the paint keeps coming off. I have had the prop repainted 3 times and it needs a fourth. Each time the prop has to be pulled and shipped to the repair facility, resulting in 2 weeks or more downtime. This is far more practice than I wanted in removing and re-installing the prop!

As best I can tell, flying through (very light) rain is what does it. The paint seems fine for a few months until I do a little IFR, then the paint on the tips are eroded. It looks hideous and I wonder if it does anything to the balance, though I can't detect any difference.

Has anyone else had similar issues?

frankh · #2 06-12-2010, 11:12 PM

Stripped the Hartzell leading edges in pretty short order

dmaib · #3 06-13-2010, 08:24 AM

I just took my prop over to MT USA in Deland, FL to get it repainted after 235 hours and a year and a half flying. Flying in rain is the culprit and is pretty well known in the MT community. My prop is black with yellow tips, so the grey primer shows up pretty clearly and your observation that it looks hideous is correct. I flew it over to Deland a few months ago and had them look at it to make sure the problem was only cosmetic. Juergen, at MT, confirmed this for me. He suggested that I paint the prop grey so the erosion won't looks so bad!!!!!!!
Not my idea of a fix, but I think he was serious! Anyway, I love everything else about the prop but I will avoid rain as much as possible and just live with it. I am a 30 minute drive to Deland, so at least I don't have such a long turnaround time.