When we purchased our F1 Rocket project a couple of years ago, it came with a 270-hour-since-new IO540 that had been owned by an airframe company in Canada, carefully cared for, and then pickled…..25 years ago! During the build process, we pulled all the jugs, poked around inside, replaced all of the rubber seals, replaced the old Mags with P-Mags, and had the fuel injection system gone over and serviced by Airflow Performance. With pretty much nothing left to do (except for hundreds of tiny details of course) on the project except endless fiberglass finishing, today was the day to roll it out and see if it would fire up. We had motored it on the starter with the plugs out to get oil pressure yesterday - so there was nothing left to do but “make it hot”!
And sure enough - six seconds of prime and it fired on the first blade. Stumbled a little as it cleared its long-silent throat…then purred like a kitten. Or should I say a Tiger? I had no RPM reading for some reason, so I wasn’t ready to run it up much above idle, but everything else was in the green.
Looking at the logbooks, this engine has been sitting on a pallet, pickled, for longer than I have been flying my RV-8. Say what you want about Lycomings, but if properly preserved, they do just fine!
And sure enough - six seconds of prime and it fired on the first blade. Stumbled a little as it cleared its long-silent throat…then purred like a kitten. Or should I say a Tiger? I had no RPM reading for some reason, so I wasn’t ready to run it up much above idle, but everything else was in the green.
Looking at the logbooks, this engine has been sitting on a pallet, pickled, for longer than I have been flying my RV-8. Say what you want about Lycomings, but if properly preserved, they do just fine!
