Warbird Information Exchange

Lets hope she is back in the air soon...

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I ran into the crew at lunch today. They're hard at work getting her repaired. When they landed Friday the plane was trailing quite a bit of smoke... just glad that the problem was just a blown cylinder.

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Matt

Sounds like they blew more than just a cylinder if they are removing and sending out the entire engine.

We have blown two cylinders in the last three years (these are the only two in our 19 years of flying the aircraft). Doing the repairs in both cases took about a day's worth of work once we had the parts with one/two people working on it. In both cases though, the jug was what failed and oil was not lost in large amounts and the piston and valves continued to operate normally. In fact, I think we only lost a couple of gallons on both of them (we fly with 30 gal/oil per engine).

We lost one last year on arrival into republic airport in NY last year when we went to go shoot a tv episode there. We had a new cylinder overnighted in and flew home two days later on schedule.

The one previous to that, we had repaired within 4 days. It happened on takeoff, but there was no apparent indication of failure other than a slight oil leak and a rough running engine when we tried to lean it for cruise. There was no spike in temperatures or any fluctuation in oil temp/pressure. We ended up flying all the way back home with a rich mixture and it wasnt until after we washed all the oil off the next day that we found the crack in the cylinder head.

Here is a video I took of us landing with the first jug. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=05Qau-8APOk

Hopefully they it fixed soon. It's a shame they will be missing their own show.

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Tyler Pinkerton
Active Member of Air Heritage Inc. of Beaver Falls, PA.
Aircraft: C47B, C-123K, Fairchild F-24, Funk Model B, L-21B, T-28B, T-34B
Static: F-4C Phantom II, F-15A, T-3 Provost

That would depend on how the cylinder failed. I have changed more than a few engines because a cylinder / piston failed in a way that led to metal contamination through the entire engine, requiring removal for disassembly and repair. In one case a "dropped" exhaust valve beat up one piston, then went into another cylinder and perforated it's piston. Once it went through the piston and into the crankcase, it literally destroyed the engine.

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Expert:
Ex: Former.
Spurt: A drip under pressure.

Definitely. That what I was getting at, for them to be removing an engine due to a cylinder loss, it had to have included a lot more damage than just a cylinder.

We have been very lucky in that our two losses, it has literally. Just been the jug that was lost and no damage to any other parts of the engine.

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Tyler Pinkerton
Active Member of Air Heritage Inc. of Beaver Falls, PA.
Aircraft: C47B, C-123K, Fairchild F-24, Funk Model B, L-21B, T-28B, T-34B
Static: F-4C Phantom II, F-15A, T-3 Provost

Sure enough a whole engine. Break a connecting rod and yep you have lost a cylinder. Then the rest of it goes thrashing around inside beating everything to death.

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Long Live the N3N-3 "The Last US Military Bi-Plane" 1940-1959
Badmouthing Stearmans on WIX since 2005