An A&P and/or IA made a mistake working on a engine? To hear them tell, they
are the "experts" and you should never work on your own plane nor should you
be anywhere within 100 miles of the shop when they work on them.

Tom

"Mark T. Dame" wrote in message
...
Peter R. wrote:

My fuel-injected, turbo-normalized Bonanza had a newly rebuilt engine
installed last February. Upon completion of the work, I took the
aircraft
up for the proper first flight break-in. When I landed, the engine quit
just as I touched down (low idle) on the runway. I was able to restart
and taxied back to talk to the mechanic. He adjusted
the low-idle mixture so I took the aircraft up for the second flight
break-in. Again, upon landing the engine quit.

Suspecting something else now, the mechanic ran the aircraft on the
ground
and was able to duplicate the problem. He then suspected the fuel pump
so
he took it off and sent it back to the company who supplied it to the
engine rebuilder for inspection. The fuel pump inspectors discovered
metal
shavings inside the fuel pump that were cutting off fuel flow at low
idle.
That opened up an entire finger pointing session. Nice...

The source of the shavings was never identified but it was concluded that
somehow they were introduced when the engine was on the test cell.

I had a similar situation with a carburetor on the club's Archer. It had
been at the maintenance shop for some carb work. After ground testing and
a short flight around the patch, everything seemed be working fine. So I
took off and flew home. On final my descent rate was a little fast, so I
went to tweak the throttle and nothing happened. Since I was less than a
half a mile from the threshold with plenty of altitude, it was no big deal
to dead stick it in. I actually had enough speed left on landing that had
I been going the other way I probably could have made it off the runway.
(The runway at our airport has a slight grade and I was landing uphill.)
Instead I rolled to a stop almost exactly mid-way down the runway and had
to call for a tow because the engine wouldn't restart.

It was discovered afterward that the shop that had worked on the carb had
gotten a washer stuck between the top half and bottom half of the carb
that prevented the float from properly shutting off the fuel flow. The
result was a flooded engine on final.


-m
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