Message
Greetings
again,
I've been
thinking more about the engine, and wondering what the chances are that
there's any damage inside.
I'm pretty
sure I noticed the oil about the instant it started to lose any
significant amount. As soon as the oil started to leak, I pulled the
engine back to idle, and descended ASAP. I'm sure I was doing at least
2000 fpm from 6000 to 2000 ft, which only accounts for 2 minutes of
time. At 2000 ft, is when I tried to throttle up, and the engine quit,
so no time after that counts. I'm absolutely sure the engine quit
because I had the mixture knob set way lean for cruise, and not because
it seized up.
This means
that at worst, the engine idled for 2 minutes with no oil pressure. My
guess would be that it was more like 30 seconds or less. With this in
mind, I'm thinking that it's worth doing some ground runs of the engine
to see how healthy it seems. If I can thoroughly run it on the ground
without problems, then I can follow that with about 10 hours of
circling the field. By that point, I can't imagine having any further
concerns. If there was a problem, it would damage the engine further,
but still continue to until I made it to an airport. If I'm wrong
about how much damage there might be, it will get expensive, but
shouldn't be life threatening.
Many of you
have a lot more experience with these engines than I do. Does this
sound like a reasonable plan?
Thanks,
Rusty (late
for the airport as always)