Back in the Air Soon

The freshly overhauled engine was delivered last week and the mechanics started the installation. We're hoping to make the first break-in flight by the end of the week. We opted for factory TCM cylinders this time around since we had three ECI cylinders fail within a 200 hour interval. Two had the cross-hatching wear down resulting in loss of compression and another experienced a broken valve guide. At the time, we also went ahead and replaced the remaining good four cylinders (when the first two failed), so who knows if they would have eventually succumbed to failure. (Previous post on the engine).

The engine shop did their best to help us with some of the costs, but in the end it was ECI that didn't stand behind their product and in my opinion manufactured three faulty cylinders. That's a 50% defect rate.

So moving forward with the cylinder problems behind us, we should have another 1500 hours or so of smooth and relatively maintenance free flying.