“When my wings are severely clipped by the paralysing effect of this virus on social and mobile life and the resulting travel restrictions it is certainly a welcome distraction to dream about the life after and start plotting possibe routes of my ultimate flying challenge and adventure.”
With these words and the images above ended my last update – and that was almost two years ago.
Two
Years
Ago… !!
It took this long to post another update not only because of this seemingly never-ending pandemic, unfortunately!
In a recently published post I described an incident during my trip three years ago which caused WhiskyBlue’s – and my – heart to miss a beat.
In the end it turned out that the “good old” Continental O-300 suffered from “long Con-Vib”, on and off symptoms of strange and undiagnosable symptoms of the (engine) shakes.
Over the course of two years many hypotheses were proposed and discarded, various remedies applied and (repeated) expensive surgeries performed resulting in temporary improvements at best.
Not good…
When Greg and all the consulted experts ran out of ideas, we decided to go for an IRAN (Inspect and Repair As Necessary) of the engine as the most cost-effective solution (which is not cheap).
Then the “Inspect”-part discovered some irreparable components so the IRAN would have to be upgraded to a complete overhaul.
Ouch – more money…
This made Greg, the ever vigilant entrepreneur, go over the numbers – and the stuff in his hangar.
He came up with an unexpected – and daring, for me – proposal: why not upgrade to a new O-360 instead of overhauling a tired O-300 ?
The business-idea behind his suggestion was that I’d most likely be able to recoup much more of the invested money when selling a great ”Super 170” with 180+ hp and a constant speed prop rather than a nice 170 with the stock engine.
Makes sense – but would my bank account survive this assault?
Sleepless nights !
In the end I let myself be convinced.
More sleepless nights !
The new engine came back from the master-builder early June and what a beauty she is !!
Now she is waiting to be hung – by end of August she should be ready to be test-flown.
I sure hope to be there !