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[October 1, 2014]


When I was up in Plymouth I noticed my starter wasn't really turning my engine over all that quickly. In fact, it was quite sluggish. I was thinking the oil that got into the starter when the previous owner used it crept back into the brushes. Sure enough, when I removed it from the engine, the entire innards of the starter were coated in oil.


Instead of trying to temporarily fix this starter again, I thought it would be better to send the B&C starter back to get rebuilt. I had a brand new SkyTec lightweight started in my hangar which I installed.


While I had the cowl off, I noticed a slight oil drip from the bottom of the engine. I looked around at all of the fittings, and it seems my oil temp sensor was where it was seeping out from. I took a wrench to it and was able to turn it about 1/4 of a turn - look at the safety wire for how much it moved when I tightened it. I removed the old safety wire, tightened it some more and re-safety wired it.


I drug the airplane out of the hangar to test the new starter. Holy cow did it ever spin the engine fast! I was somewhat concerned my issue wasn't the starter, and instead was something else - like the wiring, starter solenoid resistance, master switch resistance or the battery. Debugging these wouldn't of been so bad - I would just of had to find which link was causing the excess voltage drop. I still think the B&C starter is the better starter to have, and I plan to call them up to see how much it will cost to have it rebuilt (B&C charges $310 to rebuild their starters).

I was planning on going on a short night flight, but the METAR indicated some light mist was in the air, and the visibility was dropping from 5 to 4 miles. I didn't want to chance getting into low visibility conditions at night. It feels great to have my starter issues finally resolved!

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