Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Maintenance Night

Another maintenance night. This time I worked on Warrior 8330S. I worked closely with another club member, Obdulio, who taught me how to refurbish the spark plugs on the engine. We removed the spark plugs, sand blasted them clean, anneal (heat with a torch and then cool in an oil bath) the washers, clean the threads on a grinding machine, then remeasure the spark gap and adjust as necessary, then replace them.

We spent a lot of time on this. I'm not sure I totally understand why this much attention is paid the the spark plugs. I know in my car I have to replace my spark plugs every 100,000 miles. We do this every 50 hours the engine runs on the planes. I've noticed in general though that these planes get much better maintenance than my car ever does. Maybe that's why we can fly planes manufactured in 1981 and they fly just as well as brand new planes. Can't say that of many cars from the same era.

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