Meeting: May 3, 2005 Tuesday 7:00 pm
Place: Merco Marine
Route 2, Wellsburg, WV
Look for large sign on right just before Wellsburg

Inside this Issue:

www.eaa.org

President’s Corner
Hello everyone, lots of good news to report this month.
The most exciting news is that the new chapter building floor has been poured and is now ready for the iron work to start. Tom Cucarese, who has been heading this project, is now getting ready for Phase Two. This requires scheduling a work week for putting up the frame work. Everyone will be notified when it will start and it will require the team effort of all our Chapter members. A contractor who Tom knows will be advising us to make sure we do it right. I would like to thank all the members I contacted through e-mails, who came out on short notice to help unload and move the metal siding sheets to the Chapter's Building. With that out of the way we will have access to the wood needed when the frame work starts going up. With everybody's help we should be under roof in about two weeks. We've planned cookouts with plenty of hot dogs and refreshments for everyone. We need the building experiences of everyone, if you have an electric inpack driver, drills, spud wrenches, pry bars, or just old fashion Yankee know how, we'll need you. Stay tuned!!

Our next meeting will be held at fellow member Jon Meriwether's home and workshop and refreshments will be provided. Please contact him or me as soon as possible to confirm that you will be going so we don't order to much or to little. Jon will be showing fellow members and guests his latest project, a Xenos motor glider. Jon is fast becoming a master metal worker, with each piece requiring precision fabrication. This is Jon's fourth project. Following that he will be demonstrating his plasma cutting equipment and giving a tour of his factory. This is a must see. Most of us have been to Jon's house in the past but if you are a new member, his house is not hard to find. He is located at the North end of Wellsburgh about 1 1/2 miles south of Follansbee. As you are traveling south look for Merco Marine which is located on the right side of RT 2. If you pass the State Highway Garage you've gone about 100 yards too far south. Turn into the lot and proceed around the building and go down the drive to his house. This will be a fun evening for all.

I would like to thank Tom Cucarese for his Cessna Factory slide show, it was a fun evening. And if your name is Bob Marshall, you missed out on the $75.00 pool raffle. The pot continues to grow. In the upcoming months we hope to continue to have more interesting meetings and activites for the Chapter members. As time and opportunities arise we will try to get more activities planned outside of our regular Chapter meetings. When the new Chapter Building is up and work inside starts to take shape, we will be holding more meetings there.

Interest continues to grow on the plan to go to Oskhosh this year. I have had several members aready contact me. We we are still trying to get some ideas on going up as a group. I would like to charter a plane, so if anyone has access to a DC-3 let me know.... I would sleep under that wing any day.This is supposed to be the best Oshkosh AirVenture ever with the Global Flyer and Space Ship One expected.

Flying activities at the airpark seem to be on the upswing, despite the rise in gas prices. The airpark has been able to hold down the price of aviation fuel and is now the lowest in the area. The Propbuster's airplane has been seeing a lot of flying time with it's members. With the coming of warm weather, the old girl got her first bath of the flying season.

Well that's all folks, remember to introduce someone to aviation, bring them to a Chapter meeting, and if you see a stranger at a meeting make them feel at home. See you all down at Jon's.

Dave T.

Chapter Building
And here it is;

Taylorcraft Points to May 21 For First Taylor Sport Flight
Taylorcraft Aviation expects its new sport pilot-ready Taylor Sport to make its first flight on Saturday, May 21, 2005. The company is back into full production after three years preparation, offering six models of this time-tested classic airplane. Taylorcraft has 31 aircraft sold and now in production. The special light sport aircraft (SLSA) Taylor Sport and Taylor Cub start at just under $60,000. Taylorcraft will add manufacturing space and employees at LaGrange, Texas.

Engine Beat - Oil Analysis – By Jim Stark
The basic tool in oil analysis is the spectrometer, which reads the wear metals (the metallic particles in the sub-visible size range) present in a sample of oil. Larger particles -- as they approach the visible size range -- do not make it into the spectrometer's plasma, and therefore are not read. If you have a mechanical part in your engine that is beginning to give off the larger, visible particles, they will collect at the oil filter or screen. These accumulations can and should be monitored by you or your mechanic, or they can be microscopically examined to determine where they're coming from and if they relate to normal or abnormal events.
Oil and oil filter element analysis work hand-in-hand to give a complete picture of your engine's metal-making tendencies. Many aircraft owners will submit the first oil sample from their engine after a prodigious amount of visible metal has been found in the oil filter media. But that's using the system backward. If your engine is leaving visible metal particles in the oil, it is possible (though somewhat rare) that the parts have already degenerated past the point of leaving wear metals that the spectrometer can "see."
All engines wear, and they all eventually wear out. Other variables aside, any given engine will wear an average amount in an average oil use interval. If a mechanical problem develops, wear will progress from average, to poor, to abnormal. The progression might occur over the course of several oil fills, or it might occur more rapidly than that. As wear progresses though the abnormal stage, large damaged particles will separate from the engine parts and begin collecting at the oil filter or screen.

Predicting Problems
There are some types of mechanical difficulties in aircraft engines that are easily seen in oil analysis. There are other problems that aren't. Poorly wearing friction bearings, for instance, will generate high lead in the oil from babbitt. But the lead is masked by lead left in the oil by aviation gas additive (100LL blow-by). There are other metals in babbitt that are easy to identify, but without lead to tie them together in a recognizable pattern, it is difficult to say whether the bearings are actually the source of the metals.
Mechanical parts may have internal flaws from manufacture that affect the part's integrity. As the part ages, heat cycles and use cause a weakening of the part and eventually, sudden failure. As the problem progresses, these parts will flex and cause an increase in wear metals in the oil, but the onset of failure is normally too rapid to make any type of oil or filter analysis useful.
Some types of problems can be detected through oil analysis in the early stage, and through filter analysis or observation at a later stage, as the problem progresses. Valve train wear -- including wear at the camshaft -- is usually discernable in oil analysis. As the poorly wearing valve train deteriorates, it tends to leave visible metals at the filter or screen. Poor wear at the interface of bushings and steel shafts can be also be detected early with oil analysis. This problem also normally progresses to visible metallic particles.
Some problems don't leave visible particles in the filter or screen, and oil analysis is a vital tool for finding these mechanical difficulties. Much of the high copper we see in oil, for example, is from brass oxides washing into the hot oil from new oil coolers. Through oil analysis, we can usually see the difference between brass and bronze wear. Poor wear at bronze valve guides in some types of engines is easy to detect, and when those metal particles become dislodged from their heat-shrink fit, they leave elements of bronze and high aluminum in the used oil.

Detecting Cylinder Wear
A common complaint about oil analysis is that it can't tell you what the problem is. But that's not what it's supposed to do. If the problem can be detected with a spectrometer, then oil analysis does tell you when parts are not wearing normally. It's up to the mechanic or owner to determine why that is.
Poor cylinder wear, for example, is a very common problem in aircraft engines that can be detected early through oil analysis. Oil analysis can tell you that the cylinders are wearing poorly. It's up to the owner or mechanic to determine why that may be. In our experience, cylinders wear poorly for one of five reasons: the type of cylinder being used, quality control at the point of manufacture, incorrect setting of the ring-gap tolerance, the way the engine is flown, or detonation from metallic deposits.
If your engine is equipped with factory steel cylinders, and they are set up properly and operating in the normal heat range, the wear metals generated by the piston/ring/cylinder interfaces will read at average levels for that type of engine. If you have another type of replacement cylinders in place, you can probably expect above-average chrome and/or nickel to appear in your oil analysis report. If we know the metallurgical make-up of your cylinders from the onset, we can tell you if your cylinder wear properties are normal. If we don't know your cylinder types, we are guessing. When assessing cylinder wear, it helps to see the wear trends from multiple oil samples.
Cylinder assemblies -- even of the same brand name -- tend to vary widely. Even if the cylinders are being made consistently well, the repair shop mechanic who installs them still needs to set the ring end-gaps correctly for normal wear properties. A mechanic who takes a cylinder set out of the box and installs it on your engine without qualifying tolerances is not doing you a favor.
The qualification of ring end-gaps is a vital measure for normal cylinder assembly wear. The tolerance must be set perfectly because at operating temperature, the rings expand to close the gaps. If the end-gap is too wide, the gaps won't close completely, and blow-by and/or excess oil consumption will plague the engine for the life of the cylinder. If the gaps are set too tight, the rings will bind in the cylinders at operating temperature, causing excess wear at rings, cylinder walls and in the ring land area of the pistons. The engine will run okay under either circumstance, but if the ring end-gaps are not properly set, the cylinders will require premature replacement.
If you were fortunate enough to get mechanically normal cylinders at your last top overhaul and the mechanic set them up properly, there is still a possibility that cylinder assembly wear will be excessive if one or more of the cylinder head temperatures is too high. Poor fuel distribution -- most common in carbureted engines but possible with any type fuel system -- can cause a temperature imbalance resulting in one or more overly hot cylinder heads. So can problems with engine baffles and cowls that don't direct enough air to the cylinder's cooling fins. All the problems mentioned here are solvable with a little detective work. If none of these problems is the cause of excess cylinder wear, then the way you use the engine is probably the culprit. Perfectly normal engines used for glider or banner towing, skydiving, or crop dusting operations wear more heavily at the cylinders than do identical engines used for normal flying duties, due to rapid alternating temperature extremes at cylinder heads.
An air-cooled aircraft engine leaving seriously high amounts of cylinder assembly wear metals in the oil can cause an associated problem to develop: possible premature engine failure due to pre-ignition from the presence of metallic deposits in the combustion area. For the same reason you can't use automotive-type engine oils in aircraft engines -- the additives are not ashless and will leave deposits in cylinders -- high levels of wear metals will cause the same problem. Metals don't burn. When we see an engine generating excess wear from cylinders, we suggest shorter oil use intervals. The shorter interval won't improve wear characteristics, but will limit metallic (and deposit-forming) accumulations in the oil.
Oil analysis can help predict some types of problems, and can't help with others. If you use oil analysis and your engine is wearing at an excessive rate, there is a reason for it. A poorly wearing engine will wear out more rapidly than an average-wearing one of the same type. Whether oil analysis helps you see the problem coming depends largely on the information you provide with your sample, the frequency with which you sample your oil, and the additional work you and your mechanic do to find -- and fix -- a problem before it leads to a failure. Oil analysis is just one tool that can, in conjunction with filter analysis and vigilance on your and your mechanic's part, keep your engine running well.

Chapter Dues
Membership form