Reading all these ways of starting and to be honest they all will work of course. It just comes down to preference. I am a EASA B1 engineer with dc3 type rating. Over the past 15 years I have worked on Daks all over the world including UK,Europe,US and Australia. My claim to fame is doing the taxi and start scenes on the set for speilbergs epic Band of Brothers and working on Bransons dc3s in Florida. Helping the team initially assess the CAT that has just arrived in Aussie when it was in Portugal.
Everyone has a different way...but they all work. My only pet hate was seeing people start them and watch them race upto about 1500+ rpm then to bring back to 1000!! But thats just me with my engineers head on!
I have always counted 3 blades tickle prime, 6 blades tickle prime, 9 blades tickle prime. Once the mags are on and as long as you have set your throttle so that it idles no more than to 800rpm on initial start, it will run on the prime all day untill you want to drop up the mixture!(if carb is set right)
We also had some mesh starters so you had to have mister tickle fingers going on!
...It saddens me that slowly we are running out of pax operated daks, no thanks to EASA EU ops.
