Starting a hot engine?

[RTN11]

i flew a PA-38, where on shutdown when you pull the mixture the engine carried on for a good 30 seconds before shuddering to a very noisy halt. I queried this with the flying school, and they just said it had been that way as long as they had it, and not to worry.

I never flew that particular aircraft again, but i'm guessing it still suffers the same problems.

[dwj]

I find that I need to give my continental O-300 one shot of primer if it has been sitting for 15 minutes - if I don't do that, it won't start.

Normal shutdown procedure for lycoming and continental engines is to set the mixture to idle cut-off. Therefore when you start there will be no fuel in the carb and you'll need to keep cranking the engine until you suck the fuel back into the system. Using the primer puts the fuel directly into the cylinders, so when you crank it (hot or cold) it should start immediately without having to drain your battery with endless cranking. As long as you don't overdo it there is no chance of backfire. As another poster said - the primer is there to be used, so use it!

[Tinstaafl]

Well said, SN3. My experience over many years has been that if an engine is consistantly difficult to start (or is becoming more & more difficult to start) when using correct technique then there is a problem with it and it's time to talk to your engineers/mechanics. With detail about how, what, when, any common factors etc. so they can diagnose the problem. I can't think of any problems that haven't been able to be solved by them (eventually. Bloody intermittent problems are a curse!)

[n5296s]

I come back to what I said earlier - when they make these planes in the factory, they all start! If they didn't they wouldn't send them out.

Not sure about that. I flew a nearly-new SR22 a couple of years ago that had some kind of fancified hot-rodded engine (I think they called the plane a "Millenium Edition"). It was incredibly hard to start, which the instructors all knew about. You had to prime it exactly the right amount, and have the mixture and throttle in exactly the right position, and even once it had started, you had to nurse it for 30 seconds, gradually advancing the throttle and mixture at JUST the right speed, or it would cough and die - and refuse to start again. What a pain.

When I started flying I had a share in a (then) new 182, with injection. It was amazingly hard to start after a short shutdown, although I never actually failed. Everyone assumed the problem was vapour locks. You would try every trick in the book - mixture lean, mixture full rich, throttle open, throttle closed, no prime, lots of prime - and eventually one of them would catch its attention and it would start. Stone cold, it started first time every time.

My TR182, which is a carb engine, starts like a dream, whether hot or cold.

n5296s

[Flash0710]

I flew an archer III last yr and it was a bitch when it was hot......

After a few days i found the knack was to have....

Mixture rich

Throttle ICO

Crank and as soon as she fired throttle fully forward then reduced back to 12....

It was specific to that particular aeroplane but. if yr running out of ideas it may work for you...


Not an expert disclaimer....


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