Well, I thought I might be able to get away with just a top-end rebuild. I gave my cylinders to Don Goyette at Aircraft Cylinder Repair. I got a call a few days later. He said he could rebuild them all, but noted that he saw metal flecks in the piston skirts. I went by to have a look, and he pointed them out to me. If you held the piston against the light, you could see metal flecks embedded in the piston skirt. Typically, he said this means the engine is creating metal somewhere. So, he offered to drop by my house and have a peak a the bottom end. Nice guy. I had looked pretty closely – the cams seemed in nice condition. But, when he came over, he spotted two cam followers that were spauled. One was in real bad shape (probably responsible for most of the metal bits). So, that meant a full engine tear down.
Once I pulled the sump off and ran my finger across the bottom and felt lots of grit, I was certainly glad I was pulling it apart. It will mean a lot of money and time, but I’ll have a good engine when I’m done. So, the rest came apart. Pretty quick job. In an afternoon I had it torn apart. All in all, it didn’t look to bad. The crank was in nice shape – nice even wear on the bearings and no scoring on the crank. Cases looked nice as well – no fretting on the bearing saddles. The cam looked nice, even the lobes riding on the two bad cam followers. It was really just the cam followers that were bad.
Once it was apart, I made a couple crates to ship everything off to ECI for inspection and refurb. They were pretty responsive on the phone and gave me some ballpark numbers. I’d heard a lot of good things about Aircraft Specialties, but I couldn’t get them to answer the phone, and they would’t return my calls.
So, I’ve got about a month now to twiddle my thumbs until all the parts come back. There’s probably a bunch of little things I can do on the plane in that time. Some finish up work on the interior and panel I’ll take care of. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ll make my goal of flying to Oshkosh this year. Next year, I guess.