teknosmurf
Well-Known Member
Hi Everyone,
I had an interesting problem in flight this last weekend and the "resolution" has me someone confused.
I am running an o-200 with slick mags. While flying, shortly after leveling off, the tach started acting goofy and an occasional right mag LED blink. Note that the mags checked just fine prior to takeoff. When I did another mag check in the air, sure enough, the engine stoped on the right mag.
Well...long story short, my A&P/IA and I debugged this problem for a while...found a slightly loose p-lead to the mag switch, and one of the 4 spark plugs on that mag had the internal cermaics (where the spring contactor is inserted) shattered and pieces fell out when I removed the wire. We replaced this plug, tightened the connection to the switch, and all works fine now.
My problem is that neither of these solutions seems logical. Loose/broken P-leads would mean the mag runs without shutting ever shutting down. Even if the one plug was broken, and arcing everywhere but the electrode, you would expect at worse a rough running engine because it fired only on 3 cylinders...not a complete shutdown of the engine.
One more thing to note. I repeated the mag check on the ground before shutting down, and on the right mag, the engine behaved like it was "diesaling" prior to stopping. Note that it was not actually diesaling.
Does anyone have any logical explanation as to how this could happen? How can one bad plug cause the entire mag to opperate poorly enough to stop the engine?
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Thanks
I had an interesting problem in flight this last weekend and the "resolution" has me someone confused.
I am running an o-200 with slick mags. While flying, shortly after leveling off, the tach started acting goofy and an occasional right mag LED blink. Note that the mags checked just fine prior to takeoff. When I did another mag check in the air, sure enough, the engine stoped on the right mag.
Well...long story short, my A&P/IA and I debugged this problem for a while...found a slightly loose p-lead to the mag switch, and one of the 4 spark plugs on that mag had the internal cermaics (where the spring contactor is inserted) shattered and pieces fell out when I removed the wire. We replaced this plug, tightened the connection to the switch, and all works fine now.
My problem is that neither of these solutions seems logical. Loose/broken P-leads would mean the mag runs without shutting ever shutting down. Even if the one plug was broken, and arcing everywhere but the electrode, you would expect at worse a rough running engine because it fired only on 3 cylinders...not a complete shutdown of the engine.
One more thing to note. I repeated the mag check on the ground before shutting down, and on the right mag, the engine behaved like it was "diesaling" prior to stopping. Note that it was not actually diesaling.
Does anyone have any logical explanation as to how this could happen? How can one bad plug cause the entire mag to opperate poorly enough to stop the engine?
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Thanks
