Engine Upgrades- Worth it? Paul New A&P/IA - InTheHangar

are engine upgrades really worth the extra horses well let's find out in the hangar [Music] hi everyone i'm dan milliken this is in the hangar and we are sponsored by gold seal i fly gps and wingfield aviation i'm so excited to welcome paul new to the oh we weren't supposed to do this that's right all new yeah oh the old habits uh the pandemic of course covet and all that kind of stuff paul i'm so grateful for you to be here and we're going to talk engine upgrades but before we do that uh tell us about what you are what you do and how you've come up uh well i own and operate tennessee aircraft services in jackson tennessee we've been there since 1974. um i'm not so you're a startup uh you have a startup just getting going we're almost to the point where we're figuring out how to do it uh but i started uh working on airplanes in grade school with dad with his projects riding my bicycle out to the airport my formal education is aircraft electronics that's my degree done a little bit of everything worked on all of them and we now focus pretty much exclusively on the cessna 210 the columbia series and the cirrus okay so you were working on on engines with your dad when you're in grade school um pretty much the engines haven't changed have they no we're the finest of 1950s technology the magneto for instance came around in the 30s or sooner and i remember dad in the 60s having trouble getting slick magneto parts and found out that the tractor store had parts we would get some slick parts there once in a great while let's talk about that before we get to the upgrades the engines haven't changed since the 30s why is that i think it's a cost of certification to come up with a new engine what the manufacturers have to go through is just unbelievable and the engine has to be able to do something that car engines can't do and that's run at a hundred percent for 150 hours straight in order to be certified that's a pretty high level to me then what leads a lot of people to end up doing upgrades i guess right so what are uh let's talk about engine upgrades what generally what are we talking about when somebody wants to upgrade an engine well there's a couple things one is you can take the engine you have and get more power out of it if you have a little lycoming i shouldn't say little if you have you're a continental guy i could tell well no um we work you know we we see a lot of continentals i will put it that way but certain lycoming engines have low compression pistons you can add high compression pistons and get an extra 10 horsepower out of your o320 for instance so that would be an actual upgrade to the engine itself the another concept is to save the same airframe but put a bigger engine in it no one ever wants a smaller engine we always want bigger and so that would be an upgrade skyhawks would go from a 150 horse to 180 horse or 160 or take out the old continental uh oh 300 and put in something larger and smoother and newer or at least it feels newer well i know on christie's uh piper uh cherokee she's got a warrior two and i guess what made it a two or maybe not there was some kind of stc for she's got a a slightly bigger engine i guess in it well the warrior came out with uh 160 horse lycoming uh 03 20 and then the archer the exact same airframe has an o 360 which is 180 horsepower so there are probably all sorts of mods out there that i don't know about to upgrade the power change pistons do whatever yeah do you think that we will see any new engine technology coming up i guess in the experimental world i guess you've got a lot of different things but you can do some fun things in the experimental world but you can also do some very scary things in the experimental world like what oh like v8 car engines with uh you know homemade gear reduction boxes and stuff like that but in the in the certified world believe it or not the faa after you go through all those hoops you end up with a pretty good engine for the most part uh the diesel or the compression ignition engine is one that everyone has been waiting for forever that's that's the engine the rest of the world runs on diesel and except for the united states but we're the ones that fly all the small airplanes in in terms of percentages right my dad who is a civil and mechanical engineer forever looked when the diesels were first coming around in the 70s people were talking about them he decided that the diesel was the engine of the future for aviation but always would be and it seems to be uh holding traffic yeah it's very difficult well there was i know that cessna for a while um was making a skyhawk with a diesel engine but i mean i read a couple years ago that they ceased that i guess because of the infrastructure or what happened yeah i'm not real sure what happened there uh i know when textron came out with the compression ignition engine for the 182 made by sma i got to go out and fly that with the test pilot it was phenomenal i went through the first maintenance school that they had it was actually here in fort worth there were four of us in the class and three instructors and i think it was the only class they had but it was a great engine in concept it looked like an airplane engine but there were some issues that came up and the interest at textron apparently was low to spend that kind of money for an engine that was going to sell so few airplanes okay so financial decision so it's yeah there's just not enough incentive for r d right when you consider and i used to it used to irritate me no end until someone put it to me like this if you have five engineers they're gonna spend six months working on a project and the return is going to be selling some 182s and you could take the same five engineers and put them on six months worth of project and they were going to sell a few jets the scale of income to do it on the jets is just overwhelming and it's it's hard to go the piston route when the other route so much more lucrative so with the the engines you know uh staying in the 30s for the time being right okay um except for the experimental market do you see anything on the future as far as new engines anybody survive the r d conundrum that we're talking about i haven't seen anything we are getting some traction on electronic ignition which is about 50 years overdue it's pretty cool that in the general aviation world we came on with fuel injection really early way before cars cars were running on carburetors and in the 50s and 60s we started seeing fuel-injected engines we still have the exact same fuel-injected engines you know they're mechanical they do really well but i haven't seen anything new come out that's it's exciting electric yeah what's up with the with the electric well if we could ever get batteries yeah the the these these are lights the energy density is just it's just not there yet it sounds great but so you don't think electric planes are are anywhere near ready um are they near ready will we see electric planes hitting the market you know in abundance in the next two to five years no i don't see that happening there will be some things some small like some of the trainers those are great some of the the lsas and those right because they leave from airport a and they return to airport a and they can charge the batteries they only have to fly for an hour or so that makes good sense but if you're in a cirrus and you want something you're going cross-country that's a real problem because by the time you get enough battery on board you may or may not have room for the pilot wow wow did you see there they have a cessna caravan that they've set up with electric motor well almost the entire passenger area was full of batteries yeah so it's an issue yeah and then the weight that you need versus yeah okay engine upgrades for um you guys are specialized in the 210 the cirrus and the the columbia um are their engine of course i know the answer to one of them but are there engine upgrades available for those not the columbia and the cirrus and those have the i o 550. they have the i o and the tsio550 which is a phenomenal engine really is tuned induction and all that the 210 started out with the 520 which had the induction underneath it's a real strange setup and the guys at tornado alley started pursuing the issue of the forward cylinders got a different amount of air than the middle of cylinders versus the af cylinders and they did a great thing coming up with a balanced injector since they couldn't do much about changing the volume of air so they decided to match fuel to the air and that's where we get the gammy injectors and all that but the 550 has tuned induction so the induction moves to the top of the engine and the pipes i don't know if you were a gear head when you were a kid and you know you had to have headers i'm so far i'm with you barely barely okay barely hanging in there but i'm with you so for the first time i know i know what th what what the gamey stuff meant because i have it on my 210 i didn't quite understand really but that made sense and now i get it so with the the 550 when you say tuned induction which i didn't understand now i do what that means is it's getting air in over the cylinders as a whole because i know when i'm flying my 210 that cylinder three is and five are going to be my hot ones and that's what i'm not yeah anyway probably number five on a 210 yeah typically you know so i i know that i'm not getting balanced air flow over the cylinders right well and you're talking about cooling airflow okay the induction airflow is for the air into the air into the cylinders for the combustion event so the tuned induction says we're going to design the pipes so when the air comes into the engine for combustion that each cylinder gets the same amount of air and then we can give them the same amount of fuel and we create the same power coming from all six cylinders it's not perfect but it's better because we're still dealing with mechanical continuous flow and uh fuel injection so it's an aerated stream of avgas spraying on top of the induction valve it's not a mist it's not a spray like we think and it works great but it's really old okay another upgrade did i see a lot riley intercooler what does that mean well does your engine have an intercooler of any sort i i believe i have a riley intercooler and i i'm i'm sorry that i sound like that because i should know better as the owner but i'm not the gear head as you're quickly learning so i'm i'm going to admonish you here because you need to go read your poh so you definitely want to do that because there are some specific things to know about how the intercooler works because the engine didn't come with an intercooler now on the on the cirrus and the columbia i don't know why they have to call them after coolers it's a new generation so instead of an intercooler synapse somebody was offended by the term intercooler something yes uh so you take the the turbine spins the compressor right compresses the air and the air gets hot right when it gets hot the air molecules are all moving around so now you're losing the benefit of compressing that air so if we can cool the air before we send it to the engine we can actually get a little more power out of it so that's what the intercooler does so it's a radiator like on your car almost identical except on a radiator water flows through that's hot you blow air over it that's cool it takes some of the heat away in this case we're taking hot air through the intercooler and blowing cool air over it so we're just exchanging heat with air on the tsio um if it did not come with an intercooler at all not on not until the r model 210. wow the very last model the last model okay so um because i was thinking riley intercooler was just a different kind of intercooler that had already had an intercooler it's an stc that's an upgrade it's a an engine upgrade if you will of sorts and there are some other there are two other uh intercoolers okay and they're all a little bit different tell me about any other engine upgrades on that continental 520 [Music] let's see i don't know if he's got it approved yet but larry vitito can convert the underside induction go with the cross-full cylinders and i don't think it works on your airplane but on the 206 and he's working on the 210 as well to go from a 520 to basically it's a 520 with 550 cylinders on it so you have the overhead induction on the system and that helps it tremendously what kind of performance does that get then well i hate to tell you but all of these engine upgrades um you have 310 horsepower right you still have 310 horsepower but the engine upgrade for instance the 550 the the vitito for a turbo charged engine or the summit which puts a 550 normally aspirated engine on they still have 310 horsepower but it's so much better uh fuel flow fuel fish everything about it is even by comparison so the engine will last longer and you're going to get more use you're going to get more available power out of the engine the timing's a little different everything's a little bit different so it's more efficient for the same amount of power you can run higher higher power settings because the engine is balanced not not in a vibration sense but in a and it is a little bit better in a vibration sense but in a power distribution so you're you have a crankshaft in essence connecting six individual engines each cylinder is its own engine and if you can get all of those engines running the same everything is way better so that's what the 550 allows that to happen now the 550 uh you mentioned vitito and summit um are those turbo the vitito is the summit is specifically a normally aspirated non-turbocharged engine that you can put on a non-turbocharged 210 or you can d-turbo a turbocharged 210 to put on the summit why um well i mean i i want you to do that and i know some of the answer to that so i don't want to play totally stupid but um but for those who are wondering why in the world would you deter bow a turbo 210 well if you own a 210 and you don't need the altitude aspects of the turbo you can go with the the high compression cylinders you can get the 550 engine and you get rid of about 70 pounds of cast iron turbo charge and the maintenance and the cost and at 10 000 feet and below the normally aspirated summit conversion will outperform your turbo 210. okay but what about it 15 000 well it doesn't have the power obviously so they're going to be down to 50 percent where you can still generate 75 percent so they're losing there but it'll fly at 15 000 feet and i would do well because i do a lot of cross-country long cross countries um to me i'd rather get up there with the jet stream can really push me along sure um but then when you have those headwinds you're stuck down running that amber charge 7000 feet or something yeah and so to get the same power you're burning roughly a gallon an hour more for the same power because of all the heat loss you have an after cooler excuse me you have an energy you have an intercooler so that non-turboed airplane has a lot of attraction to a lot of people the simplicity of it the maintenance cost and it's really a lot more difficult to hurt a non-turboed engine if you run it wrong you have access to a lot of energy with your turbo okay then around the corner is there any other are there any other good stcs coming for these type of engines that you know i haven't seen anything okay the electronic ignition is really the only thing that i'm seeing coming up there may be others but i've i've not seen them all right my last my last dream conversion i i'd paul i dream of having a pt6 pt6 well not on your 210. not on mine but they are putting them on p2 210s no aren't they no they're putting the they're putting it the rules are nice okay so it's not the pt6 but it's equivalent it's a silver well it's it's i wouldn't call it equivalent i'm stupid no no it's not i know it's a turbine it's a it's a turbine it's a rolls royce used to be called the allison 250. okay and those are really the engines now are very difficult to find right the mods are not being done uh onn aircraft has closed they're not doing those anymore it's a very difficult business case to make to do that when you can go buy a tbm for probably the same meridian you can buy meridian those kind of things but having flown some of those silver eagles it's an awesome plane all right it is so nice to get in the airplane start the engine of course it sounds pretty cool too a rolls-royce turbine yeah um so you push the power lever forward it's not a throttle you're not worried about so many other things uh i got a demo flight out uh in sonoma i guess it was last year went out there and do a pre-buy on one and did some things we should probably never do with certified airplane but uh one of the demos was i was asked to set the engine at 50 percent we were at 8 000 feet out over the water and it's like we'll keep it at 160 knots and so i pulled the power back to 50 percent and i am pretty sure i was vertical i was probably only nose down 20 degrees but in my mind all i saw was ocean and i'm thinking you know i'm falling out of the sky and i couldn't get it over about 130. but we were descending well past 2000 feet a minute so that you know slam dunk when you go into las vegas and they keep you up and then you know straight down in it's not a problem in that airplane it's pretty cool wow and what is that what did it cruise at well sadly at altitude the cruise speed is not much different than say a vitito conversion no way and the fuel burn is quite a bit higher so you really don't it sounds cool there is some cool things but well horses again i'm on i'm on that that cross cut i do tons of cross-country i fight for business you know every knot is what i want i want knots well you're going to go some faster i'm not saying you're not going to go faster what you're going to get is a way faster climb 1500 feet or more at the lower altitudes but the engine does not design for altitude it's more of a helicopter kind of engine so it starts running out of juice in the high teens it starts running out of juice it doesn't mean you don't have a lot of power when you get there i'm just saying but a vitito conversion at 17 000 feet versus the silver eagle there's not a whole lot of difference in speed horsepower there's a lot of difference in cost huge difference in cost the horsepower gives you takeoff and climb performance okay it doesn't do much for speed that's something i need to to get in my head that the horsepower is for takeoff and climb not for crews it's not going to give you a lot of cruise and you can you can try this out by setting up a 75 percent cruise and then lowering it to 70 percent cruise yeah there's not that much and there's not much difference and then this is the really disappointing thing no one should ever do this don't ever do this is calculate the difference in time on that 500 500 mile trip going 170 knots versus going 165 or even 160. and you realize it's single-digit minutes i saved nine minutes nine minutes but i was doing 170 knots you know so and that's that's a battle to because you just would yeah and so don't do that just don't don't look at fuel efficiency just look at it sit back and relax enjoy the ride i'm i'm doing 170 knots uh you know and i'm going to ask i'm going to use another gallon an hour to get that see i'm a fast walker even just going places i i want to get there i want to get there the the travers from a to b is is once you get there and cruise it's like this isn't fun anymore getting here was fun getting down is fun shooting the approach is fun yes cruise and all that it's like i don't want to be here very long i want to get there yeah that's me yeah so same here well awesome i really appreciate you uh talking to me about all the uh upgrades and conversions and uh sorry for my naivety um but probably a lot of people out there don't quite understand it either um i'm sure a lot more smarter than me and uh if you guys are then leave comments i'm sure i'll get a few paul again thank you we'll have you back we'll um we've got lots of different a lot of people have asked for amp type subjects and stuff so i really tried on this season of in the hangar to load up on some amp kind of stuff happy to come back all right thank you all right you guys so there you have it everything you want to know about engine upgrades there's not a lot available due to the harshness of r d and the faa regulations that kind of throttle that anyway appreciate you guys watching like share subscribe and we'll see you guys next time in the hangar [Applause] [Music] our customers say that they love us because of the people and because of the relationships that we build with them they like our responsiveness they love how we communicate they love that we set clear expectations for them and they know exactly what to expect from start to no no no no no no no no no finish no no no no no no no no no

Channel: Taking Off

Views: 9,036

Keywords: paul new, vittitoe, engine upgrade, engine stc, airplane engine, a&p, A&P/IA, learn to fly, tennessee aircraft, dan millican, in the hangar, inthehangar, takingoff, taking off, continental, engine, lycoming, general aviation, john efinger, how to fly, aircraft mechanic

Id: ryl_PJEaxA8

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021