Hi Harry, Your recent post about the possibility that Tapered shaft prop adapters are failing because of an improper torque recommendation sounds well thought out and may well be correct. You are to be commended for putting the pieces of the puzzle together. It will be interesting to see what information develops on the subject as people report their own experiences on the subject. I do greatly appreciate you having brought it to the groups attention and I agree fully that it may be the problem and that it needs to be dealt with promptly. Please do understand I am on your side here.
We do need to look at the approach you have proposed. You got a very cold reaction from Continental for a very good reason. You have exposed them to many law suits with significant financial loss potential and great legal cost for what is an engine part that they now wish were not in service. Yes they may well have made a big mistake by printing a manual with a wrong torque specification in it and I am sure that some lawyer will use it to extract money for himself and some widow. The result of this entrapment for Continental will be very poor advice from their lawyers to not admit that they are wrong. Yes they will say that the latest manual is correct even if it is far from right. The reason is that if they change it now they will have committed an act that will be seen by many courts as a confession of guilt and this is unacceptable to their lawyers. What this means to us is that they will have to find another way to fix the problem!!! I am not them and can not say for sure what they may do but one of the ideas that comes to mind is to put out a mandatory service bulletin (that the FAA will very soon make into a AD) that requires the x-ray inspection of all existing parts and the establishing of a life limit for the part. The x-ray is expensive and if you can not establish to a certainty the time and cycles on the part you must throw it away. Many parts will fail the x-ray and many more will not have clean history. We will ground many aircraft or engines due to no available parts. If we are fortunate Continental will design and produce an new and BETTER part that will replace the current BAD part and they will strangely find that this new part, because of its superior design, will need a lot less torque. It will be a little better part and it will cost a great deal of money. We will end up changing to 0-200 flanged crankshafts until they run out and then we will pay the price. Remember that Continental is very definitely in a position of we can pay them now or we can pay them later. If you do not like what the nice people at Continental are likely to do then you will like it even less if you get the FAA involved and they force Continental to make the changes. The FAA will issue a AD with little input from anyone including Continental and we will have the problem to inspect, test and replace parts and will not have a new part to use as a replacement. The FAA has little choice when you bring them a smoking gun they must react and their track record is to overreact in cases such as this where they can be seen to be on the side of great safety and not have a commercial interest mad at them. As you can see we lose in all cases, if we do not get it fixed now we have very dangerous failures, if we force Continental to action they will do so and it will cost all of us a lot of money (I forgot to mention that the required inspection will be repetitive and at frequent intervals) and if we get the FAA motivated it can be the worst of all worlds. So what can we do that will offer the best possible outcome with a minimum risk to all of us? Hear are my humble thoughts: 1. Collecting the data on what has happened is a great start and it should be done fast and in a professional way. We should also get the assistance from other breed clubs that use the same engines as they can contribute data and perhaps expertise. 2. We need to find a FAA DER (Designated Engineering Representative) who is approved in this area to evaluate the situation and the data when it is collected. The DER can determine if the torque value is to high and if it is he can tell us what the right value should be so that we can stop doing damage to the parts that have not yet been damaged. 3. We need to find a proper set of inspections that can be done to check out the parts we are using to be sure that we find the damaged parts and get them off aircraft. I would think that a good dye penetrate and magnaflux inspection should work but I would like to hear that from the DER with a full recommendation of how to establish that the part is in fact airworthy. 4. With the above information shared among all the users of the engines with these taper shafts we can have a positive impact on safety (not a bad plan to save our own lives) and we will have solid information to work with the FAA when they do someday get involved. This is a very important issue and it needs to be handled very carefully or we will all pay a greater price. Unfortunately the Manufacture and the FAA are not here to help us on this. I am sure that some will have a different view on this and I welcome other ideas and opinions, after all that is what the list is for to work to get the best ideas from many on issues that effect many of us and then to work together to provide the best available solution. Have a good day. Best regards, Vern Hendershott N94892 1949 415-G --------------------------------- to unsubscribe send mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________ Enlighten your in-box. http://www.topica.com/t/15
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