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engine winter storage question

vluvelin

Well Known Member
Did any one have problems due to engine full of oil up to the top?
can it harm anything???


I was planning to fill engine to the top with oil to prevent internal parts from rusting. intake and exhaust ports will be blocked with gaskets. cylinders will be sprayed with fuming oil for automotive engine storage.

Thank you
 
For the last two winters, I used Phillips 66 Aviation Anti-Rust Oil 20W-50.

It is a fly away pickling oil. Service airplane as you would at a typical oil change then go fly the airplane. It is now good to sit or to go fly. It is not suppose to be used for more than 10-hours as a break-in oil but can be used for as long as 25-hours.

Over the past 3 winters, I have let my airplane sit as long as 5-weeks without flying and will only fly about 10 or 12 hours over 3 months.

Will a little luck, the airplane and I will move south this winter.
 
Do you have a starter? You could crank the engine over with the starter to build oil pressure and fill the galleries, etc.


Otherwise, why not just fill it to the top? I'm doing that with my 540 while it waits on my slow building technique :)
 
One mechanic told me to fill it up with oil and keep it upside down so the oil covers the cam. This sounded messy and a little impractical to me... I just kept my engine inside the house warm and dry and hope for the best. Ive also been keeping dehydrator plugs in the cylinders and one in the crank case breather as well.

Alex
 
The 4 cylinders will not vent the air out of the top of the case, there is no port or communication there to let the air out. So you won?t be able to fill it high enough to flood the cam. Flipping it over is not a bad idea.
I had mine mounted in an auto engine stand, I just rolled it over once in a while to keep everything coated in oil.
Tim Andres
 
I did the same thing as Tim - on stand and rotating it every week or so. Easy to do. HF has stands for about $100.
 
Engine stand

I'm about 6 months away from mounting my engine. I have an engine stand to be able to rotate the engine filled with the Phillips oil. The stand bolts won't line up with the engine mounts due to the angle of the mounting holes on the engine. How did you adapt the stand to the engine?
 
Our O-360 sat for 12 years, on the airframe, filled with Aeroshell's pickling oil. When I say "filled", it contained over 5 gallons of oil. Intake and exhaust ports were blocked off with covers made of lexan (and appropriate gaskets installed). I topped up the oil in the crankcase filler and through the upper spark plug holes as needed.

After a dozen years I drained the oil and made the following observations.
1) oil made it all the way to the top of the accessory case - when I removed the mags I borescoped the accessory case and literally saw oil had made it right up to the top of the case. Everything in the accessory case looked shiny and new and dripping with oil.
2) cylinders looked perfect. A word of advice... If inspecting cylinders with a borescope through the bottom spark plug holes after draining the oil, reduce the intensity of your borescope illumination, otherwise you'll flash-blind yourself. Ask me how I know!
3) while Tim Andres raises an important point about not being able to get the air out of the top of the crankcase, what hasn't been mentioned is that air is absolutely "sealed off" from the outside world. Rust comes from the presence of moisture in the air circulating through a crankcase. The moist air circulates as a result of natural convection resulting from heating/cooling cycles of the environment in which the engine is stored. By filling the engine with oil, we are excluding air and sealing off the passages through which air would otherwise be circulated and exchanged. We've essentially stopped the process by which rust-causing moisture is brought into the engine.

Ideally the engine would be placed on an engine stand, mounted on its crankshaft flange, with oil added through the accessory case and allowed to slowly fill the crankcase from the highest point. If this isn't an option, being very patient and filling a horizontally-mounted engine seems to work pretty well. The preservative oil is very thick so it is best to add it when the OAT is warm and the oil is even warmer.

Oh, one additional point. Our local Shell bulk plant indicated to me that Shell has stopped making their 2F preservative oil. Now they make a concentrate, 2XN, which one adds to their normal 100 weight oil. This doesn't seem to jive with the info I find on Shell Global's website. When searching for 2F fluid on Aircraft Spruce's website, one finds only the 2XN concentrate, along with the following note:
"Note: Aeroshell 2XN fluid superceds [sic] the old 2F fluid."
Makes me happy to have several gallons of 2F fluid on hand...
 
Ideally the engine would be placed on an engine stand, mounted on its crankshaft flange, with oil added through the accessory case and allowed to slowly fill the crankcase from the highest point.

I have seen above folks talking about an ?automotive? engine stand, which I would not recommend. There is a reason that aviation stands have the crank shaft in the vertical orientation...if left long enough there will be creep as the crank was not designed as a cantilever beam with the entire engine weight hanging off of it.

On heavy components like gas and steam turbines the shafts will sag between the bearings if left to sit too long and are either rotated periodically or disassembled with the rotor hung vertical.
 
Good point - I didn't even think of somebody using an automotive engine stand.

In our case the "engine stand" was something we commonly call a motor mount, attached to the rest of that thing we call an airplane. Makes for a convenient place to store an engine! :)
 
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