I’m a big fan of learning all you can about your airplane. Aircraft systems are one of those things that will continue to come up over and over not just in flight training but in your real aviation endeavors. Get out there with your flight school mechanic or your personal A&P and get your hands dirty! There really is no better way to learn about you aircraft.
What’s your experience with aircraft maintenance? Let me hear it below!
Text Transcript
Hey everyone! Jason Schappert of MzeroA.com doing an oil change on 12 Romeo. I wanna show you guys a little bit about the process we go through as we do an oil change on a 150. Let’s go ahead and get started.
One of the first things you really want is the oil to be hot, the engine be hot. That way it’s gonna flow out a lot easier than the cold one. So we got to start with draining it. Normally I’d use a garden hose but in this case it’s a funnel. You could see the oil is gonna come out right here.
We’re gonna push this straight up until it locks like that and you got your oil. Next, we’re gonna take off our actual probe and filters. This right here is our actual probe. Cessna calls this an irreplaceable part. It is our oil temperature probe. It’s gonna come out dirty with a little bit of oil as well. That’s why I have that cup positioned down there so we’re not leaking oil on the pure white airplane and getting oil all over the engine. So we’re tucking this probe away, we’re locking that drain out and we’ll go ahead and remove the filter itself.
So, next, we’re actually gonna take out the oil filter itself. If you notice down here, it’s safety-wired so I gotta sneak in here and cut with
all my strength that safety wire. We’re gonna talk more about safety wire a little bit more in a second. I’m sneaking in here with my crescent wrench now. They didn’t make this for people with big hands to be airplane mechanics.
So it’s a tight space and when things start to get greasy, things start to get really messy. A lot of oil is gonna come out of this filter as well. You can’t be too careful. We’re in tight quarters here. You gotta worry about other stuff as well, especially getting oil in the place or dropping a wrench like that. It’s certainly not cool to the touch. So keep spinning this up the best we can, here comes a big chunk of oil and you want to get it all down into your little cup.
Here we have our actual oil filter. This is the crush gasket right here, and you gotta this each and every time. What will be doing for is to look for any metal or junk that’s maybe in there. So let’s go and clean it off and take a look. Alright so now we’re cleaning it out using mineral spirits, actually cleaning out, making a mess, cleaning out the filter looking out for metal or junk.
So we just finished cleaning the oil filter and everything looks good. No metal or anything like that. Metal is a sign that the engine is really breaking down and it’s something you want to be aware of. Your first sign that you’re coming up close to an overhaul. Basically it’s the engine eating itself and being caught in the filter. Thankfully, we got away good with this one. Another thing you can do is send a little bit of that oil sample for an oil analysis to different companies, and they can take a look at it and see if there are any fine or fat fragments that we couldn’t see just by the naked eyes.
We’re gonna finish by taking off the last little bit of the old safety wire. There it goes. Actually I’m gonna put that in a little cup since you can’t be leaving stuff around in a hangar. We’re gonna put our new crush gasket on and we’re gonna go ahead and put this oil filter back to where she came from. Make sure not to cross-thread it; I’m just putting on our hand tight and we’re really gonna crank it on. We’re gonna go ahead and fast forward to this part and once we get all this done, I’ll show you guys a quick little tip you shouldn’t miss and we’re gonna start with the spark plugs.
Okay, if you don’t learn anything today, the one thing I really want you to remember is this: before you start putting fresh oil into the engine, make sure you close the valve. This takes a little bit of effort and you get that down. Cleaning oil and draining it all on the nose path, doesn’t look very good so remember to close that.
We’re gonna go ahead and add our five quarts. I use 100W, some of it’s the 100W plus from Aeroshell and I love it on the 150. Check on your POH and see what it says to run in there. I really recommend it to have some on stock. I put 5 quarts in, again, we’re gonna fill it up and fast forward through this, and I’ll show you guys what I do exactly with the spark plugs.
So next, we’re going to clean and get the spark plugs. The first thing you can do with a spark plug is to take off the P-lead, this is actually running through the back to the magneto. So, you’ll have to work this off, loosen it up a little bit. Now it’s important to.. you don’t want to twist the P-Lead. This is independent of it. So you don’t wanna be cranking this and twisting the P-Lead around. That’s an expensive problem. So this will come out just like this. We’re gonna take our deep socket and use a little bit of muscle, a bit more muscle, a lot more muscle.. get a little more leverage.
What we’re gonna do is clean and test the plugs. The white piece, I don’t know if you can see it in there, that is actually… I’m sorry I’m moving this too much. The porcelain part is burning, you want to be real careful when you’re cleaning in there. It might be best to just use air. So we’re gonna go ahead, take them all off and clean them all out. So what we’re doing next is to actually clean out the plug. You can see in here that there’s a whole lot of junk. Again, you’ve got to be careful with this porcelain piece here. You can see it’s all built up and I’m just gonna break it off. What is this exactly? All this is carbon, fuel and junk that just didn’t burn off. This is why you get your bad magneto drops when you’re doing your run up.. This is what you’re actually burning off when you try to do the run-up and you see you’re gonna burn off a bad mag.
So we’re gonna continue and pick all this out, get all the garbage out of them and you’re gonna notice it next time when you do a run up.
Few things I want you guys to really remember and consider about: change your oil first always with an A&P. It’s best to learn hands on rather than watch this video, so go ahead and give it a try. I recommend doing it with your mechanic first.
Make sure everything is tight and safety wired. Make sure you learn how to safety wire as well. Also, be sure to conduct a thorough run-up before even considering flying.
Sit on the ground with the cowling off and really run it up. Start off slow and work up to a higher RPM so you can get that oil going through and make sure that the plugs and everything else are working fine.
That’s all I have for you guys today. I really recommend you get out there, get your hands dirty. Do it with a mechanic first and learn all you can about your airplane.
Hey, remember, a good pilot is always learning. Catch you guys later.
