 Our next presenter is the president of Lockwood Aviation Supply and he is the only Kodiak authorized master service center in North America. He is the foremost expert on road tax engines, their care and feeding, ADs, service information on the two and four stroke engines for light sport aircraft. His topi today is the pilot's guide to road tax aircraft engine maintenance. Let's welcome Mr. Phil Lockwood. Thanks, Walt. Thanks for the intro. Alright, we're going to give you some good tips on road tax nine series maintenance, an intro to some of the differences between the nine series and other aircraft engines that many people are familiar with, like homings and continental. I will just note that we do have four Kodiak authorized service centers in the U.S. We are actually the only Kodiak service center that is an FAA licensed repair station and specializes just in road tax aircraft engine maintenance. Now the nine series engine is unique in aircraft engines today because it has a unique combination of assets. One, it has liquid cooled heads, which is relatively unusual. It helps us keep the temperatures stable in the head. It enables the engine to resist shock cooling during rapid power transitions. It also enables us to get a lot of power out of a very compact engine. If you want to cool an engine with air cooled heads, you have to have a large displacement engine and turn it slow in order to be able to dissipate the heat and have enough fin area. With the nine series engine, the 100 horsepower version is just over 1300 cc's, 1.3 liters and we're able to put out 100 horsepower out of that small size displacement lightweight engine because we're cooling the heads with liquid. We also use a dry sump system, which enables us to use a smaller quantity of oil. If with that sump, that vertical oil can, because it's fairly narrow and tall, we can get away with about three liters of oil, about three and a half quarts. That actually keeps the system lighter and it also conserves oil. The oil tank cover gives you an insight into which connection you need to make for the feed line and the return line on the oil canister. As you can see, one of the connections actually goes all the way down near the bottom of the canister and that is the feed line. You want to make sure when you're hooking up oil, the oil feed line that goes to the pump on this engine that you do hook up to this line. You can see that ends up in the bottom center of the tank, which makes sure that you're going to get oil at all kinds of attitudes, even if you're slipping or skating or climbing or descending at a very steep angle, which many of the light sport planes are safely capable of doing. We do use an automotive style filter, but it is not an automotive filter. It's one made specially for Rotax by Champion. You do want to make sure that you use the Rotax filter because it has a higher bypass ratio pressure release valve than a standard automotive oil filter. That's because in a standard automotive filter, they don't anticipate that their customers will start up their engine in the morning, let it run for maybe two minutes, and then firewall it and leave it there. That is what we anticipate many of our customers will do. What that does is it puts a tremendous strain on the oil system. It goes to a pretty high pressure when the oil isn't quite up to full temperature yet. If you have an automotive filter, you will be bypassing the filter system with at least some of the oil, which means if there's any debris in the system, it'll get by the filter element. With the Rotax filter, with its higher bypass setting on the valve, as long as you have about 120 degrees Fahrenheit oil temperature, you will not go into bypass. That is why our minimum oil temperature for takeoff is 120 degrees. Also, you notice that on this picture, we have a little bit of sabotage marker on that to make sure that it hasn't turned since it was put on. Rotax is now being fairly specific about how they want you to tighten that filter. They want you to spin it on, of course lubricate the filter gasket, spin it on until it makes solid contact. I find that to be about 1-eighth of a turn past when it initially touches. Then go 270 degrees of rotation. If you do it like that, your filter will not come off and you'll have some good results. The nine series also uses a five piece crankshaft. That enables the crankshaft to be made very compact. If you were to forge the crank, you would not be able to come back in on itself like it does here in these pressings. Another piece of the puzzle which helps to make the engine very compact. We use a gear reduction drive. On the 912S, which is the most popular version in the ULS, we use 2.43 to 1 ratio. That means we have a very slow prop speed which keeps the engine quiet and enables us to produce a lot of static thrust swinging large diameter props. Normally you're not going to exceed about 2,400 RPM in flight. We use a nickel silicon alloy impregnated cylinder while it's an aluminum cylinder. This is pretty neat for a number of reasons. For one, it's very lightweight. For two, it transfers heat very rapidly. The cylinder you'll note is air-cooled while the head is water-cooled. That gives us some redundancy. In the case if you were to lose your coolant for some reason, you do have some cooling on the cylinders and you can continue on at a reduced power setting. With the nickel cell cylinder lining on that cylinder, a lot of people are hesitant to embrace that technology, but I'm here to tell you that it really works very, very well. The RU is using it on most of their current automobile engines. Porsche has been using it for years. It's a little more expensive, but it gives great results. The piston to cylinder clearance on a nine series engine is so precise, so tight that on a new engine it starts out 0 to 8 tenths of 1,007 inch total piston to cylinder clearance, remarkably tight. That means that these engines don't really require a break-in period. On a like-home in your Continental, after overhaul or after new manufacture, you run the engine hard for the first hour or so until the ring seat and the oil consumption drops. When the oil consumption drops on a new like-home in your Continental, that tells you that the rings have seated. What you're actually doing is you're machining the rings while you're running the engine so that they fit to the cylinder walls properly. This engine is so precise, it's built so precisely from the factory that there is no need to machine or break in the rings. It won't burn oil typically right from the get-go. Oil consumption is more in line with automotive standards. It's not unusual for a nine series engine to run for 100 hours and only burn about half a quart of oil. You can go up to 100 hours on an oil change if you're using unleaded fuel. I'll get into the fuel a little bit later. We just talked about the piston to cylinder clearance, how tight it is. Another I think great feature of this NICA cylinder is how well it wears. It's not uncommon for us to see a nine series engine that's gone over TBO to like say 2,000 hours, be torn down and measure the total piston to cylinder clearance with a new piston and have only about 1,000th of an inch wear. Not only are these cylinders lightweight, very precisely machined, they cool very well, they offer very low oil consumption, but they also wear better than a steel cylinder. And the last plus is that they won't corrode or rust because it's a nickel silicon alloy. Now we have internal power generation, which is another nice feature of this engine rather than having to rely on an external alternator. We actually have coils that are bolted to the block and they're excited by magnets inside the flywheel. So really nothing is moving, but the flywheel, which has to be there anyway, and all your generating coils are bolted to the block so you don't have a belt or gear driving that charging system. It puts out AC current and it's rectified externally. Now the two lobes that are pointed out here by the orange arrows, those power the external AC ignition modules. Now the fact that we have electronic ignition, a completely redundant dual system, is pretty nice, but it is different from the automotive ignition systems that everyone's used to in the fact that it runs on AC current. The ignition systems that you see in modern automobiles are 12 volt DC and they actually operate off the battery. Although it's rare, it means that if you were to have an alternator failure and your battery were to run down too low, then the ignition would stop functioning and the car would stop running. I've actually had that happen to me once when I was in college. The car I was driving, the alternator failed and I was on a long trip and I didn't have an volt meter in the car so it had no way of knowing until the car started bucking and kicking and that was because the battery had dropped down to about 11 volts and it didn't have enough power to power the ignition system anymore. That won't happen on a nine series Rotax because we're using AC current directly off these generating coils to power our ignition system. It only needs the battery to run the starter on startup. The remainder of the coils are used to provide current to rectify externally to 12 volt, actually 14 volt DC to charge your battery. There you have a maximum of 18 amps available, 14 amps continuous, which is enough for most of the modern avionics that we're using in these light sport airplanes today. We also use automotive spark plugs, which are very, very inexpensive compared to the spark plugs required in light coals and cotton owls. Anybody who works on those today knows how much the spark plugs are. So that's a nice plus. The nine series engines that are coming to us today in North America come standard, the 912S, with a overload clutch. That overload clutch does not slip unless you approach the maximum torque capability of the crankshaft. It's mainly there to protect the crank in the case of a prop strike. Another nice feature that these engines offer. Now the actual damping system in the gearbox is also a nice plus because it allows us to use very lightweight propellers. You'll notice on a lot of the light sport airplanes out here today that they have a lightweight composite prop. Many of them are foam core, some of them have a carbon fiber shell, and they're often 10 pounds or less, even for a three blade prop, very, very light. And of course that enhances overall performance because weight is going to deter from your performance. Now the fact that we can use these very lightweight props with the very lightweight hubs is due to the overload clutch and the torsional vibration damper that is built into the gearbox. Most of these propellers that we use very successfully for many, many hours would not be safe to use on a direct drive engine because of the torsional vibration that direct drive engine pumps into the propeller. That's why the props that you see on most conventional direct drive aircraft engines are much more massive, not only in weight but in the size of the hub because they have to be. We also use dual constant depression carburetors and they are a nice feature in that they maintain a constant mixture as you climb. It's automatic mixture control and it's a function that works pretty well on these engines. So you only have typically one throttle lever, no mixture control, and you start it and stop it with the ignition just like a car. Now I know I'm going to get some questions later on as to why the engine's not fuel injected since it's a modern engine and we have this dual electronic ignition system. And the reason there is we do get good power output out of the dual carburetors. If we were to go to one carburetor we would give up a fair bit of performance. We want the dual carbs for that. The carburetors are fairly easy to work on if the main jet were to get plugged up while you're in Alaska. You can drop the float ball and you can clear that pretty easily. So there are some advantages to having a mechanical carburetor in access and ease of maintenance. But it's difficult to convince many of the suppliers that produce fuel injection components to allow them to be used in aircraft and that is the battle that Rotax has right now. So that's really the main reason that we don't have multi-port fuel injection. It's not that Rotax doesn't know how to do it or doesn't want to do it. It's that we have these liability issues with companies like Bosch that if they produce 1,200 units a day just for Honda Accords our volume isn't very appealing to them even though the 9 Series has about 80 percent of the light sport market in the world today and it's probably one of the largest production aircraft engines right now. Here you can see a spec sheet taken right off the Rotax webpage and it is interesting to note again the displacement of these engines. Down here 912S at only 82.6 cubic inches, 1,350 cc's. The engines are also certificated in the standard category, FAR 33 certified. All the 9 Series engines are available in both an ASTM compliant version and a fully certificated version and there is a price difference and the reason Rotax does it that way is there was a substantial cost involved in certifying the engine. But their policy is that if you don't need the extra capabilities that you get with a certified engine in other words the ability to put it in a standard category airplane and use it for any commercial purpose that the plane is designed for like prop spraying or banner towing or air taxi then you shouldn't have to pay for the extra cost involved in certifying it and that's why we have a price spread between the non-certified and the certified version. The non-certified version does meet the ASTM design standard and that is the engine that you'll see in most of the light sport airplanes out there today. The difference by the way in the designation 912ULS is the ASTM compliant version, 912S for example would be the certified version. Now all the light sport airplanes today that are being factory built have to meet the ASTM design standard and the same goes for the engines as I just mentioned. Only mechanics that hold a light sport repairman certificate with a maintenance rating may perform the non-owner maintenance on special light sport aircraft. So those of you who are mechanics this is going to bring quite a bit of business to the A&P mechanics and the repair shops because unlike the amateur built home experimental airplanes that most of the nine series engines have gone into in the past with the new special light sports you have to have the training and the certificate to be able to work on them. Now if a special light sport aircraft is being operated for compensation or hire then only an A&P can do the annual condition inspections. However if the airplane is not being operated for compensation or hire just being used privately then a light sport repairman with a maintenance rating can do both the 100 hour inspections and the annual condition inspections. And again the difference is if it's used for flight instruction and rental then the LSRM can do the 100 hour inspections but the annual inspections require an A&P certificate. IA is not required in the case of maintenance on these airplanes. Now mechanics who wish to perform maintenance on ROTAC's engines installed in special light sport aircraft must meet the training requirements specified by ROTAC's and utilize the correct tools and fixtures as outlined in applicable ROTAC's maintenance manuals. All the maintenance manuals are available online and what we find today is that most of the special light sport aircraft manufacturers, airframe manufacturers, they refer to the ROTAC's maintenance information for maintenance and that means that you must follow the ROTAC's maintenance information. So the 100 hour inspections and any other maintenance that they lay out in their maintenance manual is what you must perform and it must be done by the people that they specify and the tools that they specify in the way that they specify which works out well because it assures that you're going to have proper maintenance. Now to help train A&P mechanics and get them ready to work on these engines we have a number of new schools that are available. These schools can be taken any one of the four service centers that ROTAC's has around the country and up in Canada at the ROTAC facility in British Columbia. At our facility in Sebring, Florida we actually have a full-time school and we offer these courses at least every other month. Some months we double up so we have about 10 courses a year going right now. The first course is a two-day service course. That course gives you all the basic information you need to do basic maintenance troubleshooting, 100 hour inspections, it's very, very good. Those people who have taken it are all quite happy with what they've learned. Now the next two-day segment is called the maintenance course and that goes on to teach you actually how to do the annual condition inspections and how to remove components, ship them off to an overhaul center for overhaul and then reinstall them properly. That's an additional two days. Then the third course is heavy maintenance and that actually involves training you how to overhaul these various components, cylinder heads, gearboxes, that sort of thing. What we find so far is that most of what the mechanics need to know to work on these engines is taught in the first two courses, probably 90% of what you're going to need. Those two are very, very cost-effective. How many people here are mechanics, got a couple of mechanics. How many are owners or prospective owners? Most people, okay. What you want to do if you have a road tax powered aircraft or a special light sport and you're looking for someone to be qualified in your area, if you don't already have someone that's qualified, try and convince a buddy, a good AMP mechanic, to go to one of the schools and get qualified because there is quite a bit of business coming on right now and so I think it will be worth your while to do that. This is the training course for Aerotechnical. We have a lot of owners that go through the first two courses also that want to learn about maintaining their engines because they're very detailed. We go into the types of oils, the types of fuels, how to do the 100-hour inspections, how to do basic troubleshooting. We do have a lot of owners going through those courses. You can see the schedule up until October. You can also get that schedule anytime by going to aerotechnicalinstitute.com. Now, road tax has redone most of their manuals recently and they're very good. They're available for free online. I find going to the road tax factory website is helpful or the Rhone website or probably the two that I use most often. The factory website is roadtax-aircraft-engines.com. You can download any of the current manuals for free anytime. When you go to the factory website, this is what it looks like. That's what the page is going to look like and you would simply move the cursor to documentation right there and click on that. It's going to pull up this page. Then each time you click on something, you're going to get a scroll list, which I believe I have right here. You get your scroll list. If you want a maintenance manual, for example, on a 912-ULS, you go down here, click on Maintenance Manual and then you would click on Search Database right here and it's going to pull up what you see below. Then you click on the PDF file over here on the right, the blue PDF file that you want. It will open up an Adobe PDF file, which will give you the complete document. The other site that I really like is the Rhone site. It's very, very helpful. That has all the same information as the factory site, with the addition of some really good training videos. Videos that show you things like how to change the oil properly, how to comply with some of the latest service bulletins. So that is a really, really handy site. In the case of this site, again, you can go ahead and click on Support and then go down to Expanded Video Instructions right there. Again, those videos are really good. Now we get a lot of questions about oil, oil and fuel. So I'm going to go ahead and spend a little bit of time explaining to you which oils you should use and why. And these recommendations change. So you might want to check either with one of the service centers on a fairly regular basis and check the Rotax website for the latest oil bulletins. Now over the past few months, we've been recommending these three oils. You see on the left the Penns Oil, which is a mineral-based oil. It's actually manufactured from their PureBase product, which uses the automotive base stock, which is quite highly refined. And then they add a gear anti-wear package to it, which we like on the Rotax series engines because it helps reduce wear in the gearbox. It's a mineral-based oil. It's available in a 10W40 and a 2050 weight. In the center, you see the Mobile One, which is a full synthetic. Now the full synthetic oils do not work well with AvGas. You can use a little bit of AvGas with it, but we don't recommend a lot of AvGas used with the full synthetics. The full synthetic does give you that 100-hour oil change interval or once a year, whichever comes first, if you're using mostly unleaded fuel. And the right golden spectro makes a semi-synthetic, which can work with AvGas or Autogas and also is quite a good product and available in 1040 and 2050 weights. Now Shell, I think partly because of the size of this market now and the fact that the Rotax engines have become extremely popular around the world, they have began producing a new oil, which is designed just for the Rotax engines, the Rotax aircraft engines. That's called the Aeroshell Oil Sport Plus 4. It's available on a 10W40 weight. It's a semi-synthetic and will work with AvGas or Autogas. Now before I go on to question and answers, I'm going to spend some time on fuel because we're getting a tremendous amount of questions about fuel. The different fuels that are available right now, AvGas, 100 octane, AvGas with lead, Autogas with and without alcohol. And the Autogas, as you know, is available in 87, usually 89 and then 91, 2, or 3 octane. If you're going to use the Autogas, the 912S requires premium Autogas. That's 91 octane or better. 93 works, 92 works, 91 works fine. You can use 87 octane regular gas in the 81 horsepower version of the 912. The 912F and the regular 912UL. That's one advantage that that engine has if you're traveling cross-country because most airports carry regular MoGas at 87 octane. So you have to be careful if you're flying with the 912S that you don't land in an airport that has MoGas and then pump 87 octane in it. It's not enough octane. The 914 turbo requires premium 91 octane or AvGas. Now one of the disadvantages of AvGas in our case is that it has a tremendous amount of tetralethyl lead. Now the lead about 18 times as much lead as leaded automobile gasoline had back in the 60s. It's a lot of lead. If you take that lead out, the octane would drop down to about 91 octane. Which means a Rotax 9-series engine would be happy to operate on 100LL without any lead in it. We feel that unleaded aviation fuel is coming in the not too distant future. We know that there is only one lead plant left in the world and that's in England that produces the tetralethyl lead product. And we know that once that plant shuts down, it'll be the end of the line for leaded AvGas. There are just a couple of countries that are using large quantities of that. And so at some point environmental issues involved are going to force that lead plant to shut down. We do prefer to use the unleaded gas, although we can operate on the 100LL. When operating on unleaded gas, we get a lot of questions about alcohol. Everybody's telling us, well, I've got 10% alcohol in my state. I've got to use the fuel with alcohol. Rotax has officially approved up to 5% alcohol in the gasoline, and that is partially because in Europe they use 5% alcohol in the fuel there and they've had good results. Here in the US, many of the states are going to 10%. We haven't seen any operational problems with the alcohol at 10%. What we find is that the fuel tanks and the fuel lines are the biggest concern. If you're going to operate with 10% alcohol in your gasoline, you do want to consider vapor lock as one of the possibilities and that is most likely to occur at altitudes over 10,000 feet. I've noticed that some aircraft don't use the Rotax-recommended return system. What Rotax has done to help prevent vapor lock in the case of an aircraft using auto gas is they have a really neat little return system which returns some of the fuel right at the carburetor back to the fuel tank. That keeps the fuel streaming. If you develop any air bubbles in the system, it allows them to exit the system quickly and just go back into the tank and it keeps the fuel cool. If you have that system on board your aircraft, then that also is going to dramatically reduce the chances of vapor lock. But as I said earlier, in most cases, you still see any issues. If your car run on it, these engines run on it, just fine. As a matter of fact, in Brazil, they're running on 22 to 25% alcohol with stock jetting and they're not having any issues there. Okay, I'd like to entertain questions at this time. If you have a question, if you'd wait for one of these gentlemen to bring a mic to you, then we have a question over here. Like a lot of people, I suppose, I keep auto gasoline in my hangar and use it whenever possible. I go on the road, I need to fill up on the road with low lead, 100 low lead, 100, yeah, low lead. The point is, what percentage of low lead use do you consider minimal, however you expect it? If you only rarely use low lead, you can use synthetic oil or semi-synthetic and not worry too much about the oil change routine, for example. Right, that's a good question. If you're using, say, I feel anything 10% or less would allow you to go to the 100-hour oil change intervals with something like Mobile One. If you're using much more than that, than 10% AFGAS, then I would go to the 50-hour oil change interval. Once you go over 50% AFGAS usage, then I would consider going to something like a 25-hour oil change interval. So the AFGAS has a dramatic effect because we only have a small amount of oil in our system and it's going to become loaded up with lead fairly quickly if you're using a lot of AFGAS. So if you're running on 100% AFGAS, fine, a lot of guys are, then you want to go ahead and change your oil, say, every 25 hours. If you're using it, say, 50% of the time, then 50-hour change intervals would be fine. And then once you get down into the 10% range, then go ahead and you can run 100-hour change intervals once a year if you're running a synthetic. Next question, another question. At one point you were recommending 4X as a motorcycle oil, and I don't see that as one of your three. Was mobile 4X a motorcycle oil? Well, there are two mobile full synthetic motorcycle oils that we recommend. One is the V-Twin oil, and that is a 20W50 weight, which you can use a 20W50 anytime you're operating at temperatures above freezing. Once you go down below freezing, then you need to switch to a 10W40. And, of course, the advantage of a 10W40 is you can use it in almost any temperature range. But I think it's better to use the heavier oil if it's available in hot temperatures, although the 1040 is fine. Yes, they do make one called MX-4T. They've changed the name of that recently to MX-4 Racing. I think we have some in our booth, and you can see that the new MX-4 Racing logo on it, but it's the same oil they're telling us. So that's a 10W40 weight. We've got that in our booth in Building D, which is where I'll be headed after this presentation if you have any questions that you're afraid to ask now. I'll head back over to the booth, and I'll be happy to answer them over in D. We're right across from Garmin. We had another question here in the center. For the light sport, concerning light sport, if you attend the first two instruction classes, do you still need an A&P in order to make your own annual inspection? If you have a special light sport, is that what you have? Special light sport, factory built? No. Okay, if it's experimental, you could do whatever you want. On an experimental, you can still do all the maintenance yourself. You only need to have an A&P sign off the annual condition inspections. If it's special light sport, then you have to have a rated mechanic perform all the maintenance that is not called out as owner maintenance in the maintenance manual of that aircraft. That's kind of an interesting point, actually, because on the special light sport aircraft, you really have to go by the maintenance manual on that airplane. The maintenance manual on that airplane is going to tell you exactly what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do. If it calls it out as owner maintenance, then you can do it. Often oil changes, obviously putting air in the tires, sometimes changing tires, things like that are often called out as owner allowed maintenance. Anything that is listed as non-owner maintenance, that requires a rated mechanic to perform that maintenance. And the other thing that's interesting about the light sport is if it's not covered in the maintenance manual, then it's considered to be major maintenance. Once you go to major maintenance, you also need a rated mechanic, but you have to have written permission and guidance from the airframe manufacturer to perform that maintenance. For example, if you have a problem with the airframe, suppose you have a little kink in one of your fairings where the intersection fairing between the gear and the airframe cracks and how to fix that is not covered in the maintenance manual, then you would have to contact the manufacturer and say, what's the procedure for fixing this? If they say, well, you have to replace it, then you've got to buy a new fairing. You could go back to them and say, well, could I repair it? This is the procedure I want to use to lay up a few layers of glass, repair it, and then paint it. And you send that off to them, and then they say, yes, we'll approve that. Then you can go ahead and do that, and you take their approval and you put it in the logbook and show how you did it. But you don't do a 337, even for a major, you know, if a plane gets wrecked and the wing's ripped off of it, no 337 is required to fix it. You contact the factory. The factory says you need a new wing. You order a new wing, you install it to their guidance, and you're back in business. So it's quite different from standard category aircraft in that you actually have some different restrictions. You don't have to worry about 337s. You don't need an IA, but you do have to follow the manufacturer's guidance. Next question? Question right here. I've been having problems trying to get a repair facility or maintenance facility for the Rotax engine. I've looked on Rowan and I can't seem to get a thing near me. Where are you located? In Virginia, near Roanoke. In fact, I keep the plane in Martinsville, Virginia. We do have some new facilities in that area. If you come to our booth, Tisha is there this morning, and she should be able to tell you what facilities are available. I'm a little reluctant to have my ANP mechanic at the airport do the 100-hour inspection because he's never worked on a Rotax engine. Yeah, is it a special light sport? Yes, factory built. Yeah, he actually wouldn't even be legal to do the 100-hour inspection until he's received one of the maintenance courses. Thank you. I'll find your booth. Unless the manufacturer of your airframe has approved ANPs to do the maintenance without the course. Normally they just refer to Rotax recommendations on the engine side. Some of the airframe manufacturers also require special training to do maintenance on their airframes. You have to really look at that carefully. Again, I would recommend that you find an ANP mechanic in your area that you like, that you're comfortable with, and get him to go to one of the schools. In our area, in fact, up on Smith Mountain Lake, there's a new fella who advertises as a light sport mechanic and claims that he has worked on Rotax engines. I was thinking about maybe flying up there, but I'll visit your booth and see where you are. Sure, visit the booth. If he's got the independent Rotax repairman's technician certificate, then he's Rotax approved, and he's good to go. What happened in the past? A lot of these nine series engines were sold over the years, and they went into amateur built experimental airplanes, and the guys could work on them themselves, and they didn't really need much help. They would call or shop up, and they would say, hey, I got this problem, how do I fix it? And one of our technicians would walk them through it. If they need any parts, we'd fire the parts off to them. They could have them the next day, and if they needed a special procedure, we'd walk them through it, and that would be it. And so big repair shops didn't have people bringing Rotax-powered airplanes to them on a regular basis, saying, hey, can you do a 100-hour inspection, or can you do an annual condition inspection on my airplane? And so these shops didn't see that as a business. I mean, they worked on Lycoms and Continental, because they came up to them every day, and once in a blue moon, a guy bought a Rotax to them, but they looked at that as not an economical business thing to invest in tools for that purpose. It's all changing now because so many airplanes are being sold and built that are special, light sport, that require that kind of maintenance. Now what's happening is these shops have, you know, once a week, or once every other week, somebody brings a special light sport up to them, the Rotax part, and they say, can you work on my airplane? And what we're finding is these guys are going, wow, there's business here. I need to get my guys trained. And so we're having a lot of people come to the schools, a lot of mechanics. So I think you're going to see that situation change very rapidly now, just because of economics. Next question over here. Phil, would you address the removal of the magnetic plug and how much we torque that down to, and should we check that magnetic plug at each oil change? Okay, the magnetic plug, which is located on the side of the gearbox, which is actually a chip detector, that plug is torqued to 200 inch-pounds at the factory. It's a tapered plug, and it is fairly difficult to break free. The engines for the past five years or so have come with a T40 Torx fitting. You have to use a good quality one, a snap-on or a craftsman, and often it requires warming up the case around that chip detector to get it to break free. Some customers strip them out, trying to get them out. I recommend you do. I like to check them on each oil change. I believe Rotex only requires checking it every 100 hours, or once a year, whichever comes first. But if you retorque it to 130 inch-pounds, and then you safety wire it, there's actually a, I think I have a picture of it up here that I can pull, but if you safety wire it, there's a bolt just above it and behind it, which fills the hole that you use to lock the crankshaft to insert the crankshaft locking pin, and you can safety right around that. What we find is that 130 inch-pounds, it still takes quite a bit to pop it free. They don't leak, but they're much easier to get free. Rotex has recently come up with a new chip detector that has a hex head, which is much easier to remove. So you may want to look into upgrading next time you have it out to that new hex head. All the new engines are coming through with them now, and we're just starting to see stock come in from Rotex. If you're planning on heading to our booth and buying one of those, I can tell you that we've run out of them. So I don't know if you have any, Brian. I see Brian over there from LEAF. I think I have one left. You have one left? Okay. So somebody may get lucky if you chase Brian back to the LEAF booth. But we do expect to get more in from Rotex any time now. Does that answer your question about that? And, you know, when you pull that chip detector out, you're going to see some fuzz, some magnetic fuzz on there, and that's fairly normal, but you shouldn't see any chunks. No big chunks. We don't like chunks. Next question, back here in the corner. Would you speak a little bit to recommended engine speeds, RPM, both for our cruising and also for idle? Certainly. The idle speed, Rotex recommends a minimum idle of 1,400 RPM. We find that to be a bit on the low side. Some of the very lightweight propellers work out fine at that, but you are working the gearbox fairly hard at 1,400 RPM. We prefer to see 1,600 to 1,800 RPM. However, you don't want to set your idle over 1,800 RPM because the choke won't work and also you'll have a tough time landing the airplane. It starts to get too high. 1,800 RPM is a bit deceptive because remember you have that 2.43 to 1 reduction ratio. So even at 1,800 RPM, your prop RPM is still very, very low. You don't want to let the idle go below 1,400 RPM because if you do, you can actually get to the point where you'll close the butterfly valves all the way and shut the engine off. So you want to make sure that you never get down below 1,400. Also, you should have a solid throttle stop in the throttle quadrant on the panel, whether it's a push-pull or a lever-style throttle. If you pull hard enough on it and you don't have a good stop, you will bend or flex the idle stops on the carburetor. And when that happens, you can bring the idle down too low and then again, you can actually shut the engine off. We find some people that don't have good stops on their airplane throttle system and or have the throttle set too low, they'll be coming in on final approach and they'll be high and they'll be yanking back on that throttle lever really hard looking for some kind of magical braking effect and they shut the motor off. So you want to make sure that you have that set up properly. Moving on to take off, the other thing is, you don't want to set the idle above 1,800 RPM because the choke won't work. The choke on these engines is not really a choke, it's an enriching circuit. When you pull the choke lever, you're opening up a valve that allows extra fuel to flow into the carburetor after the butterfly, the throttle butterfly. Now the butterfly is what's throttling the engine. When the butterfly is closed all the way or almost all the way at idle, that allows you to suck the fuel out of the choke circuit. So actually the throttle is acting as the choke. So if you crack the throttle, pull the choke, you don't get much effect until the engine starts. So people that have a tough time starting a nine series engine in cold weather, it's usually because they're cracking the throttle, pulling the choke and then trying to start it. If you just pull the throttle all the way back to idle, use the choke start it and as soon as it starts then you can add a little throttle and get it up to 2,000 or 2,200 until it smooths out. Now when you go to take off power, maximum take off power is 5,800 RPM. You're allowed to be up above 5,500 RPM for up to five minutes. And then your maximum continuous RPM is 5,500 RPM or less. And you can maintain, if you're propped like a lot of the light sports are, 5,500 RPM at wide open throttle position for cruise. As long as your cylinder head temperature, your oil temperature and your coolant temperature remain below the maximum. Does that answer your question? But how low an RPM far is cruising? There's no minimum. The only reference I would give you there is if you are running Avgas 100LL, we talked about the tremendous amount of lead that is in that gasoline and that lead affects all aircraft engines. I don't care what kind it is. If you run low power settings down below 5,000 RPM you will tend to build up more lead on the valves. If you're running Autogas, you can run as low a power setting as you want. It's just going to make the engine last longer. However, the engine, as long as you keep the temperatures within range and perform the maintenance as specified by Rotax, they don't seem to have any trouble at all going to TBL, 1,500 hours, even when they're run wide open at 5,500 all their life. Which is remarkable, but they're doing it quite easily. Another question? Got everybody set? Okay, well, thanks for coming here today. I hope you guys enjoy the air show. I will be headed back to the Lockwood booth in Building D and I'll be happy to answer any of the questions you might have there. We have catalogs available. So thanks for coming today. Thank you, Phil. Pretty interesting on how to operate a Rotax engine and some of those safety features. Are you still building air here? Yes, we are. We actually bought that company back about a year ago. So we're back rolling again. Well, if you want to see a fantastic airplane that will take off on floats with one engine, that's a two-engine airplane, take a look at that Rotax that Phil's designed and built. We're about to go to the roof and we'll see our next speaker. Stay right here, Phil, because we're still on and the audio's off at the moment, the camera's off. Okay, all right, great. Well, you having fun? Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting week. Strange people, but an interesting week. Some of those people are pilots. A lot of them are. I'll rip through this one a little quicker than I usually do. Just a minute, sir, we'll be right with you.