Airborne_Again wrote:
You can get cylinders from other manufacturers than the Lycoming…
He asked Superior and got similar delivery times.
I keep hearing of people who are looking to overhaul their past-TBO or otherwise overhaul ready engines and who get told between 12 and 20 months for new cylinder kits.
When I stopped in at my local Cessna parts dealer today to buy some engine oil, I discussed this with the parts lady. She asked if I needed an oil filter too, I said no – oil screen instead. “Phew”, she said…. no oil filters until February!
Two very similar threads merged.
As noted above, the issue seems highly sporadic. I managed to buy 5 oil filters from LAS Aerospace. They always showed 0 stock so presumably they were sold quickly.
But as with all the other shortages we see (chips, etc) once somebody has enough stock they don’t need to keep buying, so this bubble will burst. When, depends on various factors. But you can be 100% sure that the supply pipeline will not give you an advance warning, because they want to keep booking orders at premium prices right up to the instant it all collapses. I’ve seen this many times since I started in business in 1978. People never change 
I ordered a couple of Tempest 48104 oil filters from Chief Aircraft stock a moment ago, enough to last me through a shortage given that I just changed my oil/filter.
Peter wrote:
As noted above, the issue seems highly sporadic.
It doesn’t look like a sporadic thing, particularly engine parts and props.
Someone I know inquired for an overhaul which includes new cylinders on a bog standard O360. He was told that currently no cylinders are available until early 2024. He has booked a date for overhaul so not to miss out. Lycoming is months behind and Superior can not pick up the slack (they are producing normally but can’t go up on the demand that fast.) Continental appears to be not much better but have delivery slots for cylinders and other parts during 2023.
Another guy was told 2025 from Lycoming.
Props, 9-10 months from Hartzell, I don’t know how McCauley are doing. MT appear to be able to deliver pretty much pronto.
Peter wrote:
But as with all the other shortages we see (chips, etc) once somebody has enough stock they don’t need to keep buying, so this bubble will burst.
With airplane parts so far what I see, there are no price hikes only massive delivery shortages. So it’s not really a bubble, but with more and more engines waiting to be overhauled, it may well turn into one.
The problem I see is that if you get a unexpected need for overhaul or end up with a failed cylinder or something like this on the legacy Lyco or Conti engines, you may well end up AOG for up to 2 years. That is totally unacceptable.
I’d find it interesting to learn, how the situation with the Continental Diesel engines are in comparison. However, I’d expect those engines to make TBR without the need to change cylinders or other major components in the meantime.
Buying new cylinders is rarely necessary, particularly in the case of a Lycoming, even if it is convenient. You just overhaul what you have instead and no, the world is not going to end while we work the idiotic government actions of the last two years out of our system.
The problem is Europe is relatively lack of flexible, capable GA infrastructure that can adapt to circumstances. Same as always.
Silvaire wrote:
Buying new cylinders is rarely necessary, particularly in the case of a Lycoming, even if it is convenient. You just overhaul what you have instead
In terms of a full overhaul, does Lycoming (and other manufacturers for that matter) prescribe which parts need to be exchanged with new ones? That was my impression.
Also, the same kind of delays go for new engines by what I hear. This on the other hand will eventually have an impact on manufacturers as well, as if they can’t get engines for their new SR22’s or even in the experimental scene, the engine market dries up, it will be a massive problem.
Re-using old cylinders after a re-honing has been and is done wherever possible, but what I was told, precludes resetting the hour and time counter to zero in an overhaul. I will ask about this again, unless one of you here has the answer to that. However, that does not help in the case of cracked or out of tolerance items. And cylinders is not the only thing where massive waiting times are done, camshafts and other rather important parts are similarily rare. Down to bog standard oil filters.
In the US, flying past TBO is much more common than here, but that is about the biggest difference. Cylinders break there as they do here, arguably less so in non turbo airplanes than in turbocharged ones. Nevertheless, I’ve read similar questions and alerts in US publications as well recently, only that it appears the magnitude of the problem has not hit home sufficiently so that e.g. AOPA would start to make significant noise.
New cylinders are not required for 0 SMOH overhaul, and were not routinely fitted at overhaul until competition from non-OEMs brought the price of new PMA and OEM cylinder assemblies down. Prior to that buying new cylinders was price prohibitive, but at a certain point it became easier to buy new than overhaul and many of the cylinder specially shops went out of business. But not all. I’ve lost track, but this must’ve been about 20 years ago.
Cylinder cracks can and are repaired at overhaul by a cylinder shop using approved procedures, and all fits can be brought to new spec. The problem comes when they’ve already been bored and welded one or more times, at which point the raw material isn’t really good enough. At that point the ‘old system’ was to find another cylinder that was good enough to overhaul, buying new being the solution of last resort. There’s probably a lot of such cylinders about nowadays, the air boat guys probably have hundreds of them in stock.
Silvaire wrote:
New cylinders are not required for 0 SMOH overhaul, and were rarely fitted at overhaul until competition from non-OEMs brought the price of new cylinder assemblies down. At that point it became easier to buy new than overhaul and many of the cylinder overhaul specially shops went out of business.
Yes. A new cylinder assembly in itself is more expensive than overhauling, but using it saves turnaround time and labour costs significantly, so at the bottom line it’s comparable. One possible exception is when an engine shop owns an engine outright and overhauls it at a low priority, filling small gaps between high-priority jobs, especially if the cylinders are also overhauled in-house.
