Interesting find on planecheck: overhauled IO540 for a TB20, 0hrs since overhaul in 2003 (why would you store it that long ?) and apparently fitted a bad crankshaft then.
IO540 C4D5D
Can this be (otherwise) a sensible option (assuming areasonable price) ?
That’s a strange thing to be selling. It looks like an engine new in 2003, stored ever since. This is totally outside the mfg’s storage limitations. In that case it will be full of rust – the silica gel plugs won’t help – and worthless… well maybe 10k. Socata will know about this; they installed a lot of these engines which were stored for too long and were full of rust.
Another possibility is that somebody overhauled it and then “somebody” discovered SB569 applies … whoops! 
I don’t know how much Lyco want for a new crank but 30k plus that can’t be far off the price a brand new IO540-C4D5D, by the time the engine is re-opened, inspected, re-assembled, etc. Also I doubt any engine shop will take the engine on trust, so will want to do a full “check and repair as necessary” job at least. Unless you go back to the same company which overhauled this one, but any engine shop whose expertise appears limited to getting all the externals nicely plated and painted is best avoided – even for a Vespa scooter.
Under this is somebody’s personal / financial tragedy – like so many in the GA maintenance field. One guy on here lost a plane plus 30k, in a dispute.
I know Socata had a stock of ~14 of these when they stopped making the TBs. All were presumed rusted up. I tried to buy one but they refused to sell it unless they got a French shop to overhaul it, which I was totally uninterested in. This engine may be one of those. It is in France so most likely Socata related. Vaison is not far from Tarbes. But those were not new in 2003, and Socata probably had no reason to be buying new engines in 2003 since they stopped making TBs in 2001/2002 and just built some more planes out of a pile of bits.
If you get the S/N you can phone Lyco and they will tell you who it was shipped to and when.
The smaller orange note says « Daher Socata » (it is blury).
And in French on a pushrod « Engine in storage, do not turn ».
30k$ plus crankshaft (18-20k$) plus work for crankshaft exchange – it’s probably very close to new engine price. I guess shop will charge price similar to full overhaul due to engine age and “who knows what else to replace”. I would definitely avoid this.
Would probably work well for somebody building an RV10, and could do the “repair” needed under the auspices of their permit regime. The new price of a 540 outright is unbelievably high if you have no core.
The new price was $60k from a US discount shop, a few years ago.
The problem here is that the engine could be anything from “just needing a new crankshaft” (that AD is real and needs to be complied with, for safety) to being well corroded inside, and needing loads of new bits e.g. camshaft, conrods (no corrosion at all is permitted on a conrod).
We also know the Socata engines were well corroded on the bores in 2003 so if this one is out of that stock…
IMHO 30k is too much to take a chance on it.
Peter wrote:
IMHO 30k is too much to take a chance on it.
Fair price would be 10k or so and you would probably put some 35k into it and get decent total price.
The tag does indeed say DAHER-SOCATA so that cannot be from 2003 because the DAHER label is much more recent. Could have been labelled recently though…
However it could not have been legally overhauled anytime since around 2008 and still have the old crankshaft, so whichever way to look at it, it will have been stored for many years.
