Almost a month ago, I and the classmates with who I am studying the AMT (Aircraft Maintenance Technician) studies had the opportunity to witness the Lycoming O-360 piston engine we had seen lying stopped in a test stand during the entire year of studies… working at last!
Nearly a week before we had a few attempts at starting it, but, despite a few explosions at the beginning, the engine refused to begin turning. It wasn’t till some days later that, being outside the building where we have the engine among other material, we heard a strange noise coming from it. We went inside… and there was the engine in full performance and operated by our 2nd course colleagues! Being the first time I saw an aviation engine turning it was a really exciting experience, noisy and windy too…! 😀
Some interesting facts are that the engine was turning on only one magneto (thus having half of of the spark plugs, one per cylinder, inoperative). This made the engine want to stop when idling it. Throttling it up again solved the problem 🙂 . Other fact is that the carburetor used by this engine did not correspond to it, although it worked quite well. The propeller was a wooden, four-bladed Sensenich which prevented the engine from running at excessive RPM’s during the run.
I didn’t have the HD camera with me, but I did record some video of the engine running with a Sony Ericsson k810i cell phone. Ok, not HD quality, but at least I got something acceptable. Enjoy!
Passion for Aviation 
