Oiling With the Forever Club at Shuttleworth

While most pilots have a strong interest in keeping their engines running, on walkabout last August in the U.K. we met a group absolutely dedicated to engine preservation. They are the technicians at the Shuttleworth Collection in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, England. A flying museum, the private Shuttleworth Collection’s mandate is to keep their six hangars’ worth of priceless WW-II and earlier aircraft flying as long as possible so the rest of us can enjoy them in their natural state. Considering Shuttleworth’s many decades of experience, including they’re still aviating the world’s oldest flying aircraft, a 113-year-old Bleriot XI, we thought you might like a look at one of their methods: pre-oiling.

Coaxing oil through an engine’s innards prior to starting is just one of the Shuttleworth’s wear prevention techniques. Faced with winter-long storage, then flying displays every few weeks through the summer—usually seven flights—the Shuttleworth airplanes are a test case in worst-case flying schedules—long periods of inactivity with every start dry. With weeks to months between engine starts, oil has overly ample time to drain away from critical interfaces, and the resulting dry starts promote excess wear.

To mitigate the intermittent flying, Shuttleworth has developed protocols designed to minimize engine wear. Some of these are impractical for normal operations; others are definitely effective on any engine.

The first technique is to simply limit engine run time. The airplanes are often towed to and from the runway by tractors, and flown only during scheduled displays unless (rarely) demanded by maintenance checks or pilot training. The displays are kept short and only the WW-II fighters see easy 1-G aerobatics. Warmup times are carefully optimized because the true antiques go from cold to overheated far too easily; some have takeoff windows measured to the half minute. All told, much thought and effort go into preserving while still running these engines.

One thing every Shuttleworth engine gets, however, is pre-oiling. Their rule is an engine must be pre-oiled in the previous five days prior to starting. If not, they pre-oil it again. In practice, Shuttleworth techs are typically able to pre-lube within a day or two of engine start. And if the engines aren’t started—English weather can curtail some of the displays—absolutely no harm has been done.

How to reasonably get oil inside an engine varies with engine type. At the Shuttleworth, they deal with many old rotaries and a good number of radials, along with inlines such as straight-6s and V-12s.

One hundred years ago the old rotaries were typically manually lubed and primed, and those practices continue at Shuttleworth. Generally speaking, the rotaries need no modification to pre-lube as removing the spark plug is all that is required.

Radials take some modification consisting of permanently tapping into several (often three) oil galleries or inlet passages around the engine, then running hoses to a convenient, accessible point in the accessory area in the rear of the cowling. This allows a pressure pot of warmed oil to be joined into the oiling system.

The inlines—especially the big V-12s in the Collection’s Hurricane and Spitfire fighters—use a permanently mounted auxiliary electrically driven pump to circulate the engine’s own oil prior to start.

We thought you’d like a look at the effort going into the Shuttleworth oiling protocols, and were able to photograph the procedures used on the round motors. We did not photograph inline pre-oiling as it is little more than toggling a momentary switch for a few seconds—same as with aftermarket pre-oilers sold for use on Continentals and Lycomings.