That moment I caught my own mistake on an engine run after 5 years

I was doing a run-up on a Cessna 172 last Thursday and noticed the oil pressure was sitting at the low end of the green. It hit me that I had been using the wrong viscosity oil since I started at this shop because nobody ever told me we switched suppliers six months ago. Has anyone else had that gut-drop feeling when you realize you missed a simple spec change?

2 comments

2 Comments

betty14419d ago

Man I had that same kind of sinking feeling a couple years back when I realized I'd been topping off my old Ford pickup with the wrong coolant for almost a year. Somebody at the parts store said this green stuff was fine for everything and I just trusted them without checking. Ended up finding sludge in the radiator when I finally did a flush. The worst part was knowing I'd been driving around for months thinking everything was fine when I was slowly gunking up the whole system. Its funny how one little detail you overlook can bite you so hard later on. Makes you want to go back and recheck every single thing you ever learned.

sandra_black19d ago

Did you flush it with distilled water after you drained the sludge? I learned the hard way that just dumping new coolant in without a good flush just leaves the gunk floating around to clog your heater core next winter. A couple of those cheap flush kits from the auto parts store and a Saturday afternoon saved me from having to replace the whole radiator a year later.