I wasted a great afternoon of flying today when my plane failed to crank over. Tracked the problem down to the starter motor... looks like I need a rebuilt or a new one. Anyone have any experience with the Skytec lightweight starters on continental 0-470's? I've heard some mixed review about their longevity. After this afternoon I would definitely take reliability over weight.

Love mine but its for a Lycoming. My partner messed it up right after we bought it and Skytec was quick and helpful repairing it. I saved 10.8 pounds off my old Prestolite which was a boat anchor.

I loved mine on my Luscombe C90, did an amazing job. Almost seemed like in the event of an engine failure, you could just crank the key over to help get you to where ever you were going.

At work, we've put Skytechs on most of the planes, including Islanders, with continental engines. This was their first season with them on, but never had a problem, and they all get worked pretty hard in a season. 10 starts a day isn't too uncommon.

We have one on our champs c-90, and it works well. We had a couple of hiccups right away, but they fixed them no charge, and updated the starter to use a shear pin to fail in case of a kick back, which works--I tested it about a month ago. it was a quick and easy repair on the champ, maybe not so easy to get it out on the 180.

Please post what you do, I have been eyeing up the big boat anchor on our C-180, thinking about a lightweight one.

I have one on my Lyc also. Just like the other guys state...those suckers really crank the engine over fast!!! Never had a problem. I have been thinking of putting one on my Cont. powered Cessna but am selling it (sometime) so no sense in spending the money unles the original pucks.

L&S,


Was your starter install done by a field approval? Getting rid of the heavy original starter would be nice. Bet then again it wouldn't be the same not having to heave on the starter knob to get the thing going.

180driver wrote:I wasted a great afternoon of flying today when my plane failed to crank over. Tracked the problem down to the starter motor... looks like I need a rebuilt or a new one. Anyone have any experience with the Skytec lightweight starters on continental 0-470's? I've heard some mixed review about their longevity. After this afternoon I would definitely take reliability over weight.

Only way I'd use one of those lightweights would to replace the starter drive with the Niagara starter drive first. If you don't expect to find pieces of your old starter drive in the oil system .Been there done that. I'll take the old Delco starters off your hands . You can rebuild the old larger starters for 20 bucks or so. The small light weight starters draw 2-3 times the current(better have a good battery and cables) and spin at a higher rpm to archive the torque to spin the engine thru. Personally I like the old Delco cont. starters with the firewall mounted battery.

whee wrote:L&S,


Was your starter install done by a field approval? Getting rid of the heavy original starter would be nice. Bet then again it wouldn't be the same not having to heave on the starter knob to get the thing going.

We did a field approval. Pretty easy process for us, as we had the engine off doing an overhaul.

I didn't miss that old pull starter one bit, after the first time I hit that shinny button and the engine fired up on the first swing of the blade...

John