Dude, what the fuck? Hey everyone, I'm Russ Still. I'm on board here at the Gold Seal DC-3 with Captain Dan, and we've been getting a lot of questions as you can guess. One of the ones that we keep getting over and over is how do you go through an engine startup for an airplane like this? So Dan's going to run through it with us, and we're also going to learn three secrets about the DC-3 that a lot of people don't know. So Dan, what do we have here? Morning Russ, how are you today? Good to see you as always. Thanks for inviting me out. That's a beautiful morning. Let's talk about the DC-3. Yes sir. We're going to go ahead and start this thing and show people actually how to start a DC-3, step by step. And before we do that, I'm going to give you three secrets of the DC-3, pretty much unknown to a lot of people. And there's three big ones for maintaining a DC-3 and keeping it going. Number one, we don't pull our props through by hand. And the reason is, is because of this thing we call hydraulic lock. So a mechanic or a trained person can push a prop through a little bit in sense for hydraulic lock, but the concept of pushing a prop through by hand 12 or 15 blades and attempting to pre-oil it is wives tale. It's complete, malarkey. We don't do it. That's number one. All right. Number two, we use a power cart for most of our starts. The reason is, is that a power cart provides plenty of voltage and average to run the starter. The starter is an electric motor. That's all it is. What does any electric motor have to have to not get hot? It has to have voltage, proper voltage. Ships batteries are often dead and can't pull the engine through fast enough, burn up the starter and don't give this engine its proper rotation. This is where you get the pre-oiling effect by using our pre-oiler, which is number three, and a lot of rotation. That gets that oil case fully pressurized and that is your secret number two. Okay. The start cart's right below us right now with a bunch of batteries on there hooked in. Start cart, I got so much voltage and average connected to this airplane right now, you can't believe it. So that's number two. Number three is we have a pre-oiler system on here. So when we go to start the engine, we operate a switch, which actually you'll hear it running. It starts taking oil right out of the oil tank and pressurizing the entire system so that we actually get an oil pressure indication prior to even turning on any fuel or magneto. We're going to spin the, you know what out of this engine with the pre-oiler before we ever even think about it. How come we can spin this engine so long because we got to start cart. That starter is not going to burn up. That starter will spin all day long with voltage and an- We're not going to run a battery down, are we? And we're not going to run the battery down. It's a beautiful thing. Okay. What do you think? We already started? Well let's go through quickly. Let's go through just a switch layout so we've got some electronics panels over here. Just real quickly, what are our panels here? Well every DC-3 is laid out completely different. They built 14,000 with these things. So you're going to find every which kind of thing under the sun. But they've all got a few things in common. Here's a switch over here that controls whether you're on ship's power or auxiliary power. In our case, here's avionics. The rest of these switches are all lights. Lighting control for inside and outside light. Seat bit light right here. Landing lights and our strobe lights. So we're going to get ready to start and leave our strobe on. In the center panel here, ignition master, which kills all power to both magnetos. That's our ignition master switch to which you don't typically have on your single engine airplanes. Okay. So we'll turn our ignition master on. These are oil, low oil, quantity indicators. And these are feather buttons. So if you lost an engine on takeoff, you would mash a button and it would feather the engine for you. Okay. And this is how we do our mag selection. This is your magneetos right here. I know they're old and archaic looking, but that's what they are on all these old warbirds. Just like 172, there's off, left, right, and both. Okay. Just like a 172. Okay. All right. And then over here on this panel, you've got starter primer. There's our pre-over switch, boost pumps, just like on any piper or low wing airplane, boost pumps, generator switches. We don't have alternators, we have generators. So once we get an engine running, we'll bring a generator online. Pito heat, captain and co-pounds. We got two of those. Instrument switch powers up all of our electric switches. And then this is some test equipment for our heater and heater controls. And then up here we have an amperage indication to show which generators putting out what as far as amperage. And that's basically it. The rest of it is like a piper as tech or a system of 310, throttles, props, mixtures. And we have manifold pressure and RPM. And that's all it is. It's just everything's time tens on big. Okay. All the knobs are big, all the controls are big. This thing was built in 38 and that's the way they did it. Yep, gotcha. Okay, so we'll do the engine start just like with your 172 or anything else. We're going to turn the A, keep the avionics master off while we do the power. But for the purposes of this video, what's we get the first engine started? Let's go ahead and flip the avionics power on because we'll need to talk through the intercom so that we can record the audio. We'll flip it back off, then we'll do the next engine start after that. Sounds fairly good to you. Okay, so avionics master is off. Take it away. Alright, go ahead and give me some ship's power. There you go. No, you're okay. Go ahead and leave that switch in that position there. Okay. Alright, our avion, our master switch is on. I'm going to go ahead and pre-oil it. Now watch in the up close video that you're going to insert in here. Watch our oil pressure rise. All I've got on right now is the pre-oiler. And watch this oil pressure come up. No propeller is turning right now. Yeah, there it comes. Here comes your oil pressure. And I'm going to go ahead and spin this engine. Alright, there's mixtures. Max. Start right up. Alright, let's go ahead and go to avionics on. There you go. Okay, we've got this one of the engine on. You there? Everything's on the go. Yep. Okay, first engine is running good and everything is looking good to you, right? Yeah, first engine is running good. We've got oil pressure and everything else looks normal. Okay, and like I said, we normally wouldn't turn the avionics master and go to the intercop here, but we just need it for the video. Okay, shall we go ahead and do an engine start for number two? Yeah, let's go ahead and just... All you got to do is take the avionics off and I'll do the rest of it, okay? Okay, here we go. I got a boost pump on. Preg oil is on. Alright, boost up on. Preg oil is on. You want to look outside your window there? You're clear. Alright, here you go. And now I'm both pre-oiling the engine and I'm spinning it. It's doing great. Look how fast that thing is spinning. I'm gonna let it spin. Alright, pre-oar is off. Mix is on. Mags. Woohoo! Alright, you got an avionics on. Okay, there you go. Talking again, I think started up. Nice belt to smoke, just like we like to see. Oh, yeah. But it's good, nice and smooth. So we're out here, we got two fans turning. Let's go to battery now. I think that's what's going on. There you go. And I'm gonna go to generators on. And now we're on ship's power. And our generators are functioning. So we're actually charging the batteries now. And then if we were actually going to fly, we'd run our after-start checklist and our pre-tax checklist. And all those kind of things here. Okay, so that's pretty much how you started DC3. A few secrets about the airplane. Engine start-ups not too difficult. What you memorize a few switches and an order. And just have that right touch on the throttle and the mixture right. That's it. That's it. It's a crazy thing where you need all your fingers and your toes to start one of these big radios. And you got to listen to it. You got to, these engines are always trying to talk to you. They're going to tell you what they need. And then even after-start, before you get headsets on, I was like to listen to each engine and listen to what's going on out there. And they're going to talk to you and they're going to help you through that start. After-start, we got good oil pressure. Our temperatures are good. Our temperatures are coming up. And we typically idle these things at about 7 to 750 RPM. And we idle them for a long time like that. So we don't put any pressure on these things. We just let them sit there and chuck for a little while. All right, so now we've got the engine started. We're going to let it sit here in idle for a bit. Hope you guys enjoyed this. It was great fun to do. We're going to let these warm up. And for everybody else, good flying. Thanks for watching.