In today’s time of fuel injection, the memory of praying to whatever deity hooked you up to let your car actually start for once instead of cranking forever with no sign of a pulse is a thing of the past. But it wasn’t that long ago that the sound of starters spinning an engine over in futility was common. And there was no guarantee that the damned thing would stay running if you were lucky enough to get the engine to kick over. Fluttering the throttle, holding revs to get the temperature up quickly…did you forget so soon? There’s nothing like screaming thinly veiled threats at an engine that is in no mood to deal with you first thing fresh out of a slumber.
That being said, we think we’ve found the champion of not wanting to start for anyone, ever. It’s not even a car. It’s a Kamov Ka-26 “Hoodlum” helicopter, a happy little easter egg of a helicopter that uses co-axial rotors instead of the traditional main/tail setup to get around. While there were a couple of turboshaft-powered models, most were powered by two 325-horsepower nine-cylinder Vedeneyev radial engines. A fun thing about radial engines: the longer they sit, the more bitchy they get due to issues like oil loading in the lower cylinders, and the usual fuel issues of a piston engine.
The story on this particular helo goes like this: when the right engine on this bird spun a bearing, the engine had to come out for a month for repairs. Naturally, after sitting a month the left engine wasn’t going to make life easy. With oil drained out of the cylinders and a fresh round of spark plugs, you would think that it might actually try to fire. Yeah…keep thinking that. It’ll come around, eventually, but it will do so with the iron will of the most stubborn ass you could imagine.
After it started they downed a couple shots of vodka to celebrate… Russian videos are great!!! 🙂
That’s a lot of swinging blades, would not wanna jump too high with joy….