Tag Archives: troubleshooting

MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, eBay Shopping

Posted on by
Comment

Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping. This episode is a hodgepodge of information related to my podcasting efforts and the trouble it has been giving me lately. You can find the transcript of this podcast in the “Call Me a Geek” area of Maria’s WebLog. The easiest way to find that is to click the link on my home page, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Let’s start with the MPEG-4 lessons. If you’ve been following my podcasts, you know that I’ve begun creating the occasional enhanced podcast. Enhanced podcasts include images and links and are saved in MPEG-4 format with a .m4a extension. My other podcasts are saved in MP3 format with a .mp3 extension.

Podcast publishing is not exactly a simple task — well, not when you do it the way I do. After recording, editing, and saving the audio file, I then log into Blogger where I create a blog entry for the podcast. There’s a link field that I fill out with the URL for the audio file’s location on a server. I put a short blurb about the episode in the entry and publish it.

Publishing the entry on Blogger does two things. First, it creates the Maria Speaks home page. That’s the plain old Web page you see when you browse www.aneclecticmind.com/mariaspeaks. Then it creates an XML feed file called atom.xml, in the same location as the home page. This feed file has all the codes necessary for podcatching software — like iTunes and a bunch of others I really don’t know — to see and download the new audio files.

But that’s not what most subscribers use to access my podcast. They use my Feedburner feed. Every 30 minutes or so, Feedburner’s software checks out my atom.xml file to see if it has changed. If it has, it revises its version of my xml feed file, which can be found at feeds.feedburner.com/mariaspeaks. That’s the file most subscribers subscribe to and it’s the one with all the bells and whistles to make sure my podcast entries appear correctly in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere.

Sound confusing? It is, in a way. But I don’t usually have to deal with too much of it. As I said, I create and save the audio file, then create and publish the corresponding blog entry. Blogger, Feedburner, and subscriber’s software does the rest.

My MPEG-4 lesson started yesterday. Well, in all honestly, it started about four months ago, but I didn’t realize it then. Back then, it was a problem getting my podcasts to work. But I changed the way I was doing things and it started to work, so I assumed I’d been doing it wrong in the first place. Actually, I wasn’t.

Here’s the symptom: my enhanced podcasts weren’t accessible from the Maria Speaks podcast. Anyone trying to access the file from the Maria Speaks home page by clicking the entry name got an error message. File not found. And there was no attachment to either version of the xml feed file.

The regular podcasts were fine.

Thus began my troubleshooting exercise. I zeroed in on the difference in the file name extensions and started researching. To make a long story short, I discovered that in order for me to include m4a files in my podcasts, I had to set up a MIME mapping on the server to identify the m4a extension’s type as audio/MPEG.

If you’re completely lost, don’t worry about it. This isn’t the kind of thing most computer users need to deal with. I certainly don’t. Fortunately, I have a server in my office that I can set up MIME mapping. I added the appropriate entry, moved my m4a files over to that server, fixed the URLs in Blogger, republished, resynced Feedburner, and everything began working fine.

I’m still trying to find out if the server space I have on GoDaddy.com can be modified to add the MIME mapping I need there. I’d much rather serve from that server than the one in my office.

So that was my MPEG-4 lesson.

Server woes started this morning. I was still fiddling around with the MPEG-4 files and was very surprised to see that the folder on my GoDaddy server that I’d been using to store my MP3 files was gone. I mean gone like it was never there. And oddly enough, two folders that I thought I’d deleted were back. What the heck was going on?

I assumed that I’d accidentally deleted the missing folder and was mistaken about the other two folders. After all, I’ve been busy lately with my QuickBooks book and a bunch of unexpected helicopter charters. I was obviously being careless. So I rebuilt the missing folder from backup files on my iDisk and went to work.

All the way to work — it’s a ten-minute drive — I thought about my carelessness. And when I got to my office, I did some more research. What I soon realized was that all of the space on my GoDaddy server had been reverted to the way it looked on October 10. Over a month ago. What the heck was going on?

I called GoDaddy technical support and was fortunate enough to have a tech guy answer right away. I told him the symptoms. We did some brainstorming, using the info we both had. We soon discovered that on October 10, I’d requested a change from a Windows server to a Linux server. For some reason, it had taken GoDaddy five weeks to process the change. In the meantime, I kept uploading files to the Windows server when the Linux server was already set up but not accessible to my account. Last night, GoDaddy switched my access to the Linux server, which hadn’t been updated since I requested the change. So I was suddenly faced with a server that hadn’t been updated for five weeks and access to the server I’d been using all along was completely cut off.

Well, this wouldn’t have been so bad if I was using the server space for a Web site. I keep backup copies of all my Web site on my main production computer. If a Web site’s directory or disk is trashed, I can have it replaced in a matter of minutes. But the only thing I use this server for is storing my podcasting files. Not just for Maria Speaks but for KBSZ-AM’s Around the Town radio show, which is broadcast every weekday. When GoDaddy made its change, it wiped out about 20 podcast files.

The really tragic part of all this is that I’d been saving all those podcast audio files on my PowerBook’s hard disk. Two days ago, I got an onscreen message saying I was running out of disk space. Well, why not delete some of those podcasts, I asked myself. After all, I can always get new copies from the server.

Two days later, of course, I couldn’t.

Well, the GoDaddy tech guy was very helpful. He told me they’d do a server restore for the Windows server and copy the files in my directory there to the Linux server. Although GoDaddy usually charges $150 for this service, they admitted that they were at least partially at fault for the screw-up and waived the fee. Now I just have to wait up to 10 days for the files to reappear. And, when that happens, I have to re-upload any files I uploaded to the server between yesterday at midnight and the day the server is restored. Like this podcast.

Oh, and I did lose one of my enhanced podcast episodes. It was one of my better ones, too: Mac and Windows File Sharing. It was on my .

Mac disk space, which I also cleaned up in an effort to get rid of unneeded files. So if you have a copy of it — that’s the version with the m4a file extension — please send it to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’d really like to put it back online for the latecomers here. The lesson I learned in this ordeal is that I must have a copy of every single file I want to make available on a server. If I’d had all my files, I could have just restored the server back to its original condition and got on with my life. And not bore you with this story.

SmartDiskWhat’s weird about this is that I considered the server my backup and I deleted the originals, depending on the backup. If you recall my famous NaNoWriMo podcast episode, you’ll remember how I spoke about the importance of backups. Yeah, well the originals are important, too. Which brings me to the final topic of this podcast: eBay shopping. I’ve been surfing eBay for the past two weeks, trying to get a deal on a portable FireWire hard disk. The idea is to use the external hard disk to store all my media files, thus keeping them off my PowerBook’s internal hard disk, which is only 40GB. SmartDisk makes a drive called the FireLite and I figure I can get an 80GB model for about $130. There’s plenty to choose from, all in unopened boxes. But I seem to have the worst timing; I’ve lost about a dozen auctions in the past two weeks. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually bid on two of them at a time, knowing I can’t possibly win both.

That’s the same technique I used to snag a new iSight camera this week. I put the same bid on both cameras. I won one and lost the other. Fine with me. I figure I’ll bring the camera home and use it on my laptop for a Webcam and for iChat. I might also do some video podcasting — but don’t hold your breath on that.

My other big eBay acquisition is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. It’s about half the price on eBay as it is in the Apple Store. Sealed boxes, unregistered. Sounds almost too good to be true. We’ll see.

The server, of course, is so I can finally get rid of WebSTAR and do some serious Web hosting on my server. I’ll bore you with that in another blog entry.

That’s all for today. I hope you learned something from this mess. Thanks for listening!

WebSTAR Technical Support

Posted on by
Comment

I have an experience that convinces me that it’s time for new Web server software.

Last week, I upgraded my office Internet connection from cable modem to DSL. The new connection has download speeds about 26 times faster than the old connection and it costs less than half the price. Upgrading was a no-brainer. The only thing I don’t understand is why it took me so long to realize that DSL was available in my area.

To upgrade to DSL, I had to lease or buy a DSL modem. Since it only cost $60 to buy, I bought it. I was very surprised to discover that it was also a wireless router. Within twenty minutes of the telephone man leaving, I had the wireless feature up and running and was connecting my network computers to it, thus cutting my Apple Airport Extreme Base Station out of the loop.

Things are never as easy as they seem — not that the configuration stuff seemed easy. It seemed hard. After all, I had to obtain a fixed IP address, then map it into the new router and use port forwarding configurations to point incoming traffic to my G4, which does server duty. If I talked about it in detail with a layman, his eyes would glaze over and he’d pass out. If I talked about it in detail with someone really knowledgeable, he’d know the truth: that I knew just enough about networking to make me dangerous.

I set everything up and, on Friday, had my DNS guy, Dave, make the changes to my DNS records. PGS Internet Services handles DNS for the 19 domain names I host in my office. In the past, I’ve handed over some of my more bothersome Web clients to them. PGS charges more than I do, but they have infinitely more patience. I think they feel like they owe me for the business, so they host my DNS for free. I try not to make changes, but this was a biggie and it had to be done.

By Saturday morning, the DNS had already propagated through to the Cable America DNS server. I access the Internet via wireless cable modem (how’s that for a contradiction in terms?) at home and I was able to connect to all of my Web sites except, for some reason, aneclecticmind.com. That came later in the day. Feedburner and Blogger still couldn’t see the sites, so I couldn’t update my podcasts or the ones I do for KBSZ. But I knew it was a matter of time.

By Sunday evening, everything was accessible from just about everywhere. Mission accomplished. Total downtime: less than the 48 hours I’d expected.

But, like I said, things weren’t as easy as they seemed. Because when I got to my office this morning, I quickly discovered that my production computer was unable to access my server for FTP, e-mail, or Web sites.

I had a lot of work to do — I’m still working on that QuickBooks book and I think I’m supposed to have it done by the end of the week. (Oops.) So I didn’t start troubleshooting right away. But it was driving me nuts that it wouldn’t work. And the fact that I could access it if I connected to the Internet via the Airport wireless network, which was still connected to the cable modem, was driving me nuts. So I went into full troubleshooting mode and spent about an hour banging away on it, trying all kinds of things, before I finally called the DSL modem company, Adaptec, convinced that it was a router configuration problem.

Now Adaptec has a technical support policy that basically says that they’ll help you with easy stuff for free but you have to pay $29 to get help with difficult stuff. Port forwarding for a shared static IP address fell into the difficult stuff category. But it was worth $29 to me to get it working right so I could stop thinking about it.

And that’s what I told the tech support guy I got on the toll-free phone number after about 10 minutes of waiting (their dime). But he said that he might not have to charge me. I should explain the problem.

So I did. And he knew immediately what the cause was. Here’s the simplified version. When you’re sitting at your computer and you type a domain name like www.aneclecticmind.com into your Web browser, your computer goes out to its DNS server on the Internet to find out the IP address for that domain name. In my case, it was learning that the IP address for the site I wanted to visit was the same IP address as the one I was trying to visit from. Adaptec routers don’t like that and they consider it an error so they don’t completely process the request. Apple Airport routers, on the other hand, are much more forgiving and let you visit yourself as often as you like. That’s why I didn’t get the error when I was using the Airport router and I started getting it when I began using the Adaptec router.

“How do I fix it?” I asked.

“You don’t,” he replied. “But there is a workaround. Just use the local IP address of the server computer.”

The local address is the address assigned by the DHCP services in the router, which I’ve manually set on the server computer. I typed that into my FTP software and it worked. Then I tried e-mail and it worked, too. Then I tried the Web browser and bzzzt. It didn’t work.

“It should,” he said. “There must be a configuration problem with your Web server software.”

Since I’d already taken up enough of his time and he’d solved most of my problem for free, I thanked him and hung up. The problem was sufficiently fixed to get my mind off it enough to work. I finished Chapter 6 of my book, then churned through 4 chapters of edits that had arrived that morning. I had to fiddle with my printer to get it to work on the network. I wasted about 30 minutes and 50 sheets of paper trying to get it to clear out a very old IP address so it would accept a new one from the router. No luck. But at least I could print.

Then I listened to my voicemail messages from the weekend, which I’d also put off until I was done working. By that time it was about 3:30, my normal quitting time. But instead of quitting, I dove into another troubleshooting session, this time with the folks at 4D.

4D, which started life as a database software company, bought StarNine, makers of WebSTAR Web server software, several years ago. I’d been using WebSTAR since version 3.0, when an evaluation copy of it had been given to me by Eric Zelenka, WebSTAR’s product manager. Back then I ran it under Mac OS 9 on an 8500/180 with an ISDN connection to the ‘Net. I believe Eric upgraded me to WebSTAR 4 and later I paid the big bucks to upgrade to WebSTAR 5. I’m currently running WebSTAR 5.3.3 on Mac OS X 10.3.9 on a 866MHz G4 with 384 MB of RAM.

Since upgrading to WebSTAR 5, all I’ve had is headaches with the software. The most bothersome thing is its spurious restarts: the software will shut down and restart itself about 100-200 times a day. For several months, I used 4D’s free technical support option — e-mail — to try to troubleshoot the problem. No luck. I gave up. I had to write an AppleScript that would automatically go into a specific folder where WebSTAR kept storing “backup” files it didn’t need every time it restarted itself. I discovered the buried files when I realized that something was eating up my disk space: by that time, there were over 12,000 of the damn files in the folder. Now the folder is cleared out every morning as part of the restart process.

So today, I wasn’t expecting much from 4D technical support. I knew whatever help I got was going to cost me. $40 was the going rate at 4D. But again, I thought it was worthwhile to get the problem resolved by talking to a real person.

I called and talked to a real person after being on hold (my dime) for about 15 minutes. To his credit, he really did try to help. But after going over the obvious — which I’d already done — he was out of suggestions. Time to “escalate” the case. That means time for me to break out my credit card.

He switched me to someone named David and he took my American Express card info. Then he tried to switch me back to the original guy. I was on hold for about 5 minutes when he got back on and told me the lines were busy and I’d have to wait in the queue. Duh. So I waited. My dime turned into a few bucks. On top of the $40 I’d already spent. At least the hold music was better than Adaptec’s.

Finally, a guy who sounded pretty French to me got on the phone. I groaned. Not because he was French, but because I knew I’d have to explain the problem all over again from scratch and he’d try all the things the first guy tried before getting down to real business. So I explained it. And he said, “I know exactly what the problem is.”

I laughed. “I bet you don’t. But I’m willing to listen.”

He spent the next 30 minutes crawling around inside my configuration files by accessing the server as an administrator. He made some small changes. He had me try accessing. It wouldn’t work. At one point, he had it set up so that I could use the local IP address to access one of my Web sites. But I wanted to be able to access all of them.

While he was fiddling around, I was thinking. Something he said gave me an idea.

“How about if we create a new Web site with a default folder that’s the same as the WebServer folder (the folder in which all of the other Web site folders reside). We can set that as the default that’s accessed with the local IP address. Then I can just type in a slash and the name of the folder containing the site I want. That should do it.”

“It won’t work,” he told me, dashing my hopes. He tried to explain why, but I didn’t really understand what he was saying.

I let him fiddle around for another five minutes. I was thinking hard. I couldn’t understand why my idea wouldn’t work. So I tried it. And it worked.

I told him and he had difficulty believing me. But it worked and although it wasn’t the perfect solution, it was a workaround I was willing to live with.

“So tell me something,” I said to him. “You didn’t fix the problem and I did. Do I get my $40 back?”

The answer, after a long story in which he explained that he was actually in charge of technical support, was no.

So I spent $40 plus about 90 minutes of long distance telephone time to come up with my own solution for the problem.

I’m still trying to decide whether I should call American Express and begin a chargeback for the $40. I didn’t, after all, get what I paid for. What do you think?

In the meantime, I’d spent a lot of that time on hold doing research. I discovered that Mac OS X 10.4 Server will indeed run on a G4. And it includes not only the well-respected and highly compatible Apache Web server, but e-mail, DNS, blogging software, streaming audio server, steaming video server, iChat server, and so many more things I don’t have. Of course, it is a bit pricey at $999.

But after my dismal technical support experiences with the 4D WebSTAR folks, I’m ready for a change.

On Popping Circuit Breakers

Posted on by
Comment

I learn about a Raven II’s Fuel System While Troubleshooting a Pesky Circuit Breaker

Starting a Raven II is a weird process. You turn on the master battery switch, push the mixture full rich, then turn the key to prime and count 5. Behind you, you can hear the sound of the auxiliary fuel pump priming the engine. Then you position the key to Both, pull the mixture knob out to engine cutoff (full lean), and push a starter button. When you hear the engine catch, you push the mixture knob back in to full rich and put the guard over it. Throttle up to 50%-60% RPM, engage the clutch, the strobe, and the alternator. The blades start spinning within five seconds, usually with the sound of new drive belts slipping (at first) on the sheave. Then, as the belts tighten, the sounds all sound good and it’s a matter of waiting until the clutch light goes out before finishing the startup procedure.

The very first time I started Zero-Mike-Lima, at the Robinson factory last Thursday, the engine caught right away. That was easy, I remember thinking to myself. Since then, I’ve had mixed results. I just have to get the hang of it, I guess. First time was luck.

Zero-Mike-Lima has already shown me a potential problem. Nothing major, thankfully. When it’s cold out on start — like it was on the morning of day two of my ferry flight and again yesterday morning — the auxiliary fuel pump circuit breaker pops right after startup. Fortunately, I was still on the ground, so the first time, so I didn’t worry much about it. I just pulled out the Pilot’s Operating Handbook and consulted Section 4 for information about what to do if the Aux Fuel light comes on. It said that if the engine continued to operate normally, I should land as soon as practicable (as opposed to land as soon as possible). I was already landed, so that wasn’t a big deal. I pushed the circuit breaker in, the light went out, and I continued my startup process. It didn’t pop again and the light didn’t go on. A fluke, I decided the first time. The new helicopter is just shaking out a few little bugs.

On Friday evening, I pulled out my Maintenance Manual and looked up the fuel system. I soon became an expert (of sorts) in how the Raven II’s fuel system is designed. There are two fuel pumps: an engine-driven pump and an electric (aux) pump. Either pump provides more fuel to the engine than it will ever need. So the system is designed for redundancy. If the engine-driven pump dies, the aux pump, which is running whenever the engine is running, will take up the slack. The excess fuel that these pumps provide is pumped into the auxiliary fuel tank (the smaller of the two fuel tanks) which helps with fuel cooling.

I flew it on Saturday several times — starting it at least four times in the process — and the Aux Fuel problem never happened again. This further confirmed that the problem was a fluke. But yesterday, when I started it at about 10:00 AM, when it was only about 40°F outside, it did it again.

Time to call Robinson.

When I called the factory, I spoke to a guy named Ray who took the information about the problem and said he’d call back. He did — much later in the day — and left a voicemail message on my cell phone. He told me to look for pinched or shorted wires in the vicinity of the Aux Fuel Pump. He also told me to check the anemometer (gee, I hope I spelled that right) while starting up to see if there’s a power fluctuation before the breaker pops. So today I’ll have Ed look things over back there. Hopefully, it’s just a bad wire. But it could be a bad fuel pump, one that needs too much power to go to work on a cold day. I’ll keep an eye on the situation to see. I certainly won’t fly with that light on.

Of course, I did start it three times yesterday and the problem only occurred on the first start. So it definitely has to do with things being cold. That’s what I think, anyway.

But then again, what do I know? I’m just a pilot.

If It Ain’t Broke…

Posted on by
Comment

I relearn something I’ve been telling people for years.

My production Mac, a dual processor G5, started acting up yesterday. It decided, out of the blue, that it would either restart or shut down whenever it felt like it. It seemed particularly fond of doing this right after I’d revised a page of my manuscript but before I’d saved that page to disk. At least that’s how it seemed. It got to the point that I stopped using it. I’d just let it run and start up programs, one-by-one, to see which of them would trigger the problem.

But I think I caused (and then resolved) this problem. I’d been playing with Nicecast (covered elsewhere in these blogs) and had discovered, by looking at the Console log, that some piece of software was unsuccessfully searching for a piece of hardware, in the background, while I worked. It wrote an entry to the log file once per second. That couldn’t be good. It must be using processor power. So I had to make it stop.

I began my witch hunt with a few messages to programming types like Dave Mark (author of a great C book) and the makers of Nicecast. They are obviously better with Google than I am, because they both came up with a Web page that pointed to my problem: a Canon scanner driver. It seems that when you install the driver for the LiDE scanner, two drivers are installed. One driver runs the scanner. The other driver spends all its time looking for a scanner that isn’t attached. Now what rocket scientist at Canon thought that up? So I attempted to delete the drivers, just to see if I could get the log messages to go away.

That’s where I screwed up. I somehow managed to drag a driver from its folder without disabling it. Every time I tried to drag it to the trash, I got a message saying that it couldn’t be dragged to the trash because it was open. I tried restarting my Mac. I tried renaming the file. The damn file couldn’t be deleted. In the old days of Mac computing, you’d occasionally get a folder like that. We called them “folders from hell.” This was a file from hell.

Eventually, I gave up and went back to work. And that’s when the computer started acting up. The first time it shut down, I’d stepped away from my desk to retrieve something from the printer. I thought I’d somehow used the shut down command. I mean, who expects their computer to just shut down by itself? But when it started doing it while I was working, I suspected a problem. It was a windy day and I thought that maybe the wind was causing power problems. Although the computer is attached to a UPS to prevent power problems from shutting it down, I thought the UPS might be dead. They don’t live forever, you know. Of course, nothing else was shutting down and not everything in my office is attached to a UPS.

After fiddling around with the UPS for a while, I started to suspect a hardware problem. Not what I needed. The G5 is less than two years old. None of my other Macs have had serious problems, and I’ve owned at least ten of them since 1989.

Then I started thinking about that file from hell. Perhaps it was triggering something really nasty in my computer, something that would bring everything down. I became determined to get rid of it.

I tried starting the computer with the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther install disc. I used Disk Utility to repair the disk (no problems) and permissions. Of course, there’s no access to the Finder when you start from that disc, so I couldn’t just drag the nasty file to the trash. When I restarted from my hard disk, the file still couldn’t be trashed. So I opened Activity Monitor, found the file’s process, and terminated it. Then I dragged it to the trash, emptied the trash, and restarted.

The computer behaved itself after that. I’d like to think that that was the problem and that I’d solved it.

So let’s review this: I find an error message in my Console log, which I really shouldn’t be looking at in the first place. I act on what I’ve seen and cause a problem that causes spurious restarting. I lose about three hours of work time causing and then resolving the problem. And now I can’t use my scanner until I reinstall the driver(s). The moral of this story: don’t look in the Console log. Or, better yet, the golden rule of computing: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

On Stuck Valves

Posted on by
Comment

How I recognize an engine problem — and resolve it — on top of a mesa.

I’d flown Three-Niner-Lima up to Howard Mesa on my birthday, June 30. I was due to work at the Grand Canyon the next day and was looking forward to commuting to and from work daily in my helicopter.

The next day, I climbed aboard, all dressed for work. I started the engine and immediately noticed that it sounded louder and vibrated more than usual. At first, I convinced myself that the louder sound was my imagination, due to spending the night in the absolute silence of Howard Mesa. (It’s amazing how your hearing gets more sensitive when there’s nothing for it to listen to.) The vibration was due to me parking on level but uneven ground.

The blades, however, took longer than usual to start turning. There was no logical explanation to that.

And when I got it up to warm-up RPM (75%), I realize that the manifold pressure gauge read 18 inches. 18 inches is what I need to hover when I fly solo. I didn’t know what it was at warm-up RPM, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t 18 inches.

I applied carb heat, thinking that perhaps there was some icing (not likely but possible). I immediately lost about 10% of my RPM. I normally lose about 2-4%.

The lightbulb over my head came on. I had an engine problem.

I disengaged the clutch and pulled the mixture. The engine cut out gratefully. I checked my watch. It was 6:15 AM. If I didn’t hop in the Jeep soon, I’d be late for work.

I stopped the blades, tied them down, and climbed into the Jeep. It started right up and I started on my way. Of course, I did get a flat tire about 1 mile from pavement that made me late for work anyway, but that’s another story, covered in another blog entry.

I called my R22 mechanic in Prescott, Cody, and talked to him about what I’d experienced. He suggested a few things: sticky valve, fouled plugs, bad magneto (I hadn’t even gotten to the mag check). We came up with a plan of action that included checking the plugs and possibly doing a mag check.

Mike joined me at Howard Mesa a few days later. He pulled the plugs and cleaned one of them. I assumed that was the problem and didn’t bother starting up again. Until it was time to go home. And guess what? The problem was still there, if not worse. I was now pulling 18 inches of manifold pressure at 55% RPM.

We tied down the blades, covered the cockpit, and went home.

I called Paul, my old mechanic in Chandler. Although I’m not allowed to bring my helicopter to him for repairs, he’s told me time and time again that I can call him any time I have a problem. He had the same opinion as Cody about the problem, but added that if it were a stuck valve, we could easily check for bent push rods by pulling off the valve covers. Easy for him.

Cody was leaving town for Montana and would be gone for a while. And I had a feeling his boss, John, wouldn’t be too receptive to a field trip. John had a trailer that we could use to bring the helicopter to Prescott. But I could only imagine what he’d charge for its use. I was pretty financially tapped out (heck, I just put a $25,000 deposit down on a new helicopter I wouldn’t see until January 2005) and didn’t want to spend $1,000 moving my helicopter off a mountain top, just so a mechanic could spend 10 hours repairing it (at $100 per hour).

But Ed, our local mechanic, knew all about Lycoming engines, even though he wasn’t a helicopter guy. I called him and told him my problem. He agreed to make a field trip with us. We drove up yesterday with a bunch of Ed’s tools and lots of water and Gatorade.

Repairs at Howard MesaWe spread out some cardboard and throw rugs and Ed got right to work. He and Mike found another fouled plug. Then they did a compression check, with me cranking the engine. The results were pretty conclusive: Cylinder #4 was not producing any power. Zero.

The reason became apparent when Ed pulled off the valve cover. The exhaust valve was stuck. Really stuck.

He and Mike worked on it for 30 minutes and couldn’t get it to budge. It looked like they’d have to pull the cylinder and drop it off at a repair place in Prescott. Ed looked at the engine cover and all the other things attached to the engine. It looked like a lot of work. I called Paul again and told him the problem. I asked him if there were any shortcuts to getting the cylinder out. Then I turned the phone over to Ed. From Ed’s side of the conversation, I could tell it would not be a fun job.

Stuck ValveEd hung up and told us that it would be best to continue trying to free up the valve. So he and Mike went back to work. With a hammer. A big hammer.

I left to get us lunch. I was gone about 90 minutes. (It’s a half hour drive to Williams and the woman at Safeway was the slowest sandwich maker I’ve ever seen.) When I got back, they were putting things back together. They’d freed the value and had reamed it. It was now smoother than ever. I’d be able to fly.

We had lunch then cleaned up. I climbed on board while Mike and Ed stood outside, looking for leaks. When I started up, my idle manifold pressure was 8 inches. No leaks so Ed climbed on board. (It’s always reassuring to have your mechanic fly with you right after a repair he’s done.) Warm-up manifold pressure was only 12 inches. That’s more like it! Everything sounded good, the unusual vibrations were gone. (The usual vibrations, alas, were still there.) I pulled power and got into a hover at 21 inches of manifold pressure. Great. I pointed it toward the road and we took off.

I took Ed home a scenic route: over Prescott and down the Hassayampa River. He’d never been over the river in that area before and I think he really enjoyed it.

When we got back, he presented the bill. $312. And that included my oil change the previous month. I paid it with pleasure.

Oh, one more thing. Consultation of the engine log books revealed that this was the FIFTH time we’d had to ream the #4 exhaust valve. Hmmm….let’s hope it holds out until January.