In the product warranty article in the April 2019 Aviation Consumer we described reader Joel Rosenlicht’s experience with the Rolls-Royce 250-B17F turboprop engine in his Silver Eagle-converted Cessna P210. To recap, Rosenlicht flew the converted airplane for nearly 11 years and 1000 hours before the original Roll-Royce engine began making metal. When the engine was removed for evaluation, Griggs Aviation opened the gearbox (one of the engine’s chip detectors flagged metal in that location) and found a half-inch polishing stone with gouges in its side. Assumably the stone was used during the manufacturing process for the gears—and accidentally left inside of the gearbox when the engine was assembled. Call it luck (I’m not sure if it’s the good or bad kind), but that stone must have parked itself in a benign location within the gearbox for the years Rosenlicht flew the aircraft.
Although Rolls-Royce stepped outside of its limited engine warranty by providing some components for the gearbox (in the article we incorrectly said the company provided an entire gearbox), Rosenlicht paid a bill north of $70,000 for the remainder of the engine work, plus freight charges and months of downtime. His insurance company rejected his claim for foreign object damage presumably because the polishing stone wasn’t sucked into the engine while the aircraft was in service. If the aircraft crashed because of engine failure, it would have been a different story. Rosenlicht told me his policy won’t be renewed (aside from one-time hangar rash, he was a claim-free customer for over 30 years) because the company isn’t insuring Silver Eagle-modded Centurions moving forward.