Re: air box
as I understand it (this maybe just an urban myth), outboards have no air filters because on the water, airborn contaminants are seldom seen in enough quantity to penetrate the cowling and cause a problem.
You talkin bout a metal washer? Must have been a tiny fragment. Thanks for sharing - there's a lesson in there somewhere........
Where I work, when an engine is harmed by something it ingests, we call it FOD (foreign object damage), and we avoid it by trying to keep the runways clear of debris. The strangest example I know of was an engine that just disintegrated; analysis of the debris revealed an alloy foreign to the engine, but commonly used in tools - somebody forgot to count his wrenches. Then there was the guy who forgot to set the brakes on his rolling tool box - lost everything to an engine during a test run-up.
