The International Cessna^® 170 Association

Back in the happy days of my wildly misspent youth when I was up in Alaska, I made a slight boo-boo on a landing at an abandoned and overgrown strip where a buddy and I were going fishing. I straddled a bush on the roll out and suddenly found that the was a big rock right behind it. Took off about the last three or four inches of one blade of the wooden prop. There isn't much pitch in the outer end anyway so I just trimmed it off square at a joint in the brass leading edge
with a hacksaw blade from my tool kit.Then I swung it around and trimmed the other blade off at the same leading edge segment joint. it was pretty smooth on a short test run.
That old L-5 used to cruise about 105 at 2200 turns. It was red lined at 2550. When I tried to take off, it was real easy to get 3000 rpm! When I throttled back to about 2600, It was just keeping it in the air. We ran it at about 2600 t0 2700 RPM all the way, about 110 miles, back to Ladd AFB making about 75 mph.
I learned a little bit about propellers on that trip.

blueldr wrote:Sounds like Leo was my kind of guy.

I would agree he probably was. He died to young. He would have been about your age. And no, it wasn't because of a faulty propeller. He was one of very few who pioneered the local airport as a "one stop shop". It could be argued that he was THE one who accomplished this, considering the circumstances he had to deal with at that time. That is another story. There used to be 2 separate runways very near each other here at Mena. One was Leo's.

I have taken a good many cylinders off of aircraft engines and put them back on for a return to service without honeing and ringing them. If the last compression check was a good one, I would probably forgo honeing etc.after a surface inspection.

The engine mfr'r has a solution to a prop strike..... do an expensive inspection.
An overload clutch inventor's device would be an aftermarket item for which the engine mfr'r would accept absolutely no responsibility...and would still require the inspection.
The overload clutch mfr'r would not likely wish to take on all the liability of suggesting the engine mfr's inspection is unnecessary..... so, there goes the advantage an overload clutch might offer.... but still leave the aircraft owner with addit'l mx for the clutch, not to mention it's weight and acquisition and installation costs.

See why aftermarket airplane parts are expensive and troublesome, hard to sell and therefore not very prolific?