Quote:
Originally Posted by TheGrunch
It's probably worth pointing out that Sternjaeger will never have experienced the Merlin engine at combat power or indeed emergency boost because unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately, we don't want to destroy every Merlin on the planet  ) no one does that anymore for practical reasons...this being the condition at which the cut-out is least severe in its onset.
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I have experienced 100% throttle but not on take-off. It's highly not recommended to use full military power or 100% throttle anyway, again because of the components age concern.
A very quick but effective way to check the health of your engine is checking the lubricant oil for metal particles: they can be microscopic, but if found (often by means of special filters) they're a bad, bad sign.
There was a certain P-51 driver a couple of years ago who had the jolly habit to take off firewalling the throttle: needless to say the cylinder banks didn't want to know about it and an inflight engine failure followed, which fortunately happened close to landing.. the plane and pilot were ok, but the engine needed major (expensive) maintenance costs. Let's not forget that like any other liquid cooled engined, these monsters were meant to perform, not to last