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Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 21:43:55 -0400
From: Ernest Christley <echristley@nc.rr.com>
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To: Rotary motors in aircraft <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>
Subject: Re: [FlyRotary] risk reduction methods
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al p wick wrote:

> When you have any theory, you need to find a way to convert that to 
> facts. This is profound. You see, we don't do that naturally. We are 
> very comfortable making decisions entirely based on theory. Theory are 
> thoughts. Facts are numbers. We need to distinguish the two.


Go back in the archives and look at the experiments on electric water 
pumps set up by Bob White (I think it was Bob).  Long discussion 
concerning things like what will temperature do to viscosity of coolant 
and what that will do to the flow rate, followed by valiant effort to 
turn theories into facts which left us all with real world numbers.  
Then there's Rusty who has both a mechanical pump and an EWP installed 
so that he can safely run test.  And then there is Ed, who has done some 
incredible work with intake tuning with variable length intakes.  It is 
simply not true that we run around spouting theory without building and 
testing the same.  I hear that is done on another list, but I have no 
firsthand knowledge of it.

BTW, Rusty, if you're listening, I think I know where I went wrong in 
interpretting that French guy.  Viscosity does decrease with temperature 
at some mathematical deterministic rate that I have written down 
somewhere, but Mother Nature works in Kelvin, not Farenheit or Celcius.  
The small margin seen in the experiment makes perfect sense when you 
take that little bit of information into account. (90 to 180 isn't  
doubled if those numbers are really 570 and 660).

> So I provided a great example of the Subaru timing chain defect. Can 
> you find a way to convert those concepts to your aircraft? If you can, 
> you are on the path.


I don't know.  Replace stuff before it breaks?  Replace all the soft 
parts every 5yrs? (You'll find me recommending this at some time in the 
not to distant past.)

> Let's take a real world example. Your fuel delivery system. How do you 
> know the distance between it and failure? Vapor lock failure is at one 
> end of a curve. We want to be as far as possible from that end. How do 
> you know that distance? Right now we use theory. We guess. But you 
> don't have to guess. You can easily measure your safety margin. There 
> are many simple tricks to measuring all of your safety margins. Not 
> just this item.


If you have a method of measuring the potential for vapor lock, then a 
lot of people will be beating a path to your door.  I'll be amoung 
them.  So far I'm just hearing you say that we should measure the 
unmeasurable.  If all it takes is a few simple tricks then I don't think 
there would be as many accidents as there are now.

>  
> Of course, I'm assuming that there are users who are unable to install 
> intank pumps. After all, those pumps do virtually eliminate all vapor 
> lock risk.


Intake pump?  Please, please define intake pump.

-- 
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."