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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.
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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)."
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