After a great trip to Santa Paula I finally solved my "compressor surge" issue. Turns out that it was SAG (Spark plug induced Attention Getter) all along. Sigh.. Despite the fact that the plugs were only a handful of hours old, and they worked fine at MAPs in the
N.A. range. I was convinced that my power drop issue was surge because it seemed directly related to pressure ratio...
I finally change out the spark plug and wala... no issue. Now i sort of wish I didn't cut off the waste-gate flapper.... oh well.
But life with an auto conversion seems never without an issue or two.
Went out to the plane yesterday ready for a flight but found a puddle of coolant underneath... sigh...
turns out that my lower radiator cap went bad. Easy enough. Return the next day and install a new one. Give everything a good once over and discover a broken alternator tension arm!!! Holy S*(^ !! Broken clean through but not displaced very far (hard to notice). From the looks of it, the thing has been broken for at least 20 flight hours! Hmmm.
So I went home and made a new one - same design until I can come up with better materials and/or design. Looking at the old one there was the end of a hacksaw cut right where break occurred. I should have been more careful grinding it out.
So that is fixed for the time being and I went flying with a friend in an RV-8 with a 180h.p. and c/s prop. Except for initial acceleration on ground roll, I could out perform him in climb and cruise even with my f.p
. prop. :-) COOL!!!!
But then I found my next problem....
Return fuel flow started drooping. Where I normally see 30+ gph returned to the tank, I was seeing about 20gph. We landed for lunch and I searched for signs of a fuel leak - none. Fuel flow seem normal on the ground, as did fuel usage for the flight. hmmm.
On the way home the problem recurred, and flow continued to dwindle. at 4gph I turned on the aux pump and solved the problem. Sure was nice to have 2 of them.
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