Greetings,
Here's
my log. I'm still alive, and I can even re-use the plane :-)
It would
seem that I succeeded in my goal of having too much cooling. Of course it
wasn't pretty :-) Now I can try to get it back to normal, and
start tweaking other things. I can also pay more attention to
the speeds, and performance at different MAP settings. Maybe Whiting
will be closed tomorrow, and I can do some more testing. I can even hope
for more a higher ceiling.
You're
up next Todd. Before you know it, he'll be flying too
:-)
Rusty
(where did I put my beer)
8-31-03
/ .1 hours /
.1 total
First flight!
It was brief, and there really isn’t much to report.
The
plane itself flew fine, with a slight bank to the right, but I had more fuel in
that tank, so perhaps that’s all it is.
Van’s aileron trim is worthless, and I’ll have to add stronger springs to
make it do anything at all, which I suspected all along.
The
engine ran fine, but it didn’t seem like I was getting the power I expected at
30 inches of MAP. 30 inches of MAP
is about half throttle, and I tried to maintain that level, but it sure felt
more like half throttle than full (NA) power. I bounced the tailwheel around a couple
times on takeoff, because I was fiddling with the power, rather than flying the
plane. At first, I was at around
2psi, which felt strong, then I adjusted it down to 0, which felt weak. All the while, the tail wheel was going
up, then down :-) Fortunately, the
landing was respectable.
Water temp never went over 130 degrees, which is way too
cool. Oil hit 190 on climb to 2000
feet (the cloud ceiling), and settled at about 210 while circling at 4700 rpm,
and about 120 mph. I didn’t want to
push the speed too high on this flight. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice
what RPM I was at during the climb.
After the flight, I removed the big ugly cowl, and fixed
a small oil leak at the oil temp sender in the pan. I also decided to install the stock 180
degree thermostat so I’d have some hope of running normal water temp. Not sure what this will do to the oil
temp. On one hand, it would seem to
raise it, but on the other, it might not.
Now that there’s a restriction in the water line, the radiator should get
even cooler than before, so perhaps this will help the oil temp. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
I
took the engine down to get gas, and was quite happy to see the temps come up so
quickly. I had to run the engine
for about 10 minutes to get off the peg before flying earlier. When I got back to the hanger, I ran the
engine at 4000 rpm, which is about the limit of my brakes. I held this for about 8 minutes, during
which time the water stayed at 180.
Oil slowly went up to 220 degrees, and stopped there. Maybe this will be OK, but at least it’s
the oil that is a problem, and not the water. Synthetic oil buys me some breathing
room on temps.
A
final note- there seems to be some cross feeding going on in my fuel tanks. I made a point to transfer fuel from the
left to the right tanks (the one I feed from) last week. Now, there’s slightly more in the left
again. The left wing does sit just
a little lower than the right, so I guess that was the equilibrium point. The check valve in the Facet pump should
stop this, but it only slows it way down.