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.