Our little fly-in was both good and bad for me. Nice to
finally meet Al in person. What an awesome airplane! I'll have to make a point
to not park too close to it in the future. Anyway, it was pretty cool to have 3
rotaries together in one place. We did attract a little attention. We all took a
couple of pictures. Paul Lamar and his wife Robin showed up and I think Paul got
video of us departing. Looking forward to hearing from them as to what the
relative sound levels for the three airplanes were and how we compared to the
LyCont powered aircraft that were there.
For me the bad was when I taxied out to depart my home
base for Borrego and did my runup, I had a re-occurrence of the B controller
flushing its memory contents. I thought I'd solved this months ago and have
about 22 hours of flight since the last time it happened. The problem is
aggravated by the fact that my engine has never run well on the B controller by
simply copying the A program. I've always had to tweak the B program after
copying. This has been the case for my EC-2 since day 1.
Anyway, I taxied back to the EAA hangar, copied the A to
B and did a quick tweak on the B program. Tested the thing a bunch of times on
the ground and could not force the problem to repeat so I went ahead and
launched for Borrego.
But this is really disappointing. I was just
starting to get to the point where I trusted this thing enough to relax a
little. Now I'm back to the point of thinking it's going to try to kill me every
time the wheels leave the pavement. Makes me wonder if I will ever trust it
enough to take my wife, kids, friends, etc... flying in it.
Not sure what to do about it this time. Last time I
found the IC not fully seated in its socket. Once the chip was seated I never
saw the problem again...until today.
Mike Wills
RV-4 N144MW
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 8:59 AM
Subject: [FlyRotary] Sunday rotary Borrego fly-in and
lunch
For anyone who is interested, Mike Wills, Al Gitzen and I are having a mini
rotary engine fly-in at Borrego Springs airport this Sunday at 1130 (to include
an Italian lunch). All are welcome. there is an open seat in my plane
departing Oceanside OKB at 1100. Al might also be willing to share one of
his seats, departing from French Valley.
--
David Leonard