Chris,
Motorcycles have a reserve because they don’t
normally have a fuel gage. This keeps you from having an engine stoppage
out in the middle of nowhere and no way to know about it before hand and no way
to get to a station. With an airplane it is not generally recommended
that you have an engine stoppage.
If Al Wick has built a reserve into his
plane, my esteem for him as a risk analyst has taken a drop. What that
will cause is he will be increasing the number of gallons of unusable fuel and
he will have to pay to carry them around everywhere he flies. He will
have to have an engine stoppage in order to get any use out of the
system. Planning for that in an airplane is just not well considered!
Some less moderate than I might even call it stupid!
As far as the rotary vs. Subaru goes, why
would you go to the effort and expense to install an alternative horizontally
opposed piston engine when Lycosaurus and Continental make pretty good ones for
airplanes and they can be installed in less than a week in a homebuilt
plane. Every part you build to install an alternative engine gives you
one more failure possibility. You can buy proven parts to install
aircraft engines.
Bill B
From: Rotary motors in aircraft
[mailto:flyrotary@lancaironline.net] On
Behalf Of Chris Barber
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012
12:04 PM
To: Rotary
motors in aircraft
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: fuel pump
replaced
I am using two fuel pumps. The Aux was
always quieter. Now they sound about the same. I guess since, IIRC,
the primary was always louder I "assumed" it was normal and was just
limited to the individual pump.
I was just reviewing Al Wick's sight. He hates
the rotary (ok, that may be too strong, but he is not a fan). He is using
a Subaru. I was looking at his sump tank. He is using in the tank
pumps, which I do not wish to do as of right now. However, something he
did which I did kinda like was that he had his pumps drawing from
different levels in the tank, like my motorcycle does for it reserve.
That way, if the primary pumps runs dry, you can switch to the second pump and
have a bit more fuel....hopefully at least enough to pull your head out and get
on the ground. This seems pretty easy, especially with inline
pumps, to do and like a good idea. Seems as if you would just have to
have one pump out location higher than the other and you have a bit of a reserve.
Yeah, you should be paying attention to fuel management but
this seems like some cheap back up. However, I could be
missing something as currently I am feeding both pumps from the same
outlet. Thoughts?
Chris
From: Rotary
motors in aircraft [flyrotary@lancaironline.net] on behalf of
Bill Bradburry [bbradburry@bellsouth.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012
10:15 AM
To: Rotary
motors in aircraft
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: fuel pump
replaced
Chris,
Is there a difference in sound between the
new pump and the old one you are still using? I think that they should
both sound the same. Mine do.
Bill B
From: Rotary motors in aircraft
[mailto:flyrotary@lancaironline.net] On
Behalf Of Chris Barber
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012
10:43 AM
To: Rotary
motors in aircraft
Subject: [FlyRotary] fuel pump
replaced
I replaced my faulty fuel pump. The new
pump is MUCH more quite. I suspect the old one was on the way to failure
for a while and finally when belly up. It was really noisy.
When I took it off I applied power to both independently and the old one
was just plain dead.
I hope I have addressed the few gremlins
that has kept me on the ground the last few weeks and will get to fly later
today.
FWIW.
Chris Barber
Houston KEFD
Velocity SE