Great flight report Rusty.  You sound a little disappointed. 

I AM disappointed in the current performance.  My friends RV-3 with a 160 HP Lycoming is nearly doubling my climb rate, with an almost identical prop.  At least I have proof that my engine isn't producing the power that Tracy's is, so I just need to get to work on finding out why.  

Step one will be a simple thing, changing plugs.  I now have about 30 or so hours on the engine, mostly with 100 LL.  I've felt a couple of times in the last two runs, where full throttle seemed to go over rich, and leaning the mixture a little seemed to help.  I'm wondering if this might be Ed's plug sag???

Step two will be a new intake, but I'm completely undecided as to how I'll proceed. 

Ed, you may not have a direct answer to this, but how about taking a SWAG.  How much rpm would you expect to gain by going from a typical short intake, to a fairly well tuned intake?  Are we talking hundreds, or maybe 50?   

It was, after all, a FLIGHT report.  If you would prefer you can fiberglass my cowl and I will do your flight testing  :-)

Look at it this way.  You get to keep flying until you get around to building a new intake at your leisure.  I’m sure you’ll get there.

There's always at least one optimist in the group :-)   

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but the problem is that I'll be obsessed with making this perform better, and I'll spend all my time working on it, and not flying it.  This isn't bad, since I need something to tinker with, but it sure won't get the test hours flown off anytime soon. 

Rusty (cup usually half empty)