Ah-h-h; at last the smell of
fuel and exhaust instead of epoxy. One milestone in an airplane
building project like this is running the engine on the plane for the first
time. I was able to do that today. It was successful; and quite
short.
The reason for its brevity was
the loss of use of the EM-2 engine monitor. This happened before the
run – the display was dead the second time I turned it on for reasons yet to
be determined. After some checks, and a couple calls to
Tracy, we
agreed there were no further checks I could effectively do, so it and the
connecting cable is removed and packed for shipment to
RWS.
I chose to proceed with a
brief run anyway just to see that everything needed for engine operation was
functional. The engine fired off promptly and ran just above idle just
long enough for oil and coolant to flow and get detectably warm. After
checking everything out, there were no leaks, and I knew oil was flowing by
the slight warmth of the filters and cooler. I fired it up again,
adjusted mixture a bit, ran for a bit, added a bit of throttle a couple of
times, and shutdown. This time I could also verify warm coolant flow
throughout the system, and all air bled out of both radiators. Very
nice.
Disappointed there will be no
more runs until I have a functional engine monitoring system – delighted
that everything else was just fine!
How does I sound?
POWERFULL!
Al