Van's RV-9A in Aurora

The Big Picture

The Big Picture
Flying! 8/28/2011

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Got a flight in this morning, #4, 2.0 hrs. My primary purpose was to burn holes in the sky to break in the engine. So I ran at 2600 up to full throttle between Lago Vista and Horseshoe Bay, I started at 4500 on the first west bound leg, then climbed to 5500 east bound, then up ot 6500. OATs were a nice 66 degrees, and it was almost comfortable in the cabin. There were sparse clouds to the west at about 4900, but I was soon above them.
The stuttering with leaning is gone, I guess it was the dropped bottom #4 plug that I replaced. Let that be a lesson.

CHTs popped up to 435 on 3 and 4 during the initial climb, but they all came down and were mostly green the whole time. EGTs can peak at about 1500, but with power at about 75% they run at 1350 or so. Fuel flow is a bit higher than I want, at 75% it wants to be at 9 gph.

Oil temp never got above 200 today. It was a bit cooler, the nasty heat we had in August seems to have left. I'm still wary, it could be back as soon as the storm in Louisiana is gone.

Durning the week I adjusted the left flap and right aileron to improve the heavy wing problem. It seems to be a non-issue, although the aileron trim is still not usable for leveling the wings.
I started, departed, and left the fuel selector on the left tank to see how much I had to burn to get neutral roll trim. The answer was about 7 gallons. So at that point I had 12 in the right, and 5 in the left. So I switched tanks.
The only odd problem I had today, is that after switching tanks and running a while,
the left tank was still going down, while the right was pegged at 12 gallons. At the time I was wondering what the heck. I discovered this on the way out to Horseshoe Bay. It occurred to me that I was going away from Lakeway with only one working tank, and only 4 gallons in that tank. I realized that was a problem so I turned around. In retrospect, I think it was just the left tank fuel level pickup settling out a bit. There can't be a real problem with the fuel selector. The engine was running fine, and the right tank finally did start registering lower levels.

The test flight cards had me do some slow flight, so I did that on the last lap back into Lakeway. I got it down to 70, 60, and finally 50 while maintaing altitude and making shallow turns. The fuel flow drops to about 3 gph, and the engine temps all go yellow because they're too low!
The plane flies great at 100 knots, and sips fuel. I was seen 135 knots indicated today at 2600, 150 knot ground speeds.


Flying at 9AM means it has been nearly glass smooth most of the time.