Guys,
Another pretty good day. I preheated the engine and was in the
air at 7am. The temp on the ground was 22 deg. I preheated to 60 and the
temps rose steady from there. The climb out was good and strong and I was
at 2000 feet soon after turning cross wind and continued to climb to 3000
ft. I headed South for about 15 mile sand was cruising at 145 to 150 mph.
I went to over fly a couple of our construction sites and see if everyone
but me showed up for work. This gave me the opportunity to do some steep
turns and the KR cut some of the nicest 60 deg. bank turns I have ever
done. I did some roll reversing also and these were all done at 140 mph.
I headed back to the North and started to build a little more speed up. I
have been pretty careful not to get to fast. Today I flew for awhile at
160 to 165 mph. This was about 2900 rpm. I still had some throttle to go
yet. I then started a cruise climb test from 2000 ft . to 5500 ft. I
forgot to time it but at 130 indicated I set up a steady 800ft./min
climb. While this was going on I started to learn the leaning out of the
corvair. I had noticed last week that the right side was getting the
bottom of the plane black. The exhaust temps were about 1125 when I
started to lean and I was amazed at how accurate of a control I had over
the temps. I was able to lean to 1350 deg. i could raise or lower the
exhaust temps at will at probably 10 to 15 deg. increments. The head
temps stay in the 375 deg range with the exception of the # 6 cylinder
head which went to 405 deg. I turned to head back home and started a slow
decent from 18 miles out. The temps dropped and worry me a little how low
they got. Shock cooling could be an issue some time. The head temps
dropped down into the 250 deg range.. The engine is running the smoothest
that it has ever been. The only major thing that I changed was to rotate
the prop 180 deg. on the prop hub. If it had been this smooth from the
start I might not have thought much about vibration.
The one thing that I will take a while to get used to is getting
everywhere at 60 mph faster than I am used to. I can only fly a few
minutes in almost any direction until an airspace of some kind pops up on
the GPS. Then I have to take some kind of action of course change or
altitude.
The max. speed that i got to today was 173 for a short time which
I bleed of for altitude to slow back to 160. The First time that the
engine has give any sputter of any kins was also today. I may have cause
some messing around with mixture, but just in case I gave it just a
little bit of carb heat and it seemed to like that and there was no
further complaints.
It wasn't long until I was back in pattern and slowed to 100
mph. This is where I confess my latest sins. Last week end I started
looking at my flap system because I did not think that it was working to
it's potential. They are split flaps as shown on one of Mark Langford's
pages. I was getting to much slop in them and did not remember it that
way when they were built. I started at the flap linkage to the control
horn on the flap and quickly discovered that the castle nuts on both was
loose and not cotter pin installed. I corrected that and then removed the
seat to check the torque tube. Here I found that the bolt holding the
handle to the torque tube was pretty loose and the U shaped clamp that
holds the handle assembly to the torque tube was also loose. All this has
most likely been this way sense last spring when I had it painted. I find
it hard to believe that I or anyone else did not find this sooner but it
is fixed now.
I put in the first notch of flap on base and it does enough to
notice but nothing dramatic. On finial I dropped the rest and the decent
rate increased and the speed bleed off much better. I was just above 70
mph over the numbers and she settled down to a wonderfully soft touch
down and a shorter roll out. After departing the run way and I started to
clean up for taxi back to the hanger I noticed that I was only in the 2nd
notch of flaps. So it appears that I will have plenty of drag to slow me
down. The 2nd notch landing today worked better than they had before in
the 3rd notch which is about another 20 deg down.
I think that I can safely say today was more on the fun side of
flying than work. I'm happy to actually call it a YEEEEE HAAAAA day.
Joe Horton, Coopersburg, PA.
joe.kr2s.buil...@juno.com
