I took the Cozy up this morning for the 2nd flight on the new
cooling system. The OAT was 3 or 4
degrees warmer than the first flight, as it was 79 F when I took off.
This time, I turned the cooling fan on while I was taxiing out to the
runway. After the taxi and pre-flight checks, the oil was
135 F and the coolant was still reading pretty low. Maybe 115 to 120 or so. It is a little hard to read the analog gauge down on the low
end of the scale.
I took off and climbed up to about 1300 FT AGL, at which time I pulled
the throttle back some and continued a cruise climb. The coolant was showing about 190F, and I didn’t think to
check the oil temperature. Oil
temperature has not been my issue.
It has always been the coolant.
The coolant temperature did still increase a little, even at the reduced
power, but just up to 200 F. I was
close to a low cloud layer at about 1800 AGL, so I throttle back some more and dropped
the nose to level flight. I also
turned off the cooling fan to see what the temperature would do on it’s
own. The temperature steadily dropped
to about 180 degrees within just a few minutes, and then stabilized there.
I cruised around for a little while, flew over my house and circled it
once, and then headed back to the airport. With the low cloud layer that had moved in, I really didn’t
know if it was going to clear out or get thicker, so I flew the 5 minutes back
to the airport, and made a normal landing. As I was ready to throttle back to descend about 800 feet to
pattern altitude, and quick check of the coolant temperature showed about 160
degrees. Not bad at all, although I
was probably flying at about 60% power.
Still, it would have not been nearly that low before the new cooling
system.
Once I landed and was clearing the runway, I checked the temperatures
again, and the coolant was less then 140 degrees after the glide in to land. Since I planned to wash the plane, and
sometimes it starts hard after getting heat soaked sitting after a run, I
turned on the cooling fan while a taxied over to the where the wash area is. After washing the plane, it started up pretty
easily, so I guess that worked out also.
So far so good. I like what
I see so far on the radiator, and the cooling fan definitely gives me a lot
more options.
Steve Brooks
Cozy N75CZ
13B turbo to read the an