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