Greetings,
Sorry to hear about
Johns most recent problems. I'm already nominating him for the
perseverance award.
I tried to go visit
Paul today, but only made it about half way before getting tired of fighting
my oil temps. It was only 60 degrees today, and I climbed at 120 mph,
but only made it to 4500 feet before ringing the bell at 210. I
reduced power, and continued a slow climb to 8500 where I wanted to do some
cruise testing, but I couldn't get the oil temp below 210. At least I
thought I could get the temps down once I leveled out... wrong
:-( I finally did a spirited 180, and headed home to fix
this once and for all (I hope). Otherwise, the engine ran
OK.
Water temps continue to
be just awesome, almost too cool, so I can't see this being a cowl exit
problem. I have to conclude that my current (poorly shaped) 24 cu in
oil scoop is not getting the job done. I haven't made a final
decision, but I think I'll probably do the easiest thing first, which is to
simply increase the size of the current scoop, without doing much for the
shape. At present, the scoop is oval, about 7" wide by 4" tall.
The plan will be to increase it to 7" round, which will be 38 sq
in, and should be way overkill. If this doesn't cool
significantly better, I may have to come to a new conclusion :-)
The oil temps were just
great with the B drive. The water temps were even lower than
now. For reference, here's an excerpt from my 7-4-04
log.
Finally got a cloud free day, so
I climbed to 8000 ft to do some testing. I climbed at 120 mph, and saw a max
of 195 degrees on the oil temp, and a max of 178 degrees on water. It took 7 minutes, according to the
EM-2 flight timer to get to 8000 ft, which is OK for now.
The extra power
afforded by the C drive must just be pushing my heat load beyond what the
current oil setup can handle. Stay tuned for more fiberglass
fun.
Ed, have you noticed
any of this temp increase? Also, what was the size of your oil inlet
again? I know you have a much more ideal duct shape than I do, which
is probably helping quite a bit. At the moment, I'll settle for brute
force cooling if it actually works.
Rusty (joining John
with my "tired of this" attitude)