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)