Wow,
Rusty, glad to hear you remembered to just fly the damn airplane. This is one
situation where data recording would be extremely helpful. You could look back
though the last few minutes of flight and see if the oil pressure reached zero
soon before the engine quit. If not, you would probably be ok to replace the
oil cooler and fly it out of there.
Hopefully you will find sufficient oil in the pan to
indicate that it didn't run out of oil. I know the spar on the older RV's was
much, much more difficult to remove than on the newer designs, so I'm with
Finn on this one and would like to see you at least explore the possibility of
flying it home where you can quickly put all of your efforts towards the
engine.
Unfortunately this will likely require you to replace the
oil cooler with another evap core, at least temporarily as a change in oil
coolers will necessitate more of that fibreglass work that you love so much.
Remind me again why you chose not to use the stock oil cooler. Was it for a
better fit? I don't believe that I've ever heard of a failure of a stock oil
cooler, but I've sure heard of more than a few non-stock cooler
failures.
About the time I started my project a former member of
this list (can't remember his name) had an in-flight fire when his aircraft
oil cooler failed. It was a 20B in a canard, I don't Remember all the details,
but IIRC he felt that it wouldn't have happened with the stock cooler, which
he wanted to switch to after the fire, but his wife made him pull the 20B and
install a IO-540. There was allot of discussion on the list at that time about
oil coolers and I decided then that I'd just stick to the stock cooler. I
changed many other items in an effort to improve but I just couldn't see any
improvement here that was worth the risk. We all remember (as it was recently
discussed again) the fatality in the Coot crash. Of course it sounds like this
one was an extremely poor choice for an oil cooler, as he was even warned by
Ken. I believe Dave is on his second aircraft oil cooler. I think there may
have been another that I can't recall right now.
Anyways, I hope that you are able to get it back in the
air again quickly, as your posts of your experimentation is not only
entertaining, but somewhat educational as well. After watching that Red Bull
Air Race video, I want to see you get it back in the air, partly because now I
want one. And I want to fly under a bridge... upside down
:-)
Todd Bartrim (going to start drinking RedBull
before hockey)
RV9Endurance
13B Turbo Rotary
C-FSTB
"The world will always have a place for those that bring hard work and
determination to the things they
do."