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Message
Greetings,
Well, there isn't as much
news as any of us would like. Overnight, I decided to check the oil level
as the first thing I did when I got to the plane this morning. If there
was oil on the stick, I was planning to take off the lower cowl to see
what actually failed. If it was the cooler, I would disassemble and go
home, but if it was something else, I'd fix it and fly out.
Unfortunately, there's no
sign of oil on the stick. This isn't real surprising when you look at the
plane though, because there was oil EVERYWHERE. Primarily, it came out the
bottom of the cowl. The exhaust, belly, tail, and about the inboard foot
or so of the wings was covered. Airflow in the cowl caused the oil to
also blow out around the spinner, so the top of the cowl was also covered, as
was the canopy. It was primarily the front of the canopy, so I could still
see out the sides. The front view wasn't totally blocked either, which may
be a vote for thin, clean oil in case it ever covers your canopy
:-)
The decision was made to
take the plane apart, so that's what we did. With another
knowledgeable RV builder as an assistant, it went pretty well, and we had the
wings off by about 1:30 this afternoon. Those were hauled to the hanger in
the back of my truck, but unfortunately, we couldn't get the flat bed wrecker
company to come out today to take the fuselage. It's still sitting in the
(very active) helicopter field tonight, and I should be able to get it hauled to
the hanger in the morning. Shortly after that, I'll know a lot
more.
One interesting thing to
note- I bent the flap handle :-) The mechanism sucks, and I
rarely use the flaps because of that. My eventual plan was to change them
to electric flaps. Yesterday, I pulled up on the handle, but it wouldn't
stay up, I pulled a couple more times, and finally it stayed. Today, I
noticed that I managed to pull the handle about 1.5 inches above the top notch,
to the point where the handle was above the piece of aluminum that has the
notches in it. This was probably somewhere between 40 and 45 degrees of
flaps :-)
Haven't eaten all day,
so I need to take care of that now. More tomorrow.
Rusty (tired, hungry, and
don't know what I'll do with the RV-3 yet)
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