First, had a great time at the TRR north of Austin.  Thanks to those who attended and made it well worth the time.

Now, nose back to the grindstone.  I have had a number of small successes since I have built the latest engine and received my electronics back from Tracy a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, I added my EGT probes and ran the engine on and off through the day.

I have made great strides when it comes to my cooling issues.  While I was waiting for my parts from Tracy and Mazdatrix (new center iron) etc, I redid much of my Firewall aft and cleaned it up a lot and made some major modifications to my radiator and oil cooler. I added a much larger Griffin Radiator (22X19X3) and added the stock 2nd gen oil cooler in a new configeration with much more direct ducting from the Velocity's two roof mounted NACA's along with some strategically placed fans.  Shazam! What a difference.  Seems I can now let the engine idle indefinitely while sitting on the ramp in a hot Houston summer evening with OAT at about 80 (may have been closer to 90 before the sun set) degrees and about 80 percent humidity.  Last night, the engine ran so well, that if I had to I would have taxied out and taken off.....likely a bad idea without wings or canard attached though.
My coolant stabilized at around 180 degrees (even though my reading constantly jump around a few degrees) and the oil temp was around 200 degrees.  This was while at idle of around 1800 to 2100 rpm's.   The engine was smooth, the Map seemed to make sense to me when I looked at the tables so I shut it down for the night.

Came back tonight, and got mostly the same results....well, not quite.  As must be with ya'll the worst part of all this is intermittent results. DOH! Well, the engine is still starting damn easy.  Success.  It is running mostly smoothly. But, it occasionally stumbled.  So,, I checked out the MAP table.  WHAT?  Several of the Map settings had changed.  I did NOT do it.  A couple of the bars were all the way to the bottom and a few 3/4 the way to the top.  When I left last night ALL were straight across the middle.  I have no idea what changed things.  So, I set them back to where I had them and things got better, however, as I continued to run the engine, the engine did stumble at various power levels.  The MAP table seemed consistent.  And, of course, the "stumbles" were inconsistent. Damn.  Hmmmmmm?

Now, it gets even more interesting.  While in Mode 1, things seem mostly normal (other than the stumbling)  HOWEVER, for some reason, when I try to put the PCM in either Mode 1 or Mode 9 the engine starts to quite.  It continues to run as soon as I put it back in Mode 0.  This happened once before, but other issues distracted me until it was called to my attention today.  It was not happening yesterday.   I know I have some wiring issues so perhaps I need to address these before I burden the list.  I have had inconsistent stalling when I tried to run on only the secondary coils.

Also, it seems as if the secondary injectors are putting out some fuel even at low power settings.  I suspect this since when I turn them on and off around idle there is a distinct difference in the hum of the engine. This also seems to reinforce some electrical gremlins as tonight I let the plane idle for almost a full hour.....really, a full hour <g>.  I was running mostly smooth (with the aforementioned stumbles) and cool. Suddenly, after about 40 minutes, the engine started surging and seemed to not be getting fuel.  I was standing on the side of the plane, so I hopped in and adjusted the mixture to no avail.  I then switched off the secondary injectors and it got worse.  I turned on the secondaries and turned off the primaries, and things smoothed out.  I let it run a couple of minutes on secondaries and then switched back...same thing.  Tried again and after a couple of attempts and playing with the mixture, the primaries smoothed out.  I let it run for the rest of the hour (6 hours on the Hobbs now) and shut down for the night with mixed emotions.  Happy due to the cooling but disturbed at the various anomalies

So, I need to go and find the electrical gremlins.  They have a bizarre habit of undermining other efforts.

On a final positive side, it is kinda cool to have EGT's.  Never had them before.  Interesting to see them go up and down with the throttle. Currently they are reading about 70 degrees apart.

Now that I have had this latest build running for about five hours, thus mostly broken in per my reading of the archives, I plan to replace the dino oil for some pure synthetic.  Maybe it will lower the oil temps a bit too, even though I was told on the Roundup this weekend that a 20 degree difference is considered normal by many.

Thanks for your interest and any insight you may be willing to share.

All the best,

Chris

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