Yeah, it was kind of a yawner.  Except for the burning smell.  Wasn't sure if it was fiberglass or electrical for a minute there.   Haven't removed the dead coils yet but I'm pretty sure they are the culprits.   Still haven't found how the smell migrated to the cockpit though.

I think the rotor 3 went (actually rotor 1 but I labeled my EGTs front to back) because they were at the end of the cooling plenum farthest from the blast tube.  This was also the hottest day that I have done an extended climb at high power.  I have a temperature probe near those two coils and I noticed the ambient around them got as high as 170 F.  Need to do some testing to determine if that blast tube is furnishing enough air.  Oil and water temps stayed below  200 the whole time.  They dropped into the 125F range during the descent to landing.

Tracy


Sent from my iPad

On Jul 29, 2011, at 5:22 PM, "Ed Anderson" <eanderson@carolina.rr.com> wrote:

Gee, two rotors to come home on doesn't provide much excitement, Tracy.

Sort of reminds me way back in the old days of using the Rx-7 ignition coils and ballast resistors blowing on them.  For some reason seems like that only happened to you and me.

We are all awaiting some performance numbers for that RV8-3R, so next time take your bottle and give those Ls1 coils a real try out.

Ed

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Tracy" <rwstracy@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, July 29, 2011 2:13 PM
To: "Rotary motors in aircraft" <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: Back to Phase 1 testing

Was finally getting around to doing hot weather cooling and altitude performance testing in the RV-8 yesterday.   Cooling was good during a high power climb to 14500 ft where I leveled out ( I had forgotten to put the Ox bottle in the plane).   Throttled up to WOT to see where the speed topped out at but.   After less than a minute I felt some engine roughness and noticed rotor 3 EGT went above alarm threshold so I throttled back to low power.   #3 EGT then went low off scale and I could tell that the engine was only running on 2 rotors.   I then smelled a faint electrical burning smell that lasted about 2 minutes. Engine was surprisingly smooth for having a dead rotor and still had more than enough power for cruise flight but obviously it was time to get back on the ground and find out what went wrong.   did all the usual diagnostics on the long glide down with no joy.

Made normal landing, poped off the cowl and coil diagnostics test revealed that both coils on rotor 3 were dead.   I had done the coil disable tests prior to takeoff so I know they were both good then.  I'm using RX-8 coils and there have been too many failures for me to feel good about them any longer.   I ordered a set of LS-1s to replace them.

Tracy
--
Homepage:  http://www.flyrotary.com/
Archive and UnSub: http://mail.lancaironline.net:81/lists/flyrotary/List.html

--
Homepage:  http://www.flyrotary.com/
Archive and UnSub: http://mail.lancaironline.net:81/lists/flyrotary/List.html

--
Homepage:  http://www.flyrotary.com/
Archive and UnSub: http://mail.lancaironline.net:81/lists/flyrotary/List.html