There was a few things on this list this morning before flying the airplane again. As usual, things took longer than planned this morning, starting with procaffeinating.
The before flying tasks consisted of doing another inspection on the engine compartment area since I had been gone for almost a week. I also wanted to go back and check Gregs work from the other day on the fuel system. I completely trust him, but we never did a “verbal briefing” handing off the work or communicating that it was all done. So I didn’t know the status. As I expected, Greg left the system in airworthy status.
There was just one more thing I wanted to do to the fuel system. Greg checked the fuel filter at the fuel injection servo, but there is one more after fuel comes out of the fuel selector. So I had to take the front seat out and check that one. It had a little very fine sediment that it caught, but over all I was very happy with how clean it was.
With that all cleaned up and re installed, I pulled the bottom spark plugs. I wanted to check to see what they looked like. I have been told that if they are black/wet that the rings are still not seated and you are still breaking in. And that was the case for cylinders 2 & 4. The rest of them looked pretty good actually. No signs of lead fouling or moisture.
So I cleaned up the spark plug adapters and put new plugs in. I didn’t have a good way of cleaning them at the hangar and auto plugs are pretty cheap. They got torqued down and I finished up a few miscellaneous things like reinstalling the rear seat interior. I also did a quick run up without the cowl to ensure there were no leaks in the fuel system and nothing vibrated loose.
Then it was cowl up and go fly. Greg and I arranged to rondesvous in the flight test area. Here is a little video of me passing him. I had about 45 knots on him in level flight.
Then this evening I brought the cowl home to add an air diverter scoop inside the cowl. This is to try to lower the CHT on cylinder #3. I don’t have the room to do it the same way as others have done like James Redmon and Curt Martin, but I think mine has a chance of working. So I made it out of pour foam and covered it with aluminum tape. After further thought I may need to cut the height down to make it fit, but I won’t know that until tomorrow when I try to fit the cowl. Let’s hope this works to even out the #1 and #3 CHTs.
the Garaggio 