During our last oil change, when we left the airport for the day with the cowl off and oil draining, Tanya commented on the way home that the world just isn't right when you have to leave the airplane not ready to fly. I couldn't agree more. However, with the recent ECI cylinder AD, I decided to replace all cylinders now. We had 511 hours since new. I launched into disassembly while Tanya worked out the logistics with ECI. There was only one evening that I had to leave with rods hanging out the sides of the engine. Not a pretty sight for an airplane that is supposed to be ready to fly at almost any time. I took care of the "big scary parts" while Tanya kept the bank account on life support with the arrival of the new cylinders. She spent a three day weekend with me at the hangar working to get everything put back together. I think it took us three or four times longer to re-assemble as it did for me to dis-assemble. Check, double check, triple check...
Finally everything was back together with the new cylinders. A few ground runs and inspections were completed so it was time to go for a test flight and to begin break-in. This is much like first flight, except this time I'm pretty sure the airframe is a known quantity. "Georgetown Ground, experimental RV 4822C with information Romeo is ready to taxi to departure. This is a maintenance test flight for new cylinder break-in and would like to orbit the field at three thousand for the next hour. If you can work it, minimum delay after run-up would be appreciated." "RV 22C taxi to 18 via Alpha. We have your request." Runup was all good. I just did a micro-mini single prop cycle. CHTs were coming up very fast. It was time to get in the air. "RV 22C is ready to go." There were a few other people in the pattern. We had to hold for a few seconds for landing traffic. The tower extended other traffic to make a hole for us and cleared us to go as requested. Try that at a non-towered airport. The black knob went forward a little on the roll, then was advanced to climb power gingerly with just enough runway ahead to verify real takeoff power again and have enough pavement to abort. All good and started the right turn early for the climb to orbit. Just the little climb to 3000' required a careful step climb for CHTs. OAT was 65F and we removed all the winter tape from the bottom cowl louvers. Still CHTs were headed north of 400 by 1500'. They responded to lowering the nose a little more as expected.
The next hour was excitingly uneventful. Varying 65-75% power, fly straight, turn right. We intentionally stayed in under the top of the class D so there would be another set of eyes looking out for us. The plan was to be ready at any moment to do a spiraling decent over the numbers with no power. The air wasn't as smooth as we would have hoped and there was a 30 knot wind up there. So the turn to upwind each pass was a bit bumpy with the downwind ground speeds well over 200mph. We rarely honk along at 75% power. While we had the baffles off, I spent some time in the shop working on another stab at a controllable oil cooler door. I stepped the oil cooler aft of the baffle by only .040" to create a little channel to slide a door in front. It worked great. We saw a 20 degree oil temp rise by closing the door. Note, I have a plenum top, so tape on the oil cooler is quite a bit more of a pain for us. Anyway, around and around we went for an hour. I made one test slowly pulling the power to about 10" MAP at altitude just to be sure it would behave on approach. We stepped down over about three laps at high power. The approach was uneventful. I carried a lot of power in and used most of the runway. Ahh, the RV grin is still there.
It has only been one week of down time, and we're still a long way from being back to full utility due to break-in needs. However, for those of you that don't know, the "RV grin" doesn't fly solo, there is a little internal tingle that goes right along with it.
Finally everything was back together with the new cylinders. A few ground runs and inspections were completed so it was time to go for a test flight and to begin break-in. This is much like first flight, except this time I'm pretty sure the airframe is a known quantity. "Georgetown Ground, experimental RV 4822C with information Romeo is ready to taxi to departure. This is a maintenance test flight for new cylinder break-in and would like to orbit the field at three thousand for the next hour. If you can work it, minimum delay after run-up would be appreciated." "RV 22C taxi to 18 via Alpha. We have your request." Runup was all good. I just did a micro-mini single prop cycle. CHTs were coming up very fast. It was time to get in the air. "RV 22C is ready to go." There were a few other people in the pattern. We had to hold for a few seconds for landing traffic. The tower extended other traffic to make a hole for us and cleared us to go as requested. Try that at a non-towered airport. The black knob went forward a little on the roll, then was advanced to climb power gingerly with just enough runway ahead to verify real takeoff power again and have enough pavement to abort. All good and started the right turn early for the climb to orbit. Just the little climb to 3000' required a careful step climb for CHTs. OAT was 65F and we removed all the winter tape from the bottom cowl louvers. Still CHTs were headed north of 400 by 1500'. They responded to lowering the nose a little more as expected.
The next hour was excitingly uneventful. Varying 65-75% power, fly straight, turn right. We intentionally stayed in under the top of the class D so there would be another set of eyes looking out for us. The plan was to be ready at any moment to do a spiraling decent over the numbers with no power. The air wasn't as smooth as we would have hoped and there was a 30 knot wind up there. So the turn to upwind each pass was a bit bumpy with the downwind ground speeds well over 200mph. We rarely honk along at 75% power. While we had the baffles off, I spent some time in the shop working on another stab at a controllable oil cooler door. I stepped the oil cooler aft of the baffle by only .040" to create a little channel to slide a door in front. It worked great. We saw a 20 degree oil temp rise by closing the door. Note, I have a plenum top, so tape on the oil cooler is quite a bit more of a pain for us. Anyway, around and around we went for an hour. I made one test slowly pulling the power to about 10" MAP at altitude just to be sure it would behave on approach. We stepped down over about three laps at high power. The approach was uneventful. I carried a lot of power in and used most of the runway. Ahh, the RV grin is still there.
It has only been one week of down time, and we're still a long way from being back to full utility due to break-in needs. However, for those of you that don't know, the "RV grin" doesn't fly solo, there is a little internal tingle that goes right along with it.
