flickroll

flickroll

Well Known Member
I bought Jeff Jasinsky's RV-8 last fall. It was in pieces - Jeff had taken it apart for painting, but didn't get very far before he moved overseas. Tony Partain trucked it from Oregon to Virginia. I spent the last 7 months completely rewiring it, with a new panel, and reattaching wings, emp, etc. While I did not build the airplane, I now know it from forward to aft.

First off I did a few taxi tests, faster each time, until I had the tail up in the air for the last few. Then I took off, orbited the field in a climb to 5000 agl while monitoring engine gauges, etc. Today was HOT - about 95 degrees, but all engine parameters were good, although the CHT's got a little high - 425. The first landing was uneventful, a 3 pointer, full stall. Issues after the first flight:

Transponder not working. I checked the wiring and it is good, so it's either a bad transponder (GTX 327 that came with the airplane), or a bad antenna. Don't know what else it could be.

Radio according to the tower sounded a little scratchy. It is a new SL30. May need to tweak the mic gain. Any suggestions? My voice does sound scratchy in the sidetone.

The right hand fuel sender would not calibrate. The Dynon setup had me adding gas in two gallon increments. The resistance values stopped changing after 4 gallons on the right side. The left side the resistance stopped changing after 16 gallons. I suspect the left side is probably OK, just that the sender float was at the top of the tank, and with the wing dihedral, the inboard side is totally immersed while the outboard part of the tank may not be. Any ideas on the right side? Looks like changing out the sender will not be a lot of fun if that is what it is :mad: I'm hoping the sender was stuck and flying it for a while will unstick it. Before I go to the trouble of changing it out I'll drain the tank and try a recalibration.

The last issue is the carburetor. The engine would load up rich if I did not have the mixture about half way back while taxiing. Once, when full rich and taxiing, I turned on the boost pump and the engine died. Full power it is OK. How is the carb adjusted? It is a MA 4-5, and has not had the float service bulletin completed.

Thanks
 
What I did with the senders

Jim,

I had the same manifestation with the fuel senders and my Dynon 180. One side okay the other stopped calibrating at 4 gals. There were two issues. 1) I forgot to put the little bend in the end of the sender float wire. This allowed the floats to "rotate" in the tank if things got just right. 2) I oriented one of them when I inserted the float so the float (apparently) would hang on the side wall of the tank and not float the rest of the way up when the tank was full.

When calibrating, each 2 gal. pour should indicate a change in resistance. I calibrated my tanks at 16 gals. (RV-7) so that below 16 gals. they would read (fairly) accurately all the way down.

Hope this helps....

Chris..
 
ccarter said:
I had the same manifestation with the fuel senders and my Dynon 180. One side okay the other stopped calibrating at 4 gals. There were two issues. 1) I forgot to put the little bend in the end of the sender float wire. This allowed the floats to "rotate" in the tank if things got just right. 2) I oriented one of them when I inserted the float so the float (apparently) would hang on the side wall of the tank and not float the rest of the way up when the tank was full.
Click to expand...

Chris, thanks for the tip. Before I pull the sender I'm gonna drain the tank and try again with the hope that the float was stuck and flying the plane unstuck it. Jeff tells me the Van's gas gauges in the plane worked fine when he owned the airplane.

Had my transponder benched checked yesterday and it is D-E-A-D. So that mystery is solved.

The scratchy radio I think is just a matter of going through the SL-30 setup routine as others have done to reduce/remove the noise.

And lastly I'll be working on the carb this weekend. After all of that the next step is to fit the wheel pants and intersection fairings and then GO FLY :cool:
 
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