Ron Lee
Well Known Member
I installed my Smoking Airplanes systems with two injectors last year. Once I started using it in the pattern for test purposes, another RV pilot was motivated to install his own homemade system. That produced smoke and his hangar buddy installed a similar system. So now there are three RVs on the airport with smoke.
Last week I saw both of them on an overhead approach using smoke and it looked fine. One appeared slightly less dense but still adequate. So they ask me for a smoke off to see who has the best smoke.
Last Saturday we did it. On the first pass another RV pilot stated that the person on the right (me) had better smoke. We made another pass for good measure. On the ground, I walked up to one of the other pilots and a ground-based observer. They stated that mine was inferior to their homemade systems. Of course you can be assured that an RV pilot (at least here) is one to kid, use disinformation, etc...so I just agreed.
Turns out that my system was significantly better in terms of smoke quantity and whiteness of smoke. The smoke quantity can be assumed to be tied to oil used. Theirs uses about 0.25 gallon/minute...mine 0.8-1.0 gallon/minute (not measured).
So based upon this, I suspect that the pump needs to output more than 0.25 gallons/minute.
As far as smoke color, I am using Conosol 260. Their oil was not specified but I would note that the Conosol 260 is the better of the two.
On this flight, my metering valve was set to 1.25 turns open. I will probably drop that to 0.75 turns to minimize oil consumption and hopefully still output adequate smoke.
When I talked about it to the second RV pilot, his comment was that "I smoked them."
Last week I saw both of them on an overhead approach using smoke and it looked fine. One appeared slightly less dense but still adequate. So they ask me for a smoke off to see who has the best smoke.
Last Saturday we did it. On the first pass another RV pilot stated that the person on the right (me) had better smoke. We made another pass for good measure. On the ground, I walked up to one of the other pilots and a ground-based observer. They stated that mine was inferior to their homemade systems. Of course you can be assured that an RV pilot (at least here) is one to kid, use disinformation, etc...so I just agreed.
Turns out that my system was significantly better in terms of smoke quantity and whiteness of smoke. The smoke quantity can be assumed to be tied to oil used. Theirs uses about 0.25 gallon/minute...mine 0.8-1.0 gallon/minute (not measured).
So based upon this, I suspect that the pump needs to output more than 0.25 gallons/minute.
As far as smoke color, I am using Conosol 260. Their oil was not specified but I would note that the Conosol 260 is the better of the two.
On this flight, my metering valve was set to 1.25 turns open. I will probably drop that to 0.75 turns to minimize oil consumption and hopefully still output adequate smoke.
When I talked about it to the second RV pilot, his comment was that "I smoked them."
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