First Engine Start
5/27/2006 18 Hours
It was a long, long day at the hangar yesterday (I'm writing this in retrospect now, as it's now the 28th.) I was here early (for me), and went through until 3am. I was gettin' pretty tired by the end of it. I wanted to push on too, but something told me if I didn't go home now, I'd never get up in the morning to go start her up.
I had a checklist to go through of things that needed doing, but there was still other stuff which was generated from this list too. For example "fit centre console" is a little vague. I had to do all kinds to it before it was ready to fit.
Here's the safety wire for the throttle bracket. I must admit, I am getting better at it!
Some more on the snorkel. I ran a very small bead of RTV sealant between the snorkel and the throttle body to make sure it was leak free.
I fitted the secondary air door to the snorkel. I haven't put the cable in yet that operates it. It's not really necessary for the first start. It's nearly summer, and there's not much chance of any icing conditions!
I had fun trying to figure out a good routing for the ignition leads. I need to get some made to custom lengths, because Ihave a lot that are way too long. Here's a grommet on the baffle. Shiny!
I had to put another adel clamp on the FADEC harness to keep it away from the oil cooler.
This shot is a bit out of order, but once I'd got the centre console in, I could route the throttle and prop cables. Here's the prop. Yep, I fastened it all up and forgot to put the stupid eyebal retaining nut on. Worse still, I forot it on both the prop AND the throttle! Duh! Maybe I should've had an early night!
This is the other end of the prop cable. It's tight in there!
The throttle cable at the throttle body.
OK, to get the centre console in, I wanted to make a hole in it for a bin, and an armrest lid.
This lid will get upholstered with some padding. The hole for the bin also allows access to....
... a mounting bracket that keeps the armrest nicely centred with the flap motor support channel.
Here it all all secure. Everything is working nice. I can go home to be now! Get rested for tomorrow!
I also got the EFIS keep alive battery wired in. I was having some issues with this, but I got it working temporarily for the engine start. I still have some trouble shooting to do to get it working 100% as it should be. Trying to troubleshoot stuff really kills a ton of time.
5/28/2006 5 Hours
Another early start for me. I'm glad I've got Monday & Tuesday off! I spent time cleaning out the crap that had accumulated in the plane, vacuumed it out and fitted the seat floor and the pilot seat. This photo is a bit out of focus for some reason.
A few hangar friends came by to take a look at the plane and help with the first start. We had my buddy Mike who has a wealth of RV building experience, Nick who is in one of the hangars down from me and who lives close to the airport too (lucky!), Keith who's built a couple of Lancair IV's, and too non aviation friends, Clayton who helps out all the time and Steve who comes by now and then to lend a hand. Thanks for showing up and standing on fire extinguisher duty guys!
Clayton came earlier to help figure out mounting the video camera I bought (just for this occasion). He had a suction cup mount that worked fairly well on the canopy.
We had a last check over of the plane, and then it was time to push her outside.
So here we are outside, in the lovely sunshine. I had a checklist, but I was too excited to really do anything with it! The main thing was really to check for oil pressure first, and if there's a fire to turn off the fuel before doing anything else!
Can you see the propeller? Nope, it's just a blur! Woohoo! She fired up right away. Part of my start up procedure is to let it crank a couple of revolutions to clear fuel vapours out of the intake manifold. I have a Superior Ryton sump, so this step is very important in preventing a backfire and resultant blown apart intake manifold.
It's running, and I'm grinning! It wasn't all joy though, as we did have a bit of a problem which cut short the test run for the day. Cylinder #3 had no EGT. The probe was fine, as it was indicating ambient, but it just wasn't firing that cylinder. Strange. We shut down and checked a few things out. We took out the plugs, and it was wet with unburned fuel. Hmmmm. Too much fuel eh? So it's not sparking or the injector is faulty. We eliminated the sparking part of the equation pretty quickly, so we removed the injector from cylinder #3 and swapped it with cylinder #2 which was working fine.
The problem then moved to cylinder #2. Hmmm. I guess we need a new injector. I guess the pintel is stuck inside it somehow. I did blow out all my fuel lines before fitting, but it doesn't take much to block one of these things up.
Here's another shot of the baby running. We have some video too, but I need to find a way of making the file easily downloadable. Right now it's a little on the large side. Once I find a way to squish it down, I'll post it here too. Awesome stuff. So, a bit of an anticlimax really, because I couldn't do the run up or anything else I relaly wanted to check. On the plus side, we found the problem, and we can get a new injector pretty quickly from Mattituck or Aerosance.
Yesterday the new fuel injector arrived from Aerosance. Super quick shipping got it here in time for me to do something with it this weekend! I installed it, being very careful to keep everything clean. I even ran fuel through the lines before I connected them to make sure they were clear. I also put some hose on to the sniffle valve (instead of the makeshift one we have in the shots above), to make sure fuel from the intake doesn't run onto the hot exhaust. I used silicone hose so it can withstand the heat.
Last time we ran the engine we found a small oil leak from the oil temp sensor. We are using an adaptor from JPI, to convert the thread from 5/8"-18 to 1/8" NPT. It comes with a copper washer. This is not the right washer to use for this application, as it's not a crush washer at all. When I put the adaptor in, I figured that the washer was the right one for the job. Boy was I wrong. It's tough to get in there and tighten things up as it is, and with the supplied washer, you'd have to really reef on it. Better off to just get a proper crush washer with the fibre inside it to guarantee a leak free fitting. Now it's all good in there, apart from being covered in oil that is. Darn it! Now I need to get some starter fluid on it to clean it all down.
Bob was at his hangar next door today, so he kept an eye on things when I fired her up again. Everything went peachy this time. This thing is sooo smoooooth you wouldn't believe it. It's amazing - almost turbine like. I think the combination of a FADEC controlled engine and a three blade prop really has paid off.
I ran her up to about 1900 rpm so I could try to cycle the prop. Yep, that worked too! It's pretty cool to have everythuing working as planned! The thing really wants to pull too when you cycle it, so you can't hold it for too long! Just enough to confirm it's working is enough.
I shut it down, and let it cool off for a little while. We had a stiff breeze today which was nice, so it helped keep the temps down. Cylinder temps have to be kept below 350 degrees F to prevent glazing the cylinder walls, and the oil temp should be kept below 180 degrees F. These numbers were all from the Mattituck FAQ's on their website.
Once she was cool enough, I fired her up again and went for a drive around the airport. It was great! I was driving around our hangar rows looking for someone to impress! Everyone had gone home though as it was about dusk. Doh! Oh well, I took the plane back to the hangar, covered the canopy and put her away for the night.
All in all, I ran it about four times today, accumulating 0.4 hours of total time. The FAA require that you have run the engine for at least an hour on the ground before they give you an airworthiness certificate, so we're making some headway into that.
Now I have to really get on with the stuff to make this thing fly! Woohooo!
Here's some video for download! Engine Start!