LancairTalk

Sorry for the long gap. Lots of maintenance trips to Bend to get the Evade worked on, but it still keeps breaking. I’ve also switched to this new blog software which should make it easier to post, and possibly even add support for forums soon.

My airplane just completed its 3rd annual a couple of weeks ago. Overall, its in very good shape. I was especially happy to hear a totally clean bill of health for the engine. Given all the controversy about lean of peak operation, its nice to see the compressions are great, there is no evidence of scorching or carbon deposits anywhere or anything. Good consistent engine operation, not letting it get too hot ever, and so far the results are great.

Flying has been great lately. Since the little incident with the EGTs in
cylinder 1 has been fixed the airplane has been in top shape except for some
slight imbalance in ground running. When I’m in the air everything is great, but
the ground idle is adjusted a little too low and the fuel flows don’t seem even
(the EGTs are all over). Every time I consider having someone mess with it I
remind myself that in-flight is more important and the last thing I want to do
is have that be out of tune again. The only serious issue it causes is that I
need to run the RPMs higher than I would like when I start or the engine will
die and I need to be careful after landing to not stall the engine.

There are a number of service bulletins that have come out lately and I’m mostly updated.
I’m waiting on the torque tube and
the baffle thing my mechanics at Galvin say they are still working out with the
factory how to get it installed correctly. Luckily they are figuring it out on
another airplane. So mostly I’ve just been flying- a trip to Vegas, one to Palm
Springs (non-stop on the way down, nice!), an Angel Flight to Spokane and
Portland,
and a trip down to McMinnville this week. Speaking of which, if you haven’t been
there to see the Evergreen Aviation Museum, I’d highly recommend it. Maybe we
can make that the fun event during the Bend fly-in this fall.

The only issue through all this flying has been the lack of pressurization. On
the way down to Palm Springs at FL230, Kat got sick, and to make matters worse,
if you are actively being sick, its hard to keep the mask on so her O2 levels
dropped into the scary-passing-out zone. We went down to FL190 and I was happy
that a pilot friend Eric was with me so he could “fly” (watch the autopilot)
while I attended to Kat, but it still sucked. I love being up in the flight
levels for the speed, lack of traffic, lack of turbulence (usually its a good
place to avoid the mountain effects), and weather avoidance, but its just
becoming a pain without a pressurized airplane. It occurs to me that the key
breakthrough here needs to be an airplane company that can deliver a pressurized
airplane that doesn’t scare the insurance companies and mechanics. Whomever does
that will have a huge winner on their hands.

Yesterday on the way back from Portland I flew over Mount Saint Helens which has
been very active building up a new cinder-cone lately-

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Good news- it looks like the issue I’ve been having with Cylinder 1 is fixed. Apparently they noticed that the
ignition wiring was passing really close to the intercooler. If the wire heats up that can increase resistance
and be resulting in a poor spark when running LOP. The folks at Galvin moved the wire and I’ve test-flown the airplane
twice without the issue showing up. The bad news is that the 2nd time I flew the plane I had a CHT probe problem again
in cylinder 1. This maintenance stuff is getting a little old.

On another subject the new issue of Aviation Consumer arrived today. The main
article is coverage of the new turbonormalized SR22 that the Tornado Alley folks have been working on for some time (I saw prototypes
when I went to the APS class in November of 2004). Its great news that they came out with this and that Cirrus owners can now
see 200kts airspeed, but I was disappointed that the article suggested that the Columbia 400 can only do 200kts true LOP at 18,000
when I can pretty reliably get 206-210kts up there and more than 220kts up higher.

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I mentioned last Thursday that when I had my little CO incident I noticed that the EGTs on cylinder
1 were not looking right. The CO situation was the bigger emergency and it looks like that is all
fixed, but something with cylinder 1 is still not right. Whenever I got LOP after a minute or two
the EGT on cylinder drops 50-100 degrees and bounces around all over the place.

The initial lost of potential causes was a pretty long one. It could be sparks, injector fouling, cylinder valve issues,
exhaust gas leaks, the magnetos, induction leaks, or a probe. On my flight back from PDX to BFI I did a lean test. Everything was fine ROP and
all the cylinders peaked with a sweet GAMI-spread of .4gph. I forgot to do an in-flight mag check on that flight.
When I returned to Seattle I dropped the airplane off with Galvin who appear to have made some great progress
in getting their staff trained with Columbia’s. They opened it up yesterday, checked for any signs of exhaust
gas leaks (which would be one of the more serious potential problems) and swapped the sparks from cylinder 1 to
cylinder 3. By the way- Walter Atkinson recommended not swapping sparks but it was already too late, they had put
the cowl back together. His point is that if there is a problem with the spark it could cause pre-ignition which
could destroy the engine in 30 seconds. I wasn’t too freaked out about that since I knew I was going to be
hyper-monitoring the gauges for this maintenance flight and that usually pre-ignition could be arrested by going
full rich and reducing power. Plus in the previous flights the CHTs had been solid “normal” so there certainly
hadn’t been any sign of pre-ignition so far. In addition by keeping the spark it makes the diagnostic result
a bit more clear- if you destroy the old spark, take a flight and everything looks fine, did you fix the problem
or is it just hiding somewhere?

Today I took off from BFI on the Vashon VFR departure to the west and climbed up to 2500ft and then
7500ft for a pair of GAMI-lean tests.
I supposed I didn’t really need to do a full lean test but it gets me a nice clean set of data, eliminates other
potential problems and was also useful to check for induction leaks. You check for induction leaks by running
the tests at low altitude (where ambient pressure is higher than the manifold pressure) and then at 7500ft where
the ambient pressure is just about equal to the manifold pressure. If the lean-test results show a very different
pattern its likely there is some induction leak going on.

The leak test at both altitudes were just fine. But each time after I got about 20 degrees LOP EGT 1 would nose-dive
about 50 degrees and start bouncing around a bunch. I did a pair of in-flight mag checks on the way back in
both ROP and LOP and they all looked pretty normal, although I was only at about 50% power so this wasn’t the best
test.

All this leaves me thinking that an issue with the mags not providing strong enough power for good spark to
#1 being the most likely problem. It is clearly not a spark plug issue since the problem didn’t move. Injector
fouling doesn’t make sense since the lean tests are so good (with all the cylinders peaking at the same place).
Induction leaks don’t seem likely given the consistent test results at both altitudes. And a probe problem seems
very unlikely since the probes can’t tell the difference between 20 ROP and 20 LOP and the problem is only happening
on the LOP side.

In theory it could still be a cylinder valve issue, although given that I just had an annual with a complete
cylinder inspection 20 hours ago that seems unlikely. If its not a magneto issue about the only thing it could be is
some exhaust gas leak that somehow didn’t show when they inspected the engine compartment. Stay tuned as I try to
get to the bottom of the problem.

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