Sunday, March 14, 2010

One burns more

After about 20 hrs in the plane one thing I'm noticing is that my left engine burns more oil than the right and it also burns more gas at the same or very similar EGTs. The fuel flow usually shows anywhere from 1 to 1.9 GPH more. At the annual this engine had a few cylinders with compressions in the mid 60's which was found to be ring leakage. The engine was burning a fair bit of oil at first, a qt every 3 hours or so but that seems to be trending in the right direction as on my last 4 hour flight it looks like I burned less than 1 qt. Rings seating better due to more use? Who knows... The other engine (right side) has good compressions on all cylinders, 3 of which are brand new nickel ECIs, burns very little oil and uses less gas. No I don't have an engine analyzer and yes, I know I need one... I'm still running ROP for now until I get the JPI. I do have a digital fuel flow meter, it's got an ancient Hoskins but it seems to be working perfectly. I haven't measured the fillups precisely yet though to ensure the measurements jive with the fuel truck.

Here is a video I snapped scanning across the panel. Here I'm running WOT at about 2450 RPM, as the camera pans to the right you see the EGT gauges, notice the left engine is running a bit hotter than the right, then I pan down to the fuel flow and notice the left engine is burning 2 gph more than the right. Then the camera comes up and you can see the standard fuel flow gauges split by 2 gph as well.

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