So... :-( Yeah, its coming...
I have now replaced all 12 jugs on the old 680FP and hope that it helps with some of the BS problems I keep having. We hopped in the old bird last Friday to fly to Sun n Fun and the trip down was absolutely perfect. Until...
I stopped just shy of the airport to fill up with fuel so that we could head back that evening and I wouldn’t have to stop. The trip was about 2 hours both ways and beautiful weather. Upon taking off for the 10 minute leg into Lakeland I noticed the autopilot had blown a fuse and wouldn’t reset. No big deal, just flew on in with no other troubles.
Then climbing out that evening to head home I tried to lean the engines and noticed that the left engine had an EGT that went to 1600 degrees despite the CHT sitting at 350. I tried to work through this in my head and decided that it had to be a bad reading since theoretically that just didn’t seem possible.
Then the right engine started stumbling and eventually shut off. I figured ( I think correctly) that I had leaned it too much and it just didn’t want to keep working for very little pay. I got it started again and tried to lean again. It did fine for a few minutes then died again. After a 3rd time of this exercise and the red line on the gauage for the left cylinder EGT, I decided that I’d fly ROP for the 1:45 minute trip. I learned a few things...
1) At ROP, which I NEVER fly, the airplane picks up another 20KTS. We were averaging a bit over 200 knots TAS.
2) Whenever something good happens to me there is always something around the corner waiting. My wife gets a kick out of these things now a days and this one came in the shocking fact that at 32” and 2700 RPM this freaking thing burns 40 gallons of gas per side.
The issue is that I either have to fly full rich due to any movement of the mixture control sending the CHT’s to over 450 degrees withing 30 seconds. So I either stay full rich, or go full LOP to keep things cool. There is no in between and the amazing thing is both engines perform exactly the same. They both run like tops, show same fuel pressure, oil pressure, RPM and MP as well as fuel flows. So if there is something wrong its wrong on both engines in the same amount.
So, we ended up having to stop again before we got home because you could literally sit and watch the fuel gage go down with each passing minute.
So the good news is, if I fly like that much more I’ll be ready for a Turbine pretty quickly. :-). At least nothing mechanically went wrong and the engines ran really well.
Glenn
