Flight to KCDK
Made a flight to pick up my wife down in FL today. She managed to catch my landing on the short strip at Cedar Key:
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Test Flight
With the airplane out of the shop I took it out for a test flight. She was performing strong and did well, so that's good news. I also experimented with my NFlightCam on this flight. I managed to not mount it rigidly enough, so there's more shake than there should be. I also forgot the adapter cables to patch into the intercom, so that will have to wait for next time (when I have a large memory card too). Here's the takeoff from today:
Stumble Pop Update
They found the engine ran really rough on just the right magneto and that EGT#1 went blank. They took it apart a bit to test the leads and the plugs but found no issues. Put it back together again and it ran great. So the thinking is that taking it apart knocked a bit of lead or other contaminent out that was causing the issue. We also found that we have fine wire spark plugs and plan to replace them with Tempest massives, due to this . The Platinum Aviation blog has some great spark plug info here too.
Stumble, Pop
I flew the plane on the 11th and halfway through the flight we started getting what I assume were backfires, about 1/sec. They were very minor "stumbles" with a pop sound. This was after flying LOP at that same altitude for about 10m. Occasionally there would be a slight stumble with no pop sound. Power settings changes and changing to a richer mixture did not seem to help. After getting around 2000' AGL no more issues occurred for the rest of the flight to landing. Tested the fuel tanks for water again after landing, found no issues. Flew it again on the 23rd and had no troubles until nearly leveling off at 4,500'. The mag check on the ground showed no issues but as I hit 4,400' I felt the first stumble and as I leveled off and started to go LOP the backfires started up pretty abundantly. I didn't actually make it all the way to LOP before it started and so I decided to try ROP. Left it there momentarily as I started to turn back to KUZA to land. I swapped fu