Cooling update No # – March 2017

Well … this has proved to be quite a challenge as the art of cooling – without the aid of a £1m plus wind tunnel makes it a little trial and error … perhaps Benjamin could sneak a mornings use of the Williams F1 tunnel and that nice long smoke pipe that would really let me know what the airflow was doing 🙂

Anyway … back to chalk and board .. as my first instructor used to say …..

In this case its drawing on experts like Paul HS and Danny B who have been really great through my current challenges and have certainly kept me going with this ‘long distance’ OU style course in aerodynamics.

As you can see from the previous blog entry I had failed to shroud the intake area around the oil cooler matrix – Now done … but … 2 Jersey style circuits (around 6 miles !! – EACH ! ) and it proved to not fix the problem and temps still crept up above 100.

Plan B – was to relocate the underbelly mounted cooler to the front of the ‘plane – right behind the prop .. that should def fix it as there was nothing in the way to prevent a good solid flow over the face of the matrix .. either that or it would demonstrate that THIS wasn’t the problem so at least move me on to the next option.

As you can see in the background of the picture I had to ditch my nice braided oil cooler pipes .. once I have established a proper fix I will get some new ones made up to whatever length / shape needed.

I made up some mounting brackets and moved the old oil cooler into position

The cowl then took some definite slow and steady fiddling to remove JUST as much as was required to get the cooler AND its pipework in position. Then, with some new wider ducting tape/rubber fill the gaps.

Took the opportunity to remove the original engine top cowl ducts and replace the rubber strips with wider – needed as earlier ‘fettling’ had meant I now had some small gaps between cowl and intakes

T