Cooling – Next Check

Id been thinking about the hot running head and thought the damage to the lower cowl meant we needed to repair and beef up some of the lower curves.

The original holes in the lower cowl were primarily around exhaust exits, a small hole where the exhaust silencer block touched the cowl, the oil radiator and feed pipes and some cut outs to accommodate the cylinder heads.

The accident crunched the oil radiator into the lower curves of the cowl and that needed beefing up and neatening

The net result was a super strong and great gloss finish but some holes were either enlarged or simply aren’t required anymore.

To test my theory out, without the need to do any ‘hard acts’ on the cowl , I planned to use tape to temporarily block off some of these holes and double the tape so that it would survive a short (30 min) test flight.

A short test flight, which ended up being 41 mins, proved very successful.

Even powered climbs were better than they were before.