As most of my long time readers (both of you) will recall I mounted my oil cooler on the firewall behind the #4 cylinder. Well I also suffer with some less than optimal oil temperatures during extended high power operations. Well I have tried many different approaches to bringing down the oil temperature some with a little success and some with little to none. Well this week I am posting the next chapter in this never ending saga. I decided to replace my existing oil cooler with a larger oil cooler. The cooler I have in place now is an 8 row oil cooler so I decided to replace it with a 10 row oil cooler. They are both about the same size but the 10 row has more oil passages giving it a higher capacity. In doing so I decided to replace the inlet air duct as well as fabricate the outlet air ducting. That took me a couple of weeks but I finally have something I can show. It turns out that I built the inlet duct a little too tall so I have to go back to the drawing board on that one.
I also decided that I have been without a CNC and a 3D printer long enough! I ordered both this past weekend and the 3D printer should arrive today. Expect lots of new posts in the coming months with new things I am trying. Starting out with the oil cooler inlet duct, a new alternate air inlet for my fuel servo, some headset hangers for my flight headsets, and possibly a headset control model mount for said headsets. :-)
By the way, if you are a member of EAA you can download a free copy of Solidworks for designing different items. It has a pretty good learning curve but WOW there is so much you can do with that software!
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| The inlet duct I fabricated from fiberglass is on the left and the outlet duct is on the right. Note that the outlet duct is designed to allow me to hook up my 2" cabin heat air hose so that I can take advantage of all that hot oil heat! |
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| Kinda hard to tell from this picture but the new oil cooler is installed and the inlet duct is sitting on top. You can see from the picture that it sits too high and will interfere with the cowling on the right side of the picture |
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| This is the outlet duct with the cabin heat air hose sitting just off to the left of it. The duct is not bolted on in this picture, just set into position as a trial fit. |
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| Oh yea, we also got a foot of snow on Superbowl Sunday. Made for a nice snow day on Monday. :-) |
