I performed some general maintenance on the RV-3 this weekend. Yes, I know – this engine is not pretty (Lycoming O-320). However; it runs great! 🙂 One of these weekends some parts are going to get pulled, thrown into the bead-blaster, and then into the paint booth.
I’ve been into quite a few dirt strips lately so I figured a look at my air filter was probably in order. It is a K&N unit that seems to have developed a fairly bad reputation for filtering contaminates. Mine is still in pretty good shape so I cleaned it up and reinstalled it. I’ll add the search for a replacement to my to do list.
During my last couple flights I’ve noticed that one magneto is remaining hot/active even with the switch off. I figured it was a bad P-Lead. After removing both leads from the magnetos, I tested them both for ground (switches off) and both were good. I’m not sure what that means. So, I put it all back together and figured I’d query my mechanic friends this week. Of course, it is entirely possible that just the act of disassembly/reassembly has fixed the problem. I’ll know soon enough.
I’ve had a few drips of oil along the trailing edge of my bottom cowling recently. Being a former Subaru flyer, this bugs me – engines should not leak. I started poking around and, as near as I could determine, the oil screen housing bolts were not snug which was allowing a bit of oil to weep. I tightened them. Fingers crossed!
Finally, I worked on another video camera mount. My wings have mostly all flush rivets with screws only at the fuel tank. This makes mounting a camera really tough. The problem is that this puts the camera inside the propeller arc so, when pointed forward, the camera picks up the prop which causes it to do all sorts of whacky things. My solution was to simply modify the mount to point forward and at an angle away from the prop. Fingers on other hand crossed. I really need to come up with a mount solution for several places but all of them involve drilling rivets and installing rivnuts or something similar.
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