Finally, almost 2 months after the initial intake experiment that indicated the need for a complete redesign of the AeroVee intake, we now have some data! After assembling everything on the engine yesterday, I test ran the engine today and the results, while not entirely perfect, are very promising. A full throttle run shows that the …
With the 3D-printing trials and tribulations overcome, I pulled the left half of the plenum off the printer. The two halves fit well together, so I proceeded to melt in the brass M5 thread inserts for the mounting bracket and the screws that hold the halves together. The plastic parts were now ready to be …
The last post ended with the test print of the plenum. This was a useful exercise as test fitting the plenum in combination with the “Lego” runners indicated some adjustments to the angles of the runners’ exits from the plenum. After fixing that, it was just a matter of printing them… … or rather, that’s …
Continue reading ‘Printing the plenum: Beating Alloy 910 into submission’ »
The last post outlined the design of the new Aerovee intake, plenum, and the four equal-length runners. Since then, I’ve been busy with fabrication: Two intake elbows had to be CNC’d and welded to the initial runners, the plenum design finalized and its attachments to the runners measured, and then the actual plenum and runners …
In the last post, I showed my DIY pipe “LEGO” kit that I would use for modeling the runners. Once I had those all fabricated, it was time to go try it on the airplane. To get an idea for how a plenum would fit, I just made a flat disk with four attachment points …
As explained in the last post, merely making a custom intake elbow for the AeroVee on the Sonex did not yield a satisfactory mixture distribution. After some discussions, I’ve decided to fabricate an entire intake, using individual runners to the cylinders. This won’t just entail replacing the intake elbow but also designing some sort of …
The AeroVee Volkswagen conversion engine used for Sonex aircraft is notorious for having poor mixture distribution between the cylinders. During my test runs, I’d noticed that the #4 cylinder (ordered in conventional crankshaft order starting with #1 nearest the prop, which makes #4 the right rear cylinder. For some reason Sonex uses a different numbering …
One of the things I’ve worked on with N132EA was to clean up the wiring. As some of you may know, the importance of neat wiring work was ingrained in me from a young age working for the electrician at my Dad’s job during summers. Things were required to be done neatly, any wires crossed …
So it’s been a while since the last update… What happened is that one of the members of our local EAA chapter was going to ship his home-built Sonex airplane to the mainland and sell it. A couple of us who are interested in flight training made a deal that if we each became co-owners of the …