Not a "flight" per se but it was pretty cool nonetheless. When I got this engine (it came with an airplane too) every square millimeter of it was coated with castor gunk and the guy said he never cleaned it even though it had a lot of runtime on it. After tearing it down and putting it through the ultrasonic cleaner I'd say it turned out pretty nice! Only part I had to replace was the head which had the plug threads stripped out. Fortunately my friend is a machinist's apprentice and he made me a new one. Cool guy!
This is on 20% S&W fuel which I put a touch of castor into because it's a really old engine. 8x4 propeller though this engine is probably happier on a 7x4. This engine already has quite a lot of time on it so peaking it out right away was probably fine. What you don't see here is me screwing with the carb for 20 minutes before I finally got it to idle down below like 4-5k rpm, and it sits happily at 2.5-3k now - Perry carbs are fine on bigger engines but on this it's just a no. I really don't know what their idea was with the weird, overly sensitive disk LSN they have here. The HSN is a little confusing too as it rotates with the carburetor barrel, but most of the time you only adjust it at full throttle so it isn't too bad. Surprisingly this is not using an idle bar plug even though I was pretty sure it would need one. I had to guess as to what to set the HSN at to start with and I got it totally wrong - you can see how rich I had it started at!
Here's the very weird, very old airplane it goes onto. According to the little placard on it it was built in 1999 (and the guy that built it is currently in his nineties and has a three-digit AMA number) It's held together very well - pretty much all I did was clean it and fix a little bit of tail damage it had. Just needs a reciever and a battery and I'll be airing it out soon enough!
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