Oil on the ground

Had a beautiful day on wednesday 65 degrees and clear skies so opened the hangar and brought out the plane for a short hop after the long winter.

Preflight went normal and I got airborne without a hitch, climbed out and flew for about 45 minutes and CHT temps seemed to be lowering, noted the oil temp seemed to be getting a little hoter than normal so I returned to the field and landed, went into the restraunt for a bowl of soup and when I came out there was oil all over the ground under the nosewheel,

 Pulled the upper cowl and it appears the oil cooler has failed and dumped most of the oil. Manually pulled the plane back to the hangar with the help of a fellow pilot from Milwaukee that was looking at my plane I really appreciated his help.

  Pulled the lower cowl also and it was full of oil . Looks more and more like a falied oil cooler. Will drain the remaining oil on friday and send a sample in for analysis and then asses the status of the engine.

Will need to pull the plugs and scope the cylinders to make sure they didn't get scored. Then will check the plugs and adjust the valves and torque the heads again as it is at the 10 hour engine time. New oil filter and new oil are in the mix.  Will assess the features of a replacement oil cooler and get it on order. Again welcome to the world of Experimental aircraft. 

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Comment by Stephen R. Smith on March 17, 2011 at 8:13pm

Hello Phillip,

 

It excellent that you got your plane back on the ground with no apparent damage.  What model oil cooler do you have?  Where did it fail? Any pictures?

 

I see you have a Jabiru 8 cylinder motor.  Cool!

 

On both the 4 and 6 cylinder Jabiru motors the oil pressure gauge is before both the cooler and the filter.  I don't know if your engine is designed in the same way.  The significant weakness of this design is that you do not know the true oil pressure the engine bearings are seeing, especially if you have a leak between the gauge and the main oil galley that runs down the block, which is what you seem to have had.  In the cockpit you might see near normal pressure, but the pressure in the main galley can be low.  If you had a slow leak this was probably not a problem.

 

On my 6 cylinder motor, I moved the oil pressure gauge so that I know to true oil pressure in the engines main oil galley.

 

Steve

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