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Permalink Reply by Patrick Hoyt on June 14, 2018 at 9:57am

I moved my gearbox vent outlet (from underneath the firewall) to a location towards the top of the firewall. I used a modified motorcycle brake fluid reservior as a "catch can" (first picture, below).  The "modification" is drilling a small hole under the cap so air can escape.  Also, ignore the "upper" and "lower" level marks on it, as they are not relevant in this case.

I'd noticed some oil on the bottom of the fuselage, just aft of my old vent location. Rather than venting oil overboard, and thus losing it, I thought it would be better to allow that oil to drain back into the big aluminum gearbox oil reservior.

Seems to be working fine. Not losing anymore gear oil overboard. Haven't even noticed any reaching the level of the new "catch can".

The way I routed the vent lines on my airplane is shown in the 2nd picture below.

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Permalink Reply by Jan Eggenfellner on December 11, 2018 at 1:43pm

We now have a no-external-vent bottle system perfected.  It was demonstrated at our 2018 engine course but we did not get video of it.  Maybe someone else did?  If not we will post it here.  Basically it works like this:

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Permalink Reply by charlie rosenzweig on December 17, 2018 at 10:27pm

Jan,

That seems like a good improvement on the gearbox venting.     With this new design, will there still be a way to have a sight tube just to make sure we can see that there is sufficient oil in the gearbox?  

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Permalink Reply by Jan Eggenfellner on December 19, 2018 at 5:56pm

Hey Charlie:

Any external hoses can not be relied upon as sight tubes. The gear oil is way to sticky even after shutdown to show an accurate oil level referencing inside to outside of the gearbox. Since you decided to upgrade to the heavy duty turbo engine version, it includes a sight glass on the side you will be able to have an accurate reference.

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Permalink Reply by charlie rosenzweig on December 19, 2018 at 10:54pm

Jan,

I know what you are staying about the tubes being a poor choice to determine how much oil in the gearbox on shutdown.  I was thinking more about pre-flight when it is cold.

Glad to hear about the sight glass on the HD gearbox.

Thanks for continuing to work on improvements, we all benefit from that approach. 

Charlie 

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Permalink Reply by Jared G Brown on December 20, 2018 at 4:07pm

Jan, 

We just emailed Alissa today to get our new vent, a question I have is about a possible sight glass in our 130 gearbox. Would you say there is any option to install a possible thread-in sight glass to the bottom gearbox hole so that way you could at least see if there is sufficient oil in the system.  I'm not sure it is necessary, we just want to make sure we have enough oil in the system and not too little or too much. thanks for your time. 

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