As I mentioned in my previous post, the Bellanca didn’t want to idle very well at sea level. This isn’t particularly surprising, since it was last adjusted during an annual at Sandia Airpark, at an elevation of 6550′. I was supposed to do a fuel pressure adjustment (high and low) yesterday, but the mechanic forgot a tool and we had to delay. The mechanic’s going to calibrate his fuel pressure gauge this week, and we’ll be able to do the run-up / calibration next weekend.

The download of the data from the flight showed some oddities in the behavior of the #5 cylinder. Either it was showing much higher exhaust gas temps than the other cylinders or was running much cooler cylinder head temps. When we took the cowl off, we also noticed some fuel stains around the intake manifold pipe for that cylinder. Hopefully, it’s just a slightly loose connection at the fuel injector, but I have some concerns that the exhaust valve is wearing out, which would be an unfortunate unexpected expense. Pretty easy to check, so I’ll know more next week.

Finally totaled the fuel for the trip from Albuquerque to Seattle. The fuel flow totalizer in the EDM-900 thinks I burned 153.5 gallons and the fuel receipts show I burned 154.4 gallons, so the computer was off by less than 1%, so I’m happy with the calibration at this point.