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My Luck Held!

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Marc W

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 31, 2017
Messages
1,234
Location
Colorado
I am still one lucky S@B! My father always told me I was. We have finally started cooling off a little more at night. It had only been getting down to 70 degrees at night which means my new Rans S-7 isn't useable. The oil temps get to high to fast! This morning it was 60 degrees at the airport so I went up for an elk spotting flight. I was able to climb to 9,500' before the oil temps made me level off. That is about high enough and it was a good elk spotting morning. I saw two small herds of 20 or 30 elk each and one big herd of well over a hundred scattered all over the mountainside.

When I got back to the hanger a friend came over to chat. A couple minutes later he said something is running out of your airplane. It turned out to be oil, a lot of oil, running down the bottom of the fuselage. So I got a piece of cardboard to catch the drips and wiped the plane off. Took the cowl off and it looks like an aluminum oil line is leaking where it attaches to the oil cooler. The cooler is buried behind the engine so it is hard to get to. I was able to get my hand onto the fitting that appears to be leaking and it felt tight. I suspect the line is cracked somewhere there that I can't see.

The oil in the engine is down about a pint. Most of that oil ran out where I parked so it must have happened right when I landed or when I gave it a blast of power to turn the tail toward the hanger. My guardian angel is still on the job. I spent about an hour of the flight over mountainside where there are very few good places to land.
 
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