This weekend I went to a local fly-in to meet up with a friend of mine who helped me out with the first startup of my engine.  It took a little to start it but it finally came to life.  Joey video’d the startup but it’s shared in a private facebook group.  I’ll try to get the video and put it up here.

So now that I got the engine running it’s time to do the break in.  There is a very specific procedure you have to follow, running the engine at specific RPMs for specific amounts of time.  In doing this I noticed a couple of issues.  My idle RPM was registering at 3000 RPMs.  The engine seemed to not want to run at that RPM very well.  Also, Joey remarked that it wasn’t very windy behind the prop.  Those were two things that were nagging at me.  So I changed the calibration of the tachometer so that it registered the idle RPM at 1500 RPM or so.  That seemed more in line with what the engine was actually doing.  Then when I ran the engine at the prescribed break-in RPMs, it ran much smoother and I could feel more “push” from the prop.

Another problem I ran into at first engine start was that my EGT (exhaust gas temperature) didn’t seem to be working.  It turned out that it was!  I just needed to run the engine at a higher RPM.  So as I was doing the break-in at the higher RPMs I noticed my EGT was up past the recommended 1100 deg Fahrenheit and even started to hit 1200 which is the absolute max.  I decided to throttle back and let the engine cool down after which I shut down.  I’ll contact Six Chuter tomorrow to get their opinion on what I should do to fix this problem.

I now leave with with few photos from the MacFarlane Farms Fly-in…