Airplane broke down on the way to Idaho!!

all right guys welcome to the video uh and this one I'm gonna show you guys the failed attempt to go to Idaho the first round did not work out so good I had some issues had to come back home limp the airplane home and fix it it's a really strange issue they had it's very rare um and I'll show you what I did to fix it and make sure it won't ever happen again uh just kind of a freak thing it's happened to a few um rotax engines but it's not common and it was just bad timing mainly to have it happen when it did so I want to show you guys a failed attempt and then but good news ultimately did make it up there had a really good trip and in fact it put together a little intro that I'm going to use in this whole video series because it'll probably be you know two three videos after this uh showcasing the adventure there's a lot to go through it's going to take me a little bit to get that done but anyway I'm going to roll the new intro for this series and uh we'll get into it and show you guys what happened here oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] there's some cool Cliffs up here it's about to stop for a second but go ahead and move on I think a long ways to go oh good just for 30 seconds to get out [Music] well things are not going as planned here not going well I'm broke down in Big Piney Wyoming and uh I stopped for fuel and I see oil dripping off the motor and it's just covered in oil underneath and it's running out everywhere what's weird is I can't actually figure out where it's coming from it looks like the rear main seal the crank seal in the back I ran it on the ground but I didn't run it hard and I didn't see any actually leaking out it could be I gotta build some actual crankcase pressure by putting a load under it and then it's blowing it out I lost oh approximately a cord in an hour I stopped to take a whiz on that hill and it wasn't leaking there because I looked at it just a glance but I think I would have seen it oil pressure was good didn't hurt anything I still got you know plenty of oil in it's just down obviously but it's uh this is a big ass problem and uh you know could be worse it could be at moose Creek where I was headed that would be worse or it could have run out of oil in the air and that would be way worse so I'm trying to be positive and thankful those things but I'm not very thrilled um this was everything that's been going on with the mold stuff and all that kind of thing I just man I really needed to get away and have a you know a decent time would have been really really nice so I'm really bummed that this is happening and at the beginning of the trip you know at least if it could do it like on Big Piney on the way home you know that'd be a little better okay so after that I didn't film too much more stuff because I had to get after trying to deal with this problem um topped off the oil there limped it over to Pinedale which is really close by and uh because after running on the ground I realized that you know at a lighter load I'm not losing a lot of oil which makes sense as you you know create a higher load make more power you're going to make more crankcase pressure it's pushing out faster so just limped it over that other airport real easy I had friends over there a big thanks to Nathan and Bill those guys were awesome man they just jumped right in to help me they cleared out some room and a hanger I had hanger space that night so I was able to work on it went over there bought some oil from them so I'd have extra oil and um and and also thanks to my buddy Matt you guys have seen him before he's got that S21 with a 915 he rerouted he was on his way to Idaho to meet up with me he rerouted to where I was and then stayed the night to give me a hand working on it so that night we pulled the oil return line off we pulled the Breather apart you know checked his mining lines and things as we could looking for a restriction because if there was a restriction in the oil Return part of the system it could it could create excessive crankcase pressure of course we found nothing there was I mean everything was spotless and clean but we had to check just to make sure so the more I thought about the more I'm like you know I think that seal just worked its way out it's been leaking ever since it put that engine in wasn't bad but it was just drizzling a little bit back there and I think there was just something not quite right so uh I did some flying at the airport the next gay again to kind of confirm that you know we're not using a lot of oil if I run it easy um looked like if I run it easy I'm staying under uh rotax's actual you know like recommended limit for oil usage so anyway I loaded up and said you know all the soft airport stuff I do all the time will come into play here because I'm just going to land every so often on the way home took the long non-mountain route home and just flew up very gently which was nice is burned like four gallons an hour doing like 85 miles an hour indicating probably about 85 you know and then um I stopped 30 minutes 60 minutes an hour and a half and then another hour and a half I was home so uh and it didn't use that much I put a little bit in it one time on the way home ended up actually overfilling it when I did it and and so it wasn't too bad still leaking obviously still a problem but far less bad you know under light throttle so anyway on the way home I ordered the seal um ordered it from Leading Edge airfoils picked Next Day Air and even left a note in the order comments that yeah I did that on purpose I got a down airplane I need this ASAP I don't care what it costs send it overnight they didn't contact me they just sent it second day really really upset me so um wasted a day there but anyway uh this was Sunday I made it home um Monday I pulled the engine and then on Tuesday I was waiting because the seal didn't come until uh the next afternoon on Wednesday but I went ahead and did some mods to kind of help make sure this wouldn't happen again so let me let me show you guys what went into taking it apart fixing it modifying it to make it better and so on and so forth to get back in the air to head back to Idaho as fast as possible you know I did the leak down to make sure there wasn't like some cylinder that's way down on compression and got a ton of blow-by or something like that that's not an issue so now it's like okay just double check where the leak's coming from and then go ahead and tear it apart that's the plan oh and I forgot to mention I bore scoped it too um and I you know everything looks the same my borescope three out of the four cylinders and uh you know they all look the same cross hatching looks good everything looks normal and it's got that side camera too so you can see the valves that's kind of cool [Music] well there goes the old man and he just got done helping me with something that's pretty cool leave it to Dad to think up some cool stuff so I'm getting ready to pull the engine okay and I don't really have like an engine hoist that'll get high enough you know being tail driven and engines like six feet in the air and all that and so I'm talking to him about him like ah we got to rig something up and he's like oh I got an idea and he goes down and whips this up this morning he just welded me up some brackets and we put um so we braced the the board up there and then we put up these brackets and then put this heavy duty pipe on there and it's got a obviously you see a roller deal so you can move the engine side to side and then the airplane can move forward and a half this way so you got you can move essentially you can move the engine around if you need to I'm going to try to just barely pull it off and turn it turn it you know angle it a little bit to get into the back but anyway um I was doing pull-ups on this earlier and bouncing on it as hard as I could and he said it uh nothing even moved at all just you know barely Wiggles Okay so let me give you guys a little update I got to seal out uh it had backed out and was rubbing on the flywheel and it's been rubbing for a while looked like and here's what's weird this this motor is leaked oil out of that since I got it um and it wasn't bad I mean I would go of 25 hours oil change without adding oil so it wasn't like it was a bad leak I'm I'm just I'm trying to figure out what happened because I've checked everything possible pulled the banjo checked all the oil lines checked the Breather taking the oil tank apart looked at every single thing on that part of it there's no restrictions everything's good I have oversized lines in fact I'm going to modify the top of the tank and make the Breather a dash eight because this is just an empty bottle it's just perfectly open inside it was my idea of like a wannabe catch can and the stock stuff is Tiny from there down I put a dash six hose on it which is actually bigger than the factory stuff and then an eight going out the bottom Okay so um I'm going to make the whole thing an eight while I've got it a part of mine as well just so it can breathe a little easier I did it to my Big Bore and my S6 and seemed like it only was a good thing can't find a reason other than the seal wasn't in all the way where the seal was defective or something along those lines because it definitely had backed out and it popped right out it wasn't hard to get out well I had made this little catch can thing it's just open but it helps to catch you know you slow down the airflow and sometimes you get a little separation in there and oil this thing doesn't blow much out the Breather anyway so it's not a big deal kind of like to reuse this if possible so what I'm going to do is just I built this up a fair amount when I welded it so I'm going to cut it off right the tip of my fingernail there basically and then I can drill and tap this and there should be enough material for that big fitting to go in here I hope okay there's the first hole I did a half inch and then I'm gonna Step Up because it's 9 16. UM but yeah pretty good amount of material you can see in there it's pretty big that's going to get a little bit less it's going to be a little wider but I think that'll be plenty to thread this in there's no real load all right threads came out good throws way down in there just gonna clean it up a little bit and uh foreign all right so we got all these little parts and pieces made this is kind of cool I just found this piece those notches already in it that we didn't put those in there on purpose but it doesn't hurt anything and what that does it fits it's just a little bit smaller in the seal this fits down in there there's actually a lip where that washer fits right down in there now we could drive that seal back in there nice and smoothly and uniformly instead of beating it in with a hammer um and then I got this done but yeah it's a big fitting that's a dash eight from what's that the factory one is like actually quite a bit smaller than a dash six so it's it's got it I bet you that thing is effectively three times as big flow wise maybe more and all that and then of course this is done so all the pieces are there just waiting on parts but uh that will uh relieve any unnecessary back pressure in the system I would say not that I think there is any excessive back pressure I can't see any signs of it really I don't think that seal was in there right or something was wrong with it and it had been leaking and working its way out okay so we just got it all started here and we're starting to drive it in but it looks like it's going to go in nice and uniformly so that's good all right well there it is it's in there and uh yeah looks good I guess I'm gonna move on here all right just working away getting ready to put it back on the mounts the oil can back together positioned slightly better man it's always so tight with some of these fittings and stuff around the mount but I think I've improved on it just a little bit so that's good then I'm going to stick it back on and uh yeah keep working here yeah buddy that was a lot of work for one day the seal didn't show up till noon that's when I got started it's uh eight o'clock now so got the seal in got the motor back in got everything hooked up thought through a bunch of stupid little issues of stuff just being ornery but it's running Prime the oil system tonight I'm just gonna do a nice easy ground run get some temperature in it and call it good all right uh next morning it's warming up and uh gonna go really test flight real good in thorough um before I get too excited and say that it's fixed and head to Home Idaho so yeah so we'll see all right so I went out and flew at that that next day put an hour and a half maybe on it did a lot of takeoffs and stuff and uh everything was good still weeping a little bit of oil out of the back but it's better than it's ever been so it's an improvement overall and obviously fixing the the major issue was the goal and we got that done so after checking everything over real thoroughly again I went ahead and called it up loaded it up and took off the next day and headed back to Idaho you know this problem put a damper on the trip because no matter what you do you're second guessing some of the work that was done I wouldn't say I was in a hurry but it was a lot of work in a couple of days and so you know you're flying up over pretty unforgiving train thinking did I tighten those engine mount bolts you know and I mean of course I did but there was some of that going on and that that just takes away from a little bit of the fun I mean you never trust them fully but you know after you've worked on it of course you know I don't really want to be venturing off a long way from home so that was a little unfortunate uh plane did great you know the trip went well and and so you know everything's good filmed a lot it was a good Adventure you guys 1200 gigabytes of footage after cutting out a lot of the garbage um so there's a lot to go through it's going to take me a while and I'm I'm guessing there might be like three videos probably break it up into three parts so stay tuned for that um I'm glad I did push through get all that work done and go on the trip it ended up being worth it so that's that's the good news there uh even though it started out kind of sucky also I don't want to I don't want this video to be about blame um yeah you know it's an edge engine an edge built and all that but I sent them to stator housing because we reused that and I can't remember if I put that seal in there or how that went uh it's been a number of years ago so it may very well been me or like say that may have been something wrong with a seal the way it was split around the outside edge but either way that was not the point of this video it's unfortunate thing that happened uh and a weird thing that happened but it isn't necessarily their fault or anything like that so I just wanted to point that out but I do want to give a thanks to my folks my folks really jumped in to help me with this whole thing you know Dad building that overhead deal so we could pick up the engine and uh you know he whipped up that little that little driver that we could drive the seal in uh nicely and just things like that and mom was feeding me left and right you know down there at The Hanger so I could just keep putting in the hours and taking care of everything else around the you know they live close by so you know she was around and helping me out at home getting ready to go back on the trip so a big thanks to them that was a huge part of being able to make that trip anyway thank you patreons I appreciate you guys supporting me um especially with not you know putting out a lot of content which I explained in the last video but either way but I think this this next couple of videos should be pretty good and everybody else I appreciate if you give me a thumbs up but subscribe if you have not all that good stuff and uh yeah you guys know the deal we'll see on the next one

Channel: GravityKnightFlying

Views: 8,538

Keywords: airplane, trent palmer, flying cowboys, gravity knight flying, rans s7, s-7s, rotax, edge performance, edge performance engine, edge 912, edge 914, edge sti, kitfox, cessna, backcountry flying, backcountry aviation, off airport, stol, stol pilot, high sierra fly-in, stol drags, stol competition, bushwheels, alaskan bushwheels, acme aero, yamaha apex, s7 courier, s-21 outbound, rotax 915, ep912sti, taildragger, tailwheel, mountain pilot, mountain flying, aircraft, vans rv-15, flying

Id: irJMkD_kFDs

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023