15 May 11
The main air dams are coming along slowly.
|
|
The nose air dam is done. The airflow and pressure recovery are improved over the original design.
The nose dam video showed good improvement.
The main dams have a lot of work left to do. An initial test flight with the front half only indicated no improvement.
17 May 11
The reed valves on the Bowers ram air blew out again. I'd noticed reduced MP lately when using ram air and, of course, the reason was leaking ram air pressure. I noticed a similar problem several months ago but dismissed it as being a one time problem due to backfiring. Now, I'm not so sure, but even if caused by backfiring, the reed valves should not blow out.
So, I decided to cut reed valves out of .010 aluminum and make them a little larger so more surface contact helps prevent blow out. Rod shipped me some new plastic material, but it appears to be substantially the same as that which failed. For now, I'm going to try the metal valves and I'll switch back to plastic only if the metal fails.