Since i have gotten the plane to the hangar two things have been tormenting my soul. One, the wing fairings and now even worse, fuel !
Last weekend I thought I was going to do my first engine start. I follow the process for priming the oil under pressure for the first engine start… That process is not hard but takes a little while… You have to disconnect the IN oil lines going to the oil tank, and then plug those ports on the tank, then disconnect all the spark plug, remove one spark plug from every cylinder, apply pressure to the oil tank vent, check the oil levels make sure that there is just a little extra,. Then hand turn the prop about 60 times or so until you see the oil pressure rise up to about 40 PSI. I was doing this myself mind you so checking the oil PSI while turning the propeller was quite the task. I turned it a couple extra minutes to make sure that the lifters got oil in them. I then put the spark plugs back in and all of the hoses reattached them.
I was then ready to start the engine !!
I powered up the plane, turn on the fuel, and notice there was no fuel pressure. At this point I know what you’re thinking… Yes I did test this before but I didn’t test it while attached to the engine nor with the actual wings attached. So for the next week I began troubleshooting a million different things. I did change a couple things here and there and I think that did in fact help… The only good news I found out during all of this is that I didn’t have any leaks which was miraculous. After about a week of troubleshooting, and my hands being stained permanently different color due to being completely wet with fuel for a week straight,. ( Wow I sure do make a lot of run-on sentences. ) I figured out my rotax fuel pump number 2 is worthless. It powers up and makes noise but it doesn’t do anything.
Warranties ugh. The fuel pump cost $2,000 to replace it. The fuel pump is brand new. It should be covered by warranty. But as is typical with large companies they don’t want you being able to make a claim on a warranty item. Rotax makes it as hard as possible to do that by requiring you to do a ton of paperwork beforehand and then taking like 6 months to replace your product and or give you your money back. I don’t have that type of time. So I went ahead and bought a replacement pump. Should be here in a couple days cuz I paid for rush shipping. We will see how this project goes from here.
Needless to say I’ve had so many problems that this project really starting to get depressing.
update: i received the new pump. It instantly fixed the problem. Pump 2 was bad… Being an engineer and Not being happy with that answer I followed Evans advice and tried SeaFoaming it. I left it run seafoam and fuel 4 to 1 mixture for two hours and it improved psi from 0 to 6. Obviously not good enough but a step in the right direction. I will run it for longer just to experiment. Never use it. Just learning.