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Hits: 1987

I spent much of Saturday out at the hangar, grinding through the various engine to airframe hookups. I’m putting things back together in the reverse order that I removed them, based on the detailed notes I took.

The biggest single thing I got done was reinstalling the oil cooler on the left rear baffle. It took quite a bit of patience to get the oil cooler hoses to screw back onto the fittings on the engine and oil cooler, but I finally got them done once I discovered the correct magic words to utter.

I ran into one significant snag, much to my frustration. The oil temperature sender would not thread back into the hole on the top of the oil filter adapter. It would screw in about one turn with my fingers, then come up hard. I tried gently turning it with a wrench, to check whether there was just a bit of crud, but it wouldn’t turn any further. The threads on the sender look good, but the ones in the oil filter adapter look suspicious.

I don’t recall any difficulty when installing this sender before, but it certainly feels like it is cross threaded now. I acquired a 5/8"–18 nut and bolt late yesterday. On Monday I’ll use them to confirm the sender threads are good, and the ones in the engine are bad. Then I’ll call Aero Sport Power to discuss it with them. They must have put a sender in that hole when they ran the engine in their test cell, and perhaps the installer cross threaded it. The oil filter adapter is a removable part, so I think the best option is to have Aero Sport courier me a replacement, and I’ll send this one back to them.