Thursday, December 5, 2013

It Wasn't In The Gascolator...

So I spent another night at the hangar trying to determine what is causing my fuel pressure issues. I opened the gascolator and found, practically nothing. The screen is clean and nothing indicated that it wasn't clean all along. What to do?
I decided to drain the rest of fuel out that I couldn't get with my handy ATV pump which amounted to about 5 gallons. I turned on the electric pump and put a bucket under the gascolator to catch the gas. This turned out to be an almost hour long ordeal as the flow was that minimal. The Skyview showed a flow of 6.4 gallons per hour and the amount drained and the time needed verified that it was pretty accurate.
I felt compelled to do the drain test for the last gallon which is part of the PAP and instead of 181 seconds (which would have been sufficient) it took me almost 20 minutes to squeeze that gallon out of the tank.
This clearly indicates a problem between the tank and the gascolator. When the flow started to be somewhat slow at the beginning of the drain, I removed the fuel cap to see if it was a venting issue but that did not have seemed to make a difference on the flow rate.
The next tests will be to remove the fuel line at the electric pump and to see which side has the restriction. My hopes are that the fuel pump is the culprit as this would be easier to fix than an issue in the tank or in the fuel lines (maybe the lines wouldn't be so problematic but I doubt accessibility would be easy).

To be continued...

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