Scudrunners

PS  Never leave a cheap "constant current" charger on any
battery unless you regularly monitor it with a voltmeter and
know when to take it off.  Even a little 1 amp charger can
over-voltage and destroy your battery if you leave it on
long enough!

You need a "smart" or "constant voltage" (it isn't really, but)
charger which varies it's output current with the battery
voltage.  Once the battery voltage gets high enough, it
drops it's charging current to avoid damaging the battery.

Here is what a "smart charger" voltage looks like:

[img width=500 height=333][/img]

Note that it charges up to 14.3 volts and then
shuts off.  The battery slowly falls down and then
before sulfation can begin at 12.8V, it spanks
the battery again.  Rinse, lather, repeat as the
shampoo bottle says.

There are many good brands of "smart" chargers,
such as CTEK, Genius and the original Battery
Tender, which I buy because they are simple and
cheap and do a great job of keeping a good battery
in good shape.

PS  As I say to the kids at work, 30 years ago I
used to be an electrical engineer.  Today, not
so much.  I am amused, though, when people
mistake me for a hardware engineer.  No, I write
software, but recently I had to explain to a young
fellow what

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger[/url]

was in his pinconfig, and why he might want it.
Think of a dead band in A-to-D conversion.

Fun, fun, fun!

[img width=500 height=422][/img]

PS  You would be amazed at how much money you can
earn if you can remember [i]three basic words[/i]:

[size=18pt][b]POWER
CLOCK
RESET[/b][/size]

Is there power?  Is there power sequencing?  Ramping?

Is the requisite clock present?  How does it look on the scope?

Is the fucking reset line asserted?

I don't know how all of the oil lines are routed in the Pitts, but in the Zlin (yes, I'm one of those nerds) there was a line that IIRC never saw any flow when you were right side up and could collect water.  It even had a drain valve but we never paid any attention to it.


Well, we never paid attention until one day when we had to of them ice up their breathers on cross countries and blow out their front seals within about twenty minutes of each other.  Best guess was that this line burped out a cup or so of accumulated water and when it hit the oil it flashed off, all entering the line and freezing at once.  Residual engine heat on the ground and lack of cold airflow will melt away the ice before you can figure out exactly where it froze but in our case it had to have been upstream of the extra breather hole.


Just a heads up, if your 360's inverted oil is plumbed anything like the one I used to fly.

Let me guess:  cold day in Jan/Feb, below -20C?

That's when oil breather icing is the worst, in my
experience.

Need to make sure you drill the hole in the breather
tube close enough to the engine, I guess.

[img width=500 height=375][/img]

I should mention that this talk of drilling a relief
hole in the crankcase oil breather tube to avoid
blowing the crankcase seal is for [i]experimental
aircraft only[/i].

TC is going to get very upset if you take a drill
to your certified aircraft.

I know a guy who's blown the crank seal twice
on his certified R44.  That's the way the paper
wants it, I guess, and if there's one lesson I've
learned in my life in aviation, it's that paper is
more important than physics or engineering.

[quote author=Colonel Sanders link=topic=7412.msg20350#msg20350 date=1509864739]
With that in mind, toss a pint of Camguard into the oil, and
put a battery tender on [i]every time[/i] you park your airplane.

[/quote]

Is this the camguard you were referring to:

Is there any point in doing this during a Winnipeg winter? Isn't everything extremely dry anyways?