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1. 09:10 PM - Re: SB-912-065/914-046 (AmphibFlyer)
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| Subject: | Re: SB-912-065/914-046 |
rickofudall wrote:
> Did the weight check per the Service Bulletin and found a heavy float. You can
see the crack on the lower edge of the left hand float in the picture.
My 914 is 15 years old; but I replaced both carbs last year with new ones that
I bought on Ebay. (The price was hardly more than the cost of a rebuuild kit.)
Everything was fine for several months, but then I started smelling gasoline
in turbulence, and occasionally the engine would flood after a flight and was
hard to re-start. Sometimes the next day after flying I'd see that a bit of gasoline
had run down the side of the pylon (it's a high-wing pusher SeaRey) and
onto the turtledeck below. I worked around that by turning off the fuel pumps
about 30 seconds before switching the engine off. That prevented flooding, but
made me anxious, even though the engine ran just fine otherwise.
Then three people I knew with brand new engines had similar but much worse problems.
The engine would load up and sometime quit when idling. Then in flight at
low throttle settings. One got so bad that the only way the pilot could keep
the engine running in flight was to turn both fuel pumps OFF! When the engine
would begin to stutter he'd flip on one pump for a few seconds. It was a scary
situation for him, but he managed to reach an airport and land safely.
Eventually Rotax issued the SB.
And THEN I had a look at the serial numbers on my "new" carbs. Sure enough, they
were in the range that Rotax cited.
So a few days ago I took the floats out and weighed them: 3 g, 3 g, 3 g, 2.9 g--all
within the acceptable range, but very close to Rotax's maximum pair weight
of 7 g.
Furthermore, 2 of the 4 floats were abraded and had chips worse than those in Rick's
photo. They had been in service for about 200 hours.
I replaced them with unused floats from a carb kit that I bought about 8 years
ago. Those floats weighed only 0.5 g less than the faulty floats but they had
no cracks or chips.
I've flown the airplane about 5 hours since then without smelling gasoline in flight,
and the engine doesn't flood, and there's no gas seeping out anywhere.
So I'm calling it fixed, at least for now.
Anyone with an engine or carbs in the worry range of serial numbers should take
that SB VERY seriously! And if they notice any of the symptoms I've described,
I'd urge them to stay on the ground until they can check the floats.
Read this topic online here:
http://forums.matronics.com/viewtopic.php?p=434855#434855
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