Good news for me… and for N11018. No more open field tie-downs at YKM. Someone relocated some of their planes into new hangars which means some old hangars became vacant and one of those hangars was offered to me so 018 will no longer sit outside in the sweltering heat and blistering cold. She’s now parked inside a WW2 era hangar where it’s still blistering cold, but at least it’s dry! It’s a T-hangar that measures 13′ x 13′ at the tail section and 40′ x 13′ at the forward section with 10-foot high ceilings so there’s plenty of room in there for maintenance and hangar parties. Right now it’s not pretty. It has what I like to call “fixer-upper appeal”. Bottom line, I don’t have to worry about 12-inches of snow piling up on the wings or 180 days of sun taking its toll on the fabric.
I’m in the midst of some maintenance so I thought this would be a good time to get some pix and show everyone what’s under the hood of this beast. It’s a Continental O-200 that, fortunately for me, once had an owner that loved to do metal work. Nobody here on my field has ever seen an O-200 (or probably any engine for that matter) that had custom fabbed cylinder head cooling covers like this. Look closely at them and you can see the scat tubing runs from the tops of the cylinder head coolers back to the mags to keep them cool as well. There’s also a custom vent system in place for the oil cooler. That’s definitely something that makes this Wittman Tailwind stand apart from the rest. ;-)
That’s a very interesting bit of baffling you have there. It sure looks effective. Do you have individual CHT sensors so as to tell exactly what’s going on?
No, just one CHT that takes a reading from the #2 cylinder. The temperature gauge stays at a consistent 400° while S/L. It gets up to 500° during extended climb outs. On long approaches it will drop to 300°.