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Dave's RV-7A Builder's Log
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Date: 12-16-2017
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Number of Hours: 3.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: First oil change
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Today was the day for accomplishing the first oil change. Some people do this at 10 hours, but I decided to follow Lycoming’s guidance and go with 25 hours…or in my case, 22 hours. The airplane has been flying great so I wasn’t expecting any big surprises, and thankfully there were none. The process starts with a flight to warm the oil up, so I went out and did some more test flying for almost two hours. After pulling the airplane back in the hangar and de-cowling it, I waited the requisite 15 minutes to allow the oil to settle into the sump and then removed one of the drain plugs. I had placed a large bucket under the drain, so at least this part of the process created very little mess.
After draining for a couple of minutes, things slowed to a drip, so I started removing the upper left GPS antenna tray to afford better access to the oil filter. I had purchased some fancy oil filter bibs to help catch some of the oil as the filter came off, and they actually work pretty well. I’m not sure that just a heavy plastic bag wouldn’t be just as effective, but these were designed for the purpose so that part of the mess was relatively contained. So far, so good. But as always, there was one more opportunity to get oil all over the place…and that was the oil suction screen. The suction screen is designed to catch big stuff that has settled in the sump before it circulates through the engine. It lives on the lower aft portion of the engine, and I naively assumed that the sump drains would have emptied all oil in this area…and I was wrong. Once removed, a big surge of oil came out, and although it was only about a pint in volume, the deed was done. Fortunately I was able to contain it all on a floor pan, so aside from cleaning up a few engine parts, it wasn’t too bad.
I finished up by cutting the filter open to check for metallic debris (none thankfully) and then installed a new filter, cleaned and installed the suction screen and sump drains, and called it complete.
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Who wants to see what's inside?
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More mess...
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