chadadamsiii
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2014
- Messages
- 82
- Reaction score
- 23
So pretty much since I bought my airplane(Cherokee Challenger 180) (30 hours ago) I have been fighting with plugs. I don't have a plug tester or gap tool. I do have one of those blast cleaners with the media in it and a tool to remove the lead balls. I cleaned them a couple times but things never felt right. About every 10 hours of operation I would get an occasional skip on a mag check and have to lean it out and warm up the plugs to make the skip go away. The engine always ran "not smooth". The center elctrodes on the old plugs were worn just enough to detect with my eye but not worn out. So I decided to stop fighting with them and plunk down the cash on the fine wires from Tempest. Well here are some things I noticed since then. The engine fires quicker when starting, I crank for about 30% of the time I did before. When it does fire the RPM,s do not seem to climb for the first minute like it did before. In the past i would start it and the RPM's would gradually creep up from say 900 to 1500. I would have to pull back the throttle to keep it from going over 1000 rpm. Now it is just stable. And smooth of course. The slight hesitation I had as I advance the throttle to full power on take off is pretty much gone. At cruise I used to keep the RPM in the 2300 to 2350 range because any higher RPM just seemed to burn more fuel, create more noise and vibration and generally feel like I was making the airplane do something it didn't want to do. Now I found myself cruising in the 2500-2600 rpm range at higher altitudes and the engine was smooth as glass. I also noticed that leaning had a different feel. Previously when I would lean to "rough" and then advance to rich the rough just went partially away. Now the "rough" is gone and there is a surge in RPM right in that sweet spot. I definitely did not have that before. It seems to me the new plugs deal much better with lean conditions. I am not real sure about fuel consumption since I haven't really run at these rpm's consistently prior to this to get a good reading but I will say with full tanks and 250 pounds of me and my junk on board I am cruising at about 121 knots. I used my gps and went a few different directions to get that average at 4500 feet. I'm not sure how a new set of massive electrode plugs would have worked vs. the fine wires. Maybe they would have been just as good. I'm not sure. But either way I am very happy with the changes in my aircraft since I put these in.
