I snuck in a quick flight after work before it got dark. I had four goals for the flight: check prop RPM, confirm the fire sleeve fixes the fuel flow at high altitudes, do some spin testing and confirm idle mixture. On takeoff, the prop RPM came up to 2680, so I’m getting really close on the RPM. One more small tweak should get me there. I set up a cruise climb at 2500 RPM and about 120 kts and was still able to reach 10,000 ft by Hollister (less than 15 nm away). This plane really wants to climb. I continued the climb up to 12,500 ft and flew around a bit. At first, the fuel flow was rock solid around 12 gph (still reading high) with none of the dips near 0 gph that I saw earlier at 10,000 ft. After flying along for a few minutes though, I started getting occasional excursions up to around 16 gph, but they would generally come back down within a few seconds. It looks like I still have some work to do here.
I descended back down to 8,000 ft near an airport so that I could do some spin testing. I first slowed an did a couple of stalls to ensure the engine was leaned properly, then climbed back up to start spin testing. The started with an incipient spin. As the stall broke, I applied full left rudder and the plane rolled about 90º to the left. I applied full right rudder and broke the stall, then rolled level and pulled out of the dive. The recovery was nearly instantaneous, so I climbed back up and tried a second one with the intention of waiting a moment before recovery. This time, the plane rolled well past 90º and the spin started to accelerate. I applied full right rudder and was able to stop the spin after about 3/4 turn. The recovery wasn’t quite as instantaneous, but still very positive. I continued to repeat the testing, letting the spin develop further each time. The spin really accelerates after the first turn but stabilizes pretty quickly after that. It spins quite a bit faster than the Decathlon I have been flying, and fully developed spins seem to take nearly 1 full turn to recover, but recovery is always positive. After doing a number of spins to the left, I did a handful of spins to the right with roughly the result. All of these were power off with ailerons neutral. I’ll try power on and in/out spin ailerons on subsequent flights. Overall, it’s a fun plane to spin. One surprise was that the SkyView really freaks out while spinning. On one recovery, It showed me upside down after recovering to straight and level. It fixed itself within just a few seconds (which is substantially better than most competing EFISes).
After landing with a nice warm engine, I taxied back to the hangar and did a slow mixture pull to confirm a small RPM rise. There was no perceptible rise, so I think I overshot the correct mixture and I’m now running too lean. I’ll adjust it before the next flight.