Lee. I understand your proposal. Coincidentally, I just had one of my wing tanks removed for a rework by John Wright Jr., a really nice guy.
I am having the filter finger laying around here and I took a closer look at the filter. The one in the wing tanks is not even an half inch in diameter and 2 inches long. The mesh is not the finest, I measured 0.037 inches in one cell. So the bigger crud will not make it through, but the particles of the sloshing compound will. A finer filter seems to be a good thing here. But I see one problem with your proposal. You can only fit a filter up to 1/2 inch in diameter onto that finger. Anything wider will not fit through the hole of the fitting in the tank. That does not leave much of a surface for a filter. If one can fit a filter there, it might become contaminated in the lower part pretty fast. Then you'll end up with less usable fuel. I can see that a coupe equipped with such filter will need to have the filters checked more often, if not every annual. Also, will the fuel make it trough that filter fast enough? That will be hard to measure. After all, you will have to ensure a certain fuel flow, even with a partly contaminated filter. Then again, why all this hassle? If your fuel system appears to be contaminated, have someone clean it and that will take care of the problem. We did that on my Ercoupe and all the sloshing stuff was flushed out and I have not seen any of the brown flakes afterwards. Important to me seems the last fuel filter before the fuel enters the carburetor.On our planes the gascolator. And I am checking that one before each flight. Hartmut ----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [email protected] Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 7:23 PM Subject: RE: [ercoupe-tech] Tank cleaning Apparantly some are not connected to the front end of this issue as STC and 337s have already been discussed. Also, not everyone has the funds to remove, disassemble, clean, and reassemble the tanks and some who may have the funds may not do it anyway. Also a 3-4 inch finger filter won't clog in a very long time. They are on auto fuel pumps in the tank and some last the life of the fuel pump without becoming clogged with the contaminates in auto fuel. Lee -- WILLIAM BIGGS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Not legal unless it has FAA-PMA and or STC approval. What needs to be done is to FIX THE PROBLEM, not the symptom. Especially something as serious as fuel flow. Put on a finer mesh filter and it is going to clog sooner. If you have trash in the gas, find the source and eliminate it. Bill ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [email protected] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:13:23 -0400 Subject: Re: [ercoupe-tech] Tank cleaning Is it legal to use a paper gas filter housed in a clear plastic housing, as often found in an "impulse-buy" display next to the cash register at a car parts store? I used one of those on my VW bus for 26 years and had one on my lawn mower. The real point being is that if one adds a filter to screen out bits of brown crud (old frothingslosh??) and one cannot readily see the filtering element and one also has a brown crud problem, how does one know when it's really loaded and about to starve the engine? Jim Brennan NC93963 WST / RI (and I think that, before encountering this group, this may have been done to one of my wing tanks by a shop in New Hampshire) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook - together at last. Get it now! _____________________________________________________________ Make big money trading currency. Click here for more information.
