“My new club has several amateur built Jodels. None of them have any fuel drain. They never had issues.”
After a wet night outside at Glenforsa, our DR1050 had water in the rear tank. It formed orange globules with the leaded 4* then in use, as well as the water drained. (May 2000)
I kept a sample of the drained globule mix, and showed it to an ex-oil company chemist. No explanation, maybe some sort of wax. The globules remained in the sample for over 9 months at room temperature, then disappeared.
The rear tank inlet was on the vertical fuselage left side.
I recall a requirement/recommendation to modify lockable drains to remove the locking tabs so as to make them unlockable due to similar incidents in the uk?
I have found significant(engine spluttering) amounts of water when sumping some aircraft over the years…almost certainly due to outside storage with leaky fuel caps.
tmo wrote:
How much water from condensation did you sump?
Can’t remember now. I have a photo around somewhere – will try to find it.
Airborne_Again wrote:
the other must have been condensation
How much water from condensation did you sump? I’m still to find any water, luckily.
Aveling wrote:
In 20 years I’ve never had the slightest trace of water
I’ve been flying for about as long as you, and I’ve found water maybe 2-3 times. One of them was after the aircraft had been parked outside during a full day rainstorm, but the other must have been condensation.
Snoopy wrote:
Pushing hard had engaged the bayonet.In other words, it remained open?
Yes. Normally I would just push it sufficiently to get a couple of cc’s of fuel being well aware of the pesky locking problem. This time, I’d pushed it hard enough to engage the bayonet without realising it because only a few drops of few came out, and then stopped.
My new club has several amateur built Jodels. None of them have any fuel drain. They never had issues.
Thank you for your recount.
Pushing hard had engaged the bayonet.
In other words, it remained open?
We have one lockable drain (on the bottom of the aux tank). Without an aux tank, an Auster has no drain you can check at all! (There is a fuel screen, but you have to cut safety wire and remove the bottom of the bowl to check it, we check and clean this every 6 months and I’ve never found more than a couple of grains of sand in the bottom of the bowl).
In any case, I’ve never found any contaminants from our aux tank drain, which is the lowest point in the fuel system. I disassembled the fuel system last annual to replace some expired parts (seals etc) and while removing the fitting out of the bottom of the main tank got a good couple of litres of fuel out (the unusable fuel) which also had no kind of contamination. There’s a finger screen on the main tank fitting, so there’s two screens by the time you get to the engine – I have to imagine this arrangement is fairly common.
Interesting timing. We have three lockable drains on our aircraft. One of them has recently started to become sticky and prone to staying slightly open with a dribble. I have it on the list to get changed next week.
