I moved the outlet skirt to the the full forward, 125 degree, position but decided not to fly the plane until I made another fix.
I realized there was no seal around the top of the inlet air filter, big gap. I had installed seals on the sheet metal around the bottom half of the filter but had never installed seals around the upper, nose bowl portion. I checked the old nose bowl and we had seals on it.
I didn't want to modify the Taylorcraft nose bowl more than I had, in case someone ever wants to use it on a Taylorcraft. Instead I made a bracket which attaches to the front of the carburetor heat box, behind the inlet filter. I made it out of 0.032" 2024-T3 aluminum. I also made a new thinner gasket for the air filter. The old one is about 1/16" thick so I needed the total thickness to stay the same. The 2 bolt holes are for the heat box mounting holes.
The felt seal is glued and stapled to the flange at the top of the bracket. The top of the seal is thinned like I did for the new seals on the main baffle.
It mounted to the heat box just as planned. I did a little adjusting of the bolt hole locations until the filter screws fit perfect.
There are 2 little gaps where I wanted to make sure the bracket and cowl didn't collide, but there were some small gaps with the old cowl.
It was a warm 75 degree afternoon, nice shirt sleeve flying weather, so I had high hopes. It turns out none of this made any difference. I'm going to move the outlet skirt back to the shallow, 135 degree, position before I do anything more. I'm also going to check the temperature of all cylinders after warm up to make sure I don't have one cylinder running a little lean. If all that fails I'll move the skirt forward another inch. We still have 2 more warm sunny days.
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