very odd. Typically badly aligned wheel and leg fairings will cause issues with trim - ball out of center, etc. Hard to imagine them being so far off as to slow you down.
Things to consider:
- How much fuel in this test versus before?
- Engine leaned for best power in all your tests?
- Baggage weight changes?
- Wide open throttle?
Best speed will be at about 7500' at wide open throttle. Wide open throttle at lower altitude will be over 75% power (and not recommended for continuous use).
Keep us posted!
Many thanks to all for the valuable help!
Yesterday I had that short flight just to move the RV from my home to an airport, 20NM away.
I previously checked if carburetor and fuel could be full opened and it was the case, then I removed the fairings for painting prepairing.
With my friend Gianluca that is a good avionic guy, we agreed to move the RV to his shopfloor to check the charging system and the other instruments.
Immediately after take off I realized that the RV wanted to run, achieving a good acceleration to 140Kts TAS while climbing. I was full throttle and fuel.
I leveled to 1200 ft approx., and I noticed a speed above 150 Kts that was a good news by itself. I also noticed that the trim tab placed on the rudder was putting the ball on the opposite side (I spent some time 14 days ago to center the ball without feet on controls), over correcting the initial defect (ball on the right). At that time I tried to level, set the rpm at 2600 (it would have done something more at full throttle) and read the speed at full rich: the speed was stable at 153KTS, max throttle gave me 159 KTS TAS.
Outside temperature was 10deg Celsius.
Since the last flight I also removed 100% of the carbon look plastic film that might have a role in drad augmentation, but I am convinced that the main effect is due to fairings removal.
Now I am going to paint the RV and this will take some weeks, at the same time the panel (avionics) will be re-wired.
I will also apply the leg stiffeners to eliminate shimmy and check once again the rigging.
Fortunately I discovered that close to me there are 2 RV-3 owners, so we have planned to fly toghether to compare parameters and performances.
In the avionics rewiring we will add a map instrument to understand something about power, and set the fuel flow sender to realistic values.
I will keep you all informed about the results, many thanks again to all of you who are supporting this project.
Gustavo