Hi all,

Saturday went out flying with my Kadet MkII, it's still very windy here in NL (force 4/5) but overall flying went well. I did my own takeoffs and flight, but my instructor did the landings as it was too windy for me (not feeling like doing repairs if I can avoid them ).

Anyway on my last flight of the day I made some loops and 'wild manouvres (ok, trying to recover from the loop and turbulence)' and started to line up the plane to hand over to my instructor for landing when I noticed something wasn't right. The engine stopped and that with the plane at a good distance away with the wind blowing the plane further from the field.

My instructor took over and managed to land the plane as softly as humanly possible. Then I had to crawl my way through wet mud & heavy clay, but found the plane and no damage at all!!!

So that was all good in the end, leaves the question why the engine stopped. It's an OS .40LA, never stopped before and tank was still half-full when it died. When diagnosing it turned out that when you hold the plane nose down for a few seconds with a ~half-full tank (with engine running) airbubbles were sucked in and the engine would sputter badly but mostly keep running. Except during the last flight when either the bubble was too big or something else caused it to stop.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I was advised to not use the standard clunk that came with the tank but rather a 'Filt-Clunk'.
I borrowed one from someone who had a spare and flew with it today and the problem seems to be solved. This clunk sort of keeps a reserve of fuel even when the clunk is not dipped in the fuel for a brief time.

Sofar my experience with it is good, it seems to have solved the problem. If it keeps up I wil never build a plane without it anymore!

Thought I'd share this. I never gave my clunk a second thought but they can make the difference between a normal landing or a deadstick....Anyone have similar experiences?

Johan