Carburator Icing

Yesterday, being the first Monday of the month, was the regular get together of the local BMW airheads group. I guess it's still too early in the year for any other riders but as you can see, even at 6:30pm there is still daylight! On the ride home, I am still loving the extra light from the Denali D1 led light especially with all of the ice on the roads. The warm temperatures over the weekend has made the ice still left on the roads pretty slick.

We generally meet at the Silver Gulch which is one of two microbreweries here in town. There food offerings are typical bar food and it was a little challenging to find anything that sort of fits my diet. I settled for a portobella mushroom burger. Still too many calories and carbs but very tasty. What did we talk about?

from http://www.atsb.gov.au

I like the ride out to Fox as it is one of the few times when I ride out of town during the winter. Without others to ride with, I generally stick around town during the winter. I'm thinking that the carburetor ice theory is gaining traction. On the way back, there is several miles of modest speed, gentle curving downhill and you can easily tell that the engine was cooling down quite a bit on this run. Prime conditions for carb icing. At least from what I remember when learning how to fly. When I reached the main road, the engine stumbled a bit as it does when ingesting water instead of gasoline. Then it cleared after a short run. I guess I'm just going to get used to this issue when riding at cooler temperatures (+4°F yesterday evening). From the graph, you can see that at low power levels such as down hill runs, there is a pretty wide range of temperatures where icing can occur.

Back when learning how to fly, I was taught to always turn on carburetor heat to control icing when gliding down to the runway for landing just in case you need to reapply full power before touching down or you are doing touch 'n go's.