Adding additional oil capacity with a high-capacity sump

[Bryan_Cotton]

Hey gtfan1, welcome to the forum!

I’ve never heard of anybody adding one of these extended sumps to an AeroVee. I see a few downsides, the biggest one being weight. Both the weight of the sump and the additional oil. Weight is the enemy on a Sonex! The extra surface area could help cooling, but realize the AeroVee sump lives in a hot area as compared to a VW Bug sump that is hanging in the breeze. The best thing, in my opinion, is adding airflow to the existing sump if you have oil temperature issues:

Cotton AeroVee - hot oil and sump baffle

We have always had oil cooling issues. For the most part we could live with it - but historically when we would climb up to 5500’ two-up in the summer that was as high as we could go, because the oil would be approaching 230. Once we leveled off, the oil temp would come down slowly and be fine in cruise. When I would fly solo to 6000’, I would often see 220F but it would cool down once I started doing maneuvers. Especially because I’d have to pull the throttle back during dives to keep the e…

Wes Ragle went another route, and used a real oil cooler on a full flow system. Also gave him an easy path to getting cabin heat in the airplane:

Cabin Heat Options

Hi Guys, Here is one option. Of course, feel free to add your solution to the list. Since the pics from the old forum did not survive the port to SonexPilots, I thought I would recover what I could of my cabin heat solution. Properly implemented it provides good oil cooling and cabin heat without having to run scat tubing all over the place. This is for a Onex with a Hummel 2400. Here is a copy from a recent email. Here is a pic of while I was mocking up the firewall on lexan. It didn’t e…

I seemed to have as much trouble as anybody with oil temperatures but adding a baffle and some fresh air on the stock sump has worked wonders for me. There is a lot of surface area on the stock sump.

I’ve not found the stock 2.75 quart capacity to be a problem. We run our naturally aspirated AeroVee really hard and I’ve been hot-rodding it over the years. Extra capacity would not really improve cooling, it would just take longer to heat up and cool down.