Bottom line up front--this will be the last airplane Blog until October, when we will be back in Arlington to pick up our plane. When we get it, it will be complete--fully painted and ready to go. Tracy and i plan to fly it from Arlington to North Carolina. I'll resume the Blog in October to show the finished product, so check back then if you like! You should be able to 'subscribe via email' to the blog if you want an alert--or better yet, just give either of us a shout to let us know you're interested, and we'll let you know!
Sorry I've been offline for awhile, but our last two weeks have been even busier than our first two! We have been working towards getting the FAA-required 40 flight hours flown off our airplane, as well as fixing some "squawk" items--things that weren't quite right about the airplane that are within our control to fix. Don't worry, mom--squawks are normal and our airplane is still very air-worthy! Just think of it as fine-tuning the machine.
Our biggest squawk, unfortunately, was a leaky engine. Our engine, built by Superior Air Parts in Texas, is a modified Lycoming. It works great, but we found that some of the silicone gaskets in the accessory case were leaking. It took us awhile to get to the cause...
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This is the fuel pump with its gold-colored heat shroud—coated in oil. When we first got down to
troubleshooting leaks, we estimated we were leaking about a cup of oil an
hour—certainly not enough to impact our available oil (6 qts) but enough to
make a nice mess in the engine bay.
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This is the oil sump—the camera flash shows the sheen of oil
and you can see the drips at the bottom.
We weren’t sure if the sump was a collection point for leaking oil or part of
the cause—so we took out the plugs at the bottom, resealed them, and put them
back in. This required a full oil
change with only 3 hours on the engine.
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Over time the leaks built up a sheen of oil on the bottom of
the plane.
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Luckily, Glasair is a great company (and our engine has a
warranty!) In this photo Jim is inspecting the engine with us. With his help (along with Preston,
Matt, and Ben!) we were able to reduce our leak to about a tbsp. per hour. Glasair will have the leak entirely
stopped when we come back to pick up the airplane.
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The only other engine problem we’ve had is a one-time
occurrence of a backfiring cylinder.
The culprit is this small piece of debris that worked its way into the
fuel injection nozzle (the nozzle opening is about ball-point-pen-sized). We cleaned out the injector line and
haven’t had any more issues. We’ve
been confident enough in the motor to take it into mountainous terrain…see
below!
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In addition to fixing our engine issues, we've still been working on getting the plane finished and ready for paint. Here are some of our rainy-day modifications:
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This piece of metal in the tail is our “tail pull”—basically
a handle for moving the airplane around easily once it’s in tailwheel
configuration. Tracy and I cut the
holes and fiberglassed this into place during a rainy morning this week. Sorry I don’t have a picture of
what it looks like from the outside…I’ll try to remember to get one in October!
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While we were working on that, Jim put the cable covers
& headphone jack inputs into the roof.
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Troubleshooting the avionics has been part of the 40 hours
of flight test. We had some
problems with the magnetometer in our EFIS—in this picture I was shooting an
approach to Orcas Island and the magnetic heading and GPS ground track are 40
degrees divergent because the magnetic heading kept drifting in the EFIS. This requires a magnetometer
calibration to fix—just the right digital wizardry.
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This is a picture of everything going right! For you GA performance junkies, this is
the rough performance we’ll see from our finished product—about 135kts True
Airspeed (145-ish MPH) on 10gallons per hour. Quick math says around 15mpg. Gadget & Holly, don’t know if we can quite keep up with
you…but we’ll carry your gear.
Those figures are still good at our 1100lb usable-load limit. :-)
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When we’re not troubleshooting—well, we’re sightseeing! It’s beautiful here. This is Olympic National Park at
sunset.
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Point Roche at the San Juan Islands.
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Mount Rainier—stunning.
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Okay, that’s it—the last picture of our new toy before it
goes to paint. In the next
two months, Glasair will fix all our squawks, weather-seal the plane, take it
apart for paint, and put it back together for us to fly it away. How’s that for a good deal?
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It’s been a life-changing experience here and we look
forward to sharing our stories with you!
Thanks for keeping up with the blog—hope you’ve enjoyed it! We’ll run a few more posts in
October, including our cross-country trip to take the plane home to North
Carolina. Hope to see you then!
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Blue Skies,
Tracy & Eric