Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Still down but progress is being made

I think I needed this down time more than I would otherwise have admitted.  Turns out that I am making good use of this time to work on a few of the projects that still needed to be done but I didn't want to get started because they might interfere with my flying...

First lets go back and address a couple of issues from last week.  Turns out attaching the 'red cube' to the flow divider was not a good idea.  I posted some pictures of the installation on VAF and got lots of negative feedback about cracking fittings and some other less critical potential issues.  I won't rehash them all here but the possibility of a cracked fitting (which would cause a fire) is something I don't want to even think about.  This week I made a few changes that should eliminate that problem and still allow me to keep the red cube away from the heat of the exhaust.

Speaking of the exhaust...  I talked to Clint at Vetterman and he says that all of their testing has shown that there should not be any back pressure in the exhaust.  However when faced with the facts of what we saw he agreed to send me a set of straight pipes to replace the mufflers and then give it another try.  Those new pipes should arrive tomorrow and my PMags should be back by Friday so hopefully next weekend I will be able to fly again.  Good thing too, the weather is suppose to be awesome!

Now on to the work for this week.  I brought the lower cowling and both wing tips home and have been working all week on getting them finished and primed.  That task is almost done and will be done by the time I get the airplane back in the air.  I am excited about having these finished.

This is how the red cube now sits.  Its not hard mounted to the flow divider any longer but I still think I need to work on the new hose routing a bit.

This is where the hose comes out below.  The special part of this is that this hose has two layers of fire sleeve on it to help alleviate any  heat issues.

One of the things we did the day of first flight was to screw these two covers down with an odd assortment of screws.  We did this because the original covers were not thick enough to allow the countersunk screws to fit properly.  I fixed that this week by fabricating two new covers that are a little thicker and then countersinking the screws properly.  Now its all nice and smooth and looks much better.