Monday, January 30, 2017

A little more flying...

This weekend I got a chance to take a good friend flying.  Dave is a great photographer so most of the pictures below are from his camera.  We had planned on flying down to Sun River but the runway had some pretty big snow chunks so we planned to fly to Madras.  When we got down there the town was covered in freezing fog so we opted to go a little further and land at Redmond Oregon.  After borrowing the local courtesy car, and eating some lunch, we launched for Aurora Oregon to pick up a part for another friend Ben who drives an RV-12.  A brief stop in Aurora and maybe a cookie or two later we were on our way back home.  This time we stayed low and flew over Portland, up the river, and then crossed near Chehalis on our way home.  All in all we had just over 4 hours of flying and a LOT of fun.



The start of the day

My passenger, photographer, and good friend Dave


Jeff snuggling up for a picture.

Not sure what happened here....Dave must have had his camera upside down or something....



On final to Redmond.  Look at all the snow!

Snowy backdrop.

Jeff and Chad as we taxied out for departure from Redmond

I think this is Smith rock.  Taken on our departure from Redmond.

downtown Portland from 1000' agl





The end of the day after cleaning up the hangar a little

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Long hiatus

Wow, it has been a while since I posted any updates but unfortunately for the 10 there haven't been any.  I've been working pretty much solely on the 9A, oh and doing a bit of flying.  :-)

So what have I been doing on the 9A?  Well I recently purchased a new oil cooler that has more cooling capacity than the one I currently have installed.  As the warm flying approaches I want to do everything I can to keep that oil cool so I moved from an 8 row cooler to a 10 row cooler.  As most of you will remember I have my oil cooler mounted on the firewall and that means I have to duct cooling air to the cooler.  So, I've been fashioning new inlet and exit ductwork.  I decided that since I have the cooler off of the airplane that I might as well finish the exit cooler design plans that I had.  I will have more pictures of this process in the future.

Because of the cold air I decided to do something about the temperature in the airplane as well.  Part of the problem is that cold air can enter the cockpit from the tailcone via some corrugated stiffener bends in my baggage compartment covers.  I pulled those covers and molded some soft rubber plugs for these corrugations and then I glued them in place.  So far it seems to have cut the air flow down considerably.

Oh, I'm also trying out a new audio panel that allows me to use a connection bluetooth to my phone for playing music during flight.  No more cables running across or under the panel.  :-)

Below are some pictures I've taken, or my passenger took, while flying the past few weeks.

Mariah and I after our Christmas flight.

This is a picture of the existing oil cooler and inlet ducting.

Jeff and I on an afternoon flight around the sound.

See Seattle in the background?  We are headed North while flying over the puget sound to the West of Seattle.

Oh this could have been such a great picture....I think it was so cold I couldn't hold the camera still...

Andy Karmy in is RV-8 moving in during a flight around the sound yesterday.


Another picture of Andy with Josh in the back seat.  Josh got his first RV ride today.

Ok, this is a selfie that Josh took during an aileron roll in Andy's 8.  So cool!  If you look closely you can see the ground above his head.