More plastic parts and some flying

Seems like it's been so long between flights lately due to the weather but Jeff and I still managed to get a flight to the San Juans in this past week.  Friday after work looked like a nice day for flying so we saddled up and flew to Lopez Island.  There was  a beautiful sunset on the way home and it was just a gorgeous evening for flying.  The camera just doesn't do it justice.

I also spent a considerable amount of time working with the new 3D printer making some parts and prototypes of parts.  Below you will see a series of pictures of  the new intake that I designed with Solidworks.  So far its looking like it will work but I won't know until I try it.

Oh, I got the new CNC parts today.  Looks like I have a project for the next week or so!

Ok, here is the first part of the new induction.  This part will get bolted to the front of the fuel servo.  It has holes in the sides that I will eventually put some sort of door on that allows me to get alternate air if the intake gets blocked.

Next on the list is a plate that gets bolted to the first part.  The purpose of this piece is to act as a base for the air filter that you can see in a picture further down.  The small lip you see on the top is what the K&N filter will clamp on to.  The ring around the outer edge is for the cone to bolt to.  This part is designed very similar to the James intake I had on the airplane originally.

Attached to the plate is this big cone.  Actually this is only half of the cone.

Here is the bottom half of the cone with the air filter inside.

Another picture of the air filter.  I took this one to explain how the ram air will work.  I need to cut a hole in the top of the filter and then using the top of the cone (see next picture) I can have a butterfly valve to either allow air directly into the servo or to pass down the side of the cone and through the filter before entering the fuel servo.

This is a top down view of the top part of the cone.  Here you can see both the bypasses on the side of the ring, and the ram air inlet in the middle of the ring.

This is a view from the outside of what the entire assembly will look like.  The small hole you see in the middle is for the butterfly valve that I will use to control the ram air flow.

Another top down view.  Here you can see the area of the intake filter that I need to remove to allow bypass air.

Finally here is another part that printed that will be a phone holder Ram mount for the airplane.  I use my phone to take pictures a lot as you all know and I've always wanted a safe place to put my phone that is easy to reach.  This has edges to prevent the phone from slipping but it also has a powerful magnet in the middle that will hold the phone in the cradle without clips.  This works very similar to the magnetic phone holder I use in both the car and the truck.  This still needs some sort of cloth or rubber backing to act as a bit of a cushion.

3d printer

I mentioned last week that I had purchased a 3D printer.  Well this week I got a chance to try it out.  In fact since I purchased it its been printing day and night!  I'm pretty impressed with it but it did come with two broken plastic clips that hold the bed down.  I emailed their support and they replied within an hour with a promise to send me new parts and also included a file that I could use to print my own parts!  So the first picture below is the first of two parts that I printed.

On Sunday Jeff and Martin and I got a chance to fly down to Newport Oregon.  Its a nice little town and a beautiful flight.  I tried to use my new 360 cameras that I purchased for some VR stuff but I'm not 100% of the quality of the images.

Printing the parts needed to fix the printer.

My first self designed part in the printer.

Here is the finished part...12 hours later...

Nice sunrise again for our flight on Sunday.

Martin in his RV-4 off the left wingtip as we fly up the Oregon coast

Jeff over the Puget Sound as we approached Tacoma.  You can see the Tacoma bridge in the background just in front of Jeff.

Oil cooler mods

As most of my long time readers (both of you) will recall I mounted my oil cooler on the firewall behind the #4 cylinder.  Well I also suffer with some less than optimal oil temperatures during extended high power operations.  Well I have tried many different approaches to bringing down the oil temperature some with a little success and some with little to none.  Well this week I am posting the next chapter in this never ending saga.  I decided to replace my existing oil cooler with a larger oil cooler.  The cooler I have in place now is an 8 row oil cooler so I decided to replace it with a 10 row oil cooler.  They are both about the same size but the 10 row has more oil passages giving it a higher capacity.  In doing so I decided to replace the inlet air duct as well as fabricate the outlet air ducting.  That took me a couple of weeks but I finally have something I can show.  It turns out that I built the inlet duct a little too tall so I have to go back to the drawing board on that one.

I also decided that I have been without a CNC and a 3D printer long enough!  I ordered both this past weekend and the 3D printer should arrive today.  Expect lots of new posts in the coming months with new things I am trying.  Starting out with the oil cooler inlet duct, a new alternate air inlet for my fuel servo, some headset hangers for my flight headsets, and possibly a headset control model mount for said headsets.  :-)

By the way, if you are a member of EAA you can download a free copy of Solidworks for designing different items.  It has a pretty good learning curve but WOW there is so much you can do with that software!

The inlet duct I fabricated from fiberglass is on the left and the outlet duct is on the right.  Note that the outlet duct is designed to allow me to hook up my 2" cabin heat air hose so that I can take advantage of all that hot oil heat!

Kinda hard to tell from this picture but the new oil cooler is installed and the inlet duct is sitting on top.  You can see from the picture that it sits too high and will interfere with the cowling on the right side of the picture

This is the outlet duct with the cabin heat air hose sitting just off to the left of it.  The duct is not bolted on in this picture, just set into position as a trial fit.

Oh yea, we also got a foot of snow on Superbowl Sunday.  Made for a nice snow day on Monday.  :-)

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

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.

Trim Tabs and cold weather

This week was trim tab time.  I figured I could knock them out in a few hours....right...  Anyway they are getting close to being ready to "glue" up and then rivet.  I skipped a few steps on the elevators because the next step for them is to glue (proseal) some foam spacers in place and I wanted to do the prosealing all at one time.

I did get to do a little flying the weekend.  Jeff and I went out Friday afternoon and just looped the Puget Sound.  Then on Saturday we met up with Martin and went to Jefferson County airport for a little breakfast.

Elevators ready for the trailing edge sequence.

Jeff against Mt Si as we pass over my house.

Another shot of Jeff near Mt Si.

Sunset Friday evening.  It was so cold my oil temperature wasn't getting hot enough to boil the moisture out so I did an aggressive climb up to about 7500' to warm up the oil.  While I was up there I caught this picture but it really doesn't do the colors justice.

Jeff and I do our run-up checks.  The sun was just starting to break out over Mt Rainier.  Temperature was about 21 degrees when we took off.

We ran into a little light snow at Jeffco.  This is Martins RV-4 parked next to me and the snow is drifting around.  Not much wind so it was cool to see the snow blow around the prop and plane as we landed.