Thanksgiving weekend

Turkey Day!  Yep, lets start this out right...

Dishin' up some dinner. 

Jeff and I flew to Hoquiam and this is us passing over Tacoma Narrows airport.

You have to love the pacific northwest some times....

The little town of hoquiam.  Airport is on that little strip of land in the far left side of the picture.

Base to final.

Looking back at Jeff as we headed home.

Somewhere down there is Martin's hangar at KTIW.  I was hoping to get a picture of him taxiing but it doesn't look like hes out yet.

Yes, I even spent some time working on the 9A. In this picture I am working on reorienting the exhaust pipes to give them a little more clearance to the firewall.

A little better picture of the final position.  Not tightened down yet and still a little adjusting to do on the left side.

The 9A is running again

Not much 10 work to report this week since I think I spent most of the time working on getting the 9A back in running condition...that and I was traveling for the first 3 days of the week.  However, I did get my fuel servo back from AirFlow Performance this week and unfortunately he told me that it was running on the lean side of the calibration curve.  Well that leaves only the air inlet as a potential source of over rich fuel.  The theory that was presented is that my intake is causing some turbulent air flow at the inlet of my fuel servo which is causing it to indicate a much richer mixture is needed.  So I am going to be doing a few things to my inlet to see if I can eliminate that issue but first I am going to fly it with a few simple mods to see if it really is an issue with the air inlet.  Hence this weeks pictures.

I also took the time while the 9A was down to do a bunch of little things to the airplane.  I had a flat tire on the pilot side so while I had that wheel off to replace the tube I decided it was time to replace the brake pads on both sides.  I also spent a lot of time sealing up some of the small holes I found in my baffles that were hard to see with all the inlet ducting installed.  As an oddity I also took a file to the cooling fins between the valve guides...its one area where the casting process can leave a lot of "slag" and that also can affect cooling.

First up I decided to take a picture of the air inlet to my oil cooler.  I am going to have to do some work on this some day as well as I think I can make the airflow much smoother into the cooler with should help with cooling.

Next up you can barely see it here but on the left side of the picture you can see my new inlet ducting with the alternate air filer installed.  Look at the next picture and it might make more sense.

Here is a better view of the new inlet ducting.  This is the first configuration I tried and when I attempted to install the lower cowling I found that there is no way to make the alternate air duct fit inside on this side.  However, Jeff or Harry suggested I might be able to make it work if I removed my alternator and installed one on the vacuum pad on the aft end of the engine.

In this picture you can see the narrow channel that the air ducting has to fit in.

So here it is with the alternator removed and the new inlet ducting installed.  Works perfectly!!  However, now I have to buy a new alternator.  I guess that's ok because I need one for the 10 anyway.  One thing to note on this view is the huge gap between the new inlet duct and the cowling inlet bung.  I am going to have to fabricate a reducer that is about 3" long to bridge that gap.

Project weekend

I took this friday off and Amy is gone doing one of the "girl" things for the weekend so I got a chance to work on a few different projects.  A little work on the Rv-10 elevators, and a little work on the 9A.

My new priming "booth"...well at least the priming table.  I decided to start using the downstairs area to do priming since it smells so strong.  I have lots of room down there but not much light so I purchased 3 new 48" LED lights, a few air fittings, and some new air hose and spent the day Friday putting this together.  I was hoping to do one batch of priming before I quit but by the time I had all of this done I was beat...

Rudder horn riveted on.

Spar doublers and nutplates for the elevator attach bolts riveted on

Counterbalance arms riveted together

Priming session #1 with the new setup complete.  worked nicely!

What the heck is that?  You've seen it before, this is my induction filter housing assembly.  As I mentioned last week I sent my fuel servo off to AirFlowPerformance to get tested, well I got a call from Don and it turns out my servo is flowing on the lean side of the curve.  Exactly opposite of what I expected to hear.  After a brief discussion we came to the conclusion that there must be some air inlet issues if the fuel is correct.  Next step is to see about reworking the inlet and this is the picture I sent to Don showing the current configuration.

As I was riveting the ribs on the elevator skins I had an unusual "blowout".  The rivet must have tipped over and split the dimpled hole.  Oh well, I ordered a new rib from Vans...no biggie.

All but that final rib ready for the next step.