An RV ride for another first-timer

Although to me, it seemed like his second time. That’s because I also gave a ride to his twin brother last month! I was off work yesterday and itching for an excuse to fly; lucky me to find that he was off too. The weather down south around Cincy was forecast to be mildly yucky, with periodic bouts of 4 miles visibility and ceilings down to roughly 3000′. A look at the radar returns echoed (get it?) that prognosis. Odd as it sounds, it was just the weather I was looking for! I’ve been hoping to find some non-threatening yet not appealing weather near-by in order to try out the weather reporting functions of the new Anywhere Map. The last time I flew with it, the weather was severe clear for hundreds of miles around Ohio. Everything appeared to be working, though, with the moving map moving and the weather system showing clear reports for all of the surrounding airports. The only problem I had that day was that the little stylus used for prodding the Anywhere Map PDA into life fell out of its slot on the top of the PDA, probably as a direct result of the airplane being briefly upside down. That happens a lot in RVs, you know. Hours of searching through the cockpit failed to find the little bugger, so I’ve been forced to try to use the tip of my finger for interacting with the PDA, which is a situation rife with possibilities for eliciting creative and colorful swear words. Who knew I had such fat fingers?

Local Columbus weather was pretty good yesterday and the still winds offered me a golden opportunity to give the passenger a nice, smooth ride. Take-off was a non-event, with what little wind there was favoring the runway that allows a low pass over our neighborhood so he could get a good look at his house. He pointed out how well his and his twin brother’s in-ground pools stand out, a fact with which I was intimately familiar after having flown over them after many hot & sweaty flights, dreaming of a nice, cool dip in the deep blue water, kept clean and sparkly in its benign captivity.

It was soon after takeoff that I realized that a couple of things weren’t quite right with the Anywhere Map (hereafter referred to as ‘AM’): the screen was darker than usual and barely perceptible in the bright cockpit, and the GPS hadn’t scored a connection with the AM software. Oh, bother. The screen brightness issue was easily resolved by re-seating the power plug (the PDA reduces screen brightness when it senses that it is running on the internal battery to preserve battery capacity), but the GPS belligerently refused to connect. As we got closer to Cincy, I could see the low scuddy weather I was expecting, but since the GPS wasn’t working I was unable to see it depicted on the PDA. Since there was no real destination in mind, although we had planned on a stop at Clermont Co. to visit Sporty’s, I made a quick 180 and headed back towards the blue skies up north.

As long as we were headed back up towards the north, I decided to head into Grimes-Urbana and pick up a slice of black raspberry pie for the wife. I thought the B-25 that was parked there last weekend might still be sitting there, too, and that might be a cool thing for the passenger to see. Our course took us directly towards Springfield, which is an airport I try to give a wide berth due to the presence of my old Ohio National Guard unit. They fly F-16s now, and they fly them a lot. I had no sooner mentioned that to the passenger when a pair of 16s flew right over us, albeit a couple of thousand feet higher than we were. The B-25 was, in fact, still at Urbana, and I was able to procure the single remaining slice of raspberry pie. The landing was a bit off – it was one of those landings where I hold the plane in the flare just a second too long and we arrive tail wheel first. It’s not a horrible way to land, but it does cause a wee bit of bouncing when the mains are slapped down onto the runway.

The landing back at Bolton, however, was a greaser. As with his twin brother, the passenger had a great time and couldn’t wait until his next 24 hour shift at the firehouse since “now he’d have something to talk about!”

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Leaky brake fixed, and I’m flying with my pants off again

I may have mentioned before that I noticed a bit of brake fluid on the inside of the left wheel fairing after a recent flight. Last week, I decided to fix that as long as I had the fairings off for finishing. It was really a pretty simple operation. Removing the caliper is something of a habit these days considering how many times they had to be removed and replaced while fitting the fairings, so the only new wrinkle this time was that I had to also remove the brake line. That’s a simple matter of removing the AN fitting, and having a cap handy to plug the line before a significant amount of fluid can escape. Allowing the fluid to drain out would not only create a kitty-litter clean-up job on the hangar floor, but it would also introduce a bunch of highly compressible air into the line, and that would require that the brakes be bled. There’s apparently a way to do that solo, but I’ve never done it and given that avoidance is the easier path, that’s what I did.

Once the caliper was off the plane and cleaned up, I walked it down to the FBO to have the A&P glance at it. The caliper is actually a very simple piece, and pretty much the only thing that can cause it to leak is a age hardened or damaged O-ring. The A&P had the appropriate part in bench stock, and even with his mark-up and sales tax, it was only $1.09. I gotta tell ya, I’m getting used to this “fix a problem for a dollar” maintenance plan I’ve been on ever since selling the store-bought Tampico!

The A&P showed me another little trick that would hopefully negate the need for brake bleeding: he filled the reservoir behind the caliper puck (the only moving part on the caliper) with brake fluid, then put the puck in just far enough to hold it in place. I took it back down to the hangar and re-installed it on the plane. I then tightened up the brake line AN fitting just enough to hold it on the caliper fitting but not so tight that it would hold the fluid, and pushed the puck back in. That forced the fluid in the well behind it to squeeze out of the AN fitting and keep the brake line free of air. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it did for me. I jumped into the cockpit and worked the left brake pedal. After a little excessive movement as the caliper puck moved back out into contact with the brake pad, the pedal firmed right up. No bleeding required!

The pants are both off now, and have a coat of gray primer on them. This first coat of primer seems to be primarily intended to show all of the pinholes and faults in the fiberglass that need to be filled. I mixed up a batch of epoxy and thickened it with micro balloons to give it enough consistency to stay put in some of the larger areas that needed filled. If it was just pinholes I had to fill, I think I might have gone in the opposite direction and thinned the epoxy rather than thickened it. That way I could have more or less just poured it into the pinholes or relied on capillary action to “suck” the epoxy in. As it is, I suspect I covered the pinholes more than I filled them. Hopefully that won’t make much of a difference to the final finish. Tonight I need to go back and sand all of the epoxy and primer off, and get ready for the second coat of primer.

UPDATE: Well, after a couple of hours of hard sanding, the wheel pants have been successfully transitioned from having annoying, unsightly low spots to having annoying, unsightly high spots. Ok, just kidding. It worked out pretty well, actually. I was able to sand away the micro-balloon epoxy without sanding into the harder epoxy/glass of the pants, and it looks at first glance like the filling worked pretty well. I won’t know for sure until I spray on another coat of primer, but any depressions that show up then will be very small and easily filled.

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Oshkosh Ghost Squadron

This is a picture of Oshkosh as I’ve never seen it, after the crowds are gone. This is the area where the Van’s tents were set up, and I remember it as one of the most crowded displays of the entire show. You can see where the planes were as the grass beneath them remained untrampled:

Photo by Jeff Point, Milwaukee, WI.

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Light Sport Aircraft at OSH

Last year, when I first noticed the new Light Sport Aircraft, I was pretty underwhelmed. They looked like a rag-tag collection of antiques and overweight ultralights, and I predicted that they wouldn’t be successful, at least not to the degree that they would have a positive impact in attracting new pilots to General Aviation. Well, that was last year. This year’s crop of new LSAs has made me far more optimistic that these new planes can make a significant difference to the health of GA. They are state-of-the-art, and the certification standards allow for the use of newer equipment normally allowed only in experimentals. With the addition of composite construction, affordable glass panels (Dynon in particular), and more owner-friendly maintenance options, the LSAs are poised to make a real contribution. Plus, they’re darn nice looking!

More pix below – keep scrolling!

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Time to get back to work on the plane, but….

Back from Oshkosh and more or less caught up on my to-do list, which was rudely increased by one task when the local gang of vandal-thugs destroyed my mailbox late Saturday night. It took the police three attempts at the doorbell to rouse my faithful watch dog Hogarth, who likely only got up because he caught a whiff of doughnuts. They had reports of shots fired at my house, which should give you some idea as to the state of the mailbox. Those guys must really, really hate mailboxes! They flattened it! A quick trip to Lowe’s to purchase the Main Battle Tank(tm) Vandal-Resistant mailbox and a hot, sweaty couple of hours in the baking sun and sweltering humidity were all it took to replace the old, flimsy box. I hope these punks come back – I’m not responsible for broken fingers or other extremities if they try to pound on this one:

So, what do I need to do on the plane? Well, the pants need to come back off for final trim and paint. As long as I have them off, I need to put a new O-ring in the left side brake caliper as it has developed a bit of a weepy leak. With the new pants unpainted, I was able to detect the leak via a stain on the inside of the left pant. It seems to be oil, and the only place I can think of for that to be coming from is the brake caliper. It’s an easy job (since the pants have to come off anyway) to get the caliper off and carry it down to the maintenance hangar to have an A&P take a look at it, but it’s so doggone hot this week I can’t get up the energy to do it. It will hit 95 today, which means it will be well over 100 in the hangar. This job is going to have to wait for a couple of days!

I’m also still trying to get the Anywhere Map installed. I did get a little done – I found a spot on the panel for it. That spot wasn’t empty, though. The magnetic compass was in it. There’s another empty 2 1/4″ hole that can hold the compass, so I took it out (easy access from the top since I have a tip-up canopy) and tried to install it in the other position. No go. I can’t get behind it with a tool to hold the nuts while I tighten the screws from the front. I ordered a neat little nutplate that will solve that problem, but now I’m waiting for the slow pony express delivery that is the most I’m willing to pay for on a $13 part.

Now that the mag compass is out of the way, I can mount the cradle for the PDA directly to the panel. This will position it for right hand usage, and will put it up nice and high where I can see it without looking too far down. The antennas are both very small and will easily fit on top of the glare shield. There is a box for the XM Wx that will have to be mounted somewhere, but since it doesn’t need to be able to see the sky and has no control switches on it, I can put it up behind the panel somewhere.

This ability to spread things around in the somewhat space-constrained cockpit was one of the reasons I chose the Anywhere Map over another big-box Garmin like the 396. If I had spent the extra $1,000 for the Garmin, I would have had to replace my Garmin 295. I didn’t want to do that since I anticipate using the 295 for my low-range HSI navigation (I usually keep the 295 on a 5 – 10 mile range) and using the Wx GPS on a far higher range setting of 50 – 100 miles. Navigate locally, avoid weather globally, I always say. Well, that’s actually the first time I’ve said it, but I’m always going to say it from here on out.

It’s actually somewhat fortuitous that the nutplate for the compass will take another couple of days to arrive dusty and tired from its long journey across the desert on the back of a mule – I can wait for a break in this heat wave to get back to the installation job.

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