Saturday, August 20, 2011

Saturday, August 20, 2011 Next Trip to the Airport

Today was a beautiful day. Warm, not hot, and promise of success. I took the wing out and set it up to inflate. Knowing it would not fully inflate, I began to examine what I had. I checked out the aft flying wire, but did not see anything wrong with it. But the control wires looked like they were straining, which was not normal. I disconnected the fabric from the end of the leading-edge tubes and disconnected the control wires, and that allowed the wing to inflate. So it looks like since the control wires were cut by the EMT’s, and when I spliced them, the length apparently isn’t correct. I will have to get Larry to measure the length of the wires so I can have them re-fabricated by Aero Assemblies.

I had arranged with Richard to meet later at the airport in the afternoon because he was tied up in the morning. When he arrived at about 1PM, we started on the challenge of pulling the fan belt pulley so I can replace the fan belt, which showed wear. He thought he had a tool to facilitate that, but when we tried, we could not remove the pulley. So that project must be put off for later.

We next began to complete the basic wiring so the engine would turn over. We attached wires to the starter switch and the kill switch, mounted and wired up the new starter solenoid, attached the battery cables, pushed the starter button, and after some false starts, the engine turned over. Major success! Now we can proceed on to getting the engine to actually run!

Now I need to start thinking about ordering the propeller.

No comments:

Post a Comment