Thursday, June 9, 2011 I Hit a Gold Mine

Some time ago, I had reached out to a guy who I found on the Homebuilt Aircraft web site that seemed to be expert with Kawasaki motors. He happened to live in Plymouth, MN, which was not far from the Crystal Airport where the Jetwing is hangered. He responded and eventually we agreed to meet at the airport today. His name is Richard Schmidt, a retired race care driver and mechanic, and now a student sport pilot, and seems willing to help. What a find! We met in the afternoon and he seems very knowledgeable (to my limited knowledge) and immediately dove in to the project. He sent me to find some carburetor cleaner and other stuff that would help him rebuild the carburetor. By the time I got back, he had it torn down and ready to clean all the small parts and reassemble it. I was impressed with his knowledge, thoroughness, and yet speedy way he approached working on the carburetor. I gave me some assignments to take home with me, such as to clean the air filter, get the throttle cable parts to enable connecting it to the hand control, replace the belt from the engine fan, get some fuel tubing to run from the gas tank to the fuel pump, straighten the instrument panel, charge the battery, etc.

After remounting the carburetor, we moved on to figuring out the wiring for the engine. The EMT’s had chopped up the wiring at the time of the accident, so we had to try to figure out what wire did what from the remains. We checked out the spark and found that there was good spark and decent compression. We found the on/off circuitry to connect eventually to the kill switch and planned the wiring for the starter and key switch.

We also unmounted the little tach (known as “Tiny Tach”) that was still mounted to the instrument panel to see if works at all. If it does work, that would save me having to buy a tach. The essential engine instrumentation for the Jetwing is, in addition to the tach, dual CHT’s and EGT’s, which could be clustered into a quad-style 3-inch round gauge which is available from Aircraft Spruce. Or some other configuration, but I do need CHT’s and EGT’s for both cylinders.

So I think I’ve taken a giant leap forward to getting this thing to run. I’ll get my assignments done and contact Richard for another session. I wouldn’t be surprised if we would get the Kawasaki running next time at the airport.