October 14th

The weather forecast is for high, gusty wind, so I decided to do some maintenance on vehicles.  I started off replacing the alternator and powered steering belts on the van, and that was actually easier than I'd thought, once I figured everything out - it's a lot easier to take the silencer off that try and work around it.

We then went out and got a party pack of viton O rings and went to lunch, and when we got home I started in on the DRZ.  I couldn't get any of the O rings to seal the fuel tap, so I've just ordered a new tap, but I think I've got one sorted for the carb.  Taking the carb out and putting it back in was a real trial, but it's done now.  I took the spark plug out and turned the engine over to (hopefully) blow all the gas in the engine all over the garage.  I've ordered an oil change kit (it's an olde-worlde dirtbike style oil filter, rather than a spin-on, so there are a bunch of O rings in there that need replacing, too).

October 13th

I started the day at the airport, cleaning up all the oil residue from the leaky banjo bolt.  I tightened that up a bit (the factory doesn't have a torque setting for it), then went and did 45 minutes of circuits (so as to be close to the runway in case of a failure) - everything was fine.  I then cooked lunch before the EAA presentation - we'd originally been having a tank from the 747 fire tanker pilots, but they've been sent home, so Scott talked about flying the Lear 60.  After that I took the plane out for an hour of just flying around.  When I got home, I went to look at a fuel leak Vic had spotted on the DRZ.  Oh dear - an O ring in the petrol tap has dried out and died, and that's let fuel flow through to the carb, where an O ring by the needle has dried out, and that's let fuel in to the engine to the point where the cylinder is full of gas.  It's probably leaked through to the oil, too, so I'll need to change that.

October 7th

I didn't sleep well, so I spent the morning catching up on TV - luckily it's too windy for me to have flown anyway.  Research suggests that there are 2 different oil pressure senders - one imperial (expensive) and one metric (very expensive), but that the threads are similar enough that either can be mounted until you tighten it up - the wrong one will either not tighten up properly, or will tear the thread out of the oil pump.  When Vic got back from running around, we went to the airport so I could see which one is on my engine.  There was a puddle of oil under the rear of the plane, where the oil hose from the tank to the heat exchanger was leaking because the banjo bolt was finger tight.  Luckily Ken was around, so I showed him, and we agreed the best thing to do was tighten it up, burp the engine and start it to see if that was the entire problem.  I was - I immediately got ~60psi.  Interestingly, it's also put the oil level in the tank back to normal, so the oil had drained out of the system into the tank by the time I had thought to check the level.  Oh well.  Now I need to clean everything up, and bring a (I think) 24mm socket and find the torque specification and tighten it up correctly, then I'll mark it with paint to see if it loosens up (I can then easily check all the banjos in a pre-flight).

In the evening, we watched "Solo".  It's not a bad movie by itself, but I'm not sure it needed to be part of Star Wars.

October 6th

We started the day at the airport, getting everything set up for the Young Eagles event.  Vic was doing the ground crew stuff, and I was flying.  I pre-flighted the plane, brought it over and attended the pilot's briefing.  Erica, one of the organisers, suggested she go up with me to see what the gyro was like "for the kids", so we went out and did a quick circuit - she wasn't feeling like doing anything exciting, but at least I got to figure out where I should land to use the Golf taxiway back to the transient area where we were based.  After that I took a couple of kids up, but when I was going out for the 4th time, the oil pressure wouldn't come up above ~5PSI.  I shut the engine down and called it for the rest of the day.  The local wisdom is that it's the pressure sensor, rather than an actual pressure problem, but I wasn't taking any chances and pushed it back to the hangar.  The odd thing is that there's too much oil in the tank, making me think that there's a blockage somewhere in one of the lines.

After everything was packed away, we went home and I sulked for the rest of the day.

October 3rd

I had the day off (having worked on Sunday), so I went to the airport and installed an extra strobe on the Magni.  I then went to fly it with John, but found the fuel consumption probe reporting crazy numbers.  We flew anyway, and when I got back, I disconnected the strobe and everything's back to being normal.  As I was in Lincoln anyway, I went to the EAA board meeting.

October 1st

A new month, so here are the solar stats.

Power billed

Power generated

September 30th

I was working the Australia shift today, so I went to the airport, flew a bit, then went home and worked.  Yay.