April 21st

I called the support guys for the inverter on my solar system, that seems to be having the occasional problem where it drops to 0.  They're guessing that the problem is that the grid power goes "out of sync" somehow - I pointed out that I have the voltages, and they're not changing, so they're blaming phase frequencies and things and stuff, which sounds a lot like "it's complicated, don't worry your pretty little head about it".  Oh well, we'll see if it happens again - I've only caught it doing this twice.

April 20th

After discovering that the Chilipepper appliance isn't working properly, I went over to the airfield and took the plane out for a while, looking for a dog that the SPCA has lost (I didn't see it).

April 19th

After playing Warcraft for a while, I put together the Chilipepper appliance for the bathroom with a new gearbox, and spent a while reinstalling it.  It seemed to work, so I then went to the airfield for the Safety Team presentation.  The presentation was about dissimilar aircraft operations, so we heard from powered parachute to corporate jet pilots.

After that, I got myself all sorted out and took the plane out.  There was a Jet Prop and 2 RVs in the run up area, so I waited for them to leave, then did my run up checks.  I then waited for somebody to land, and pulled out of the way to let the parachute jump plane go.  I was waiting for the Jet Prop to land, and watching the RVs doing an overhead break when the Jet Prop ran off the runway.  I taxied over there, but they were out of the plane when I got there.  It looks like the front gear came out, but didn't rotate to be pointing the right way, as there was a big black stripe on the runway from it.  When the gear hit a lump of dirt, it broke, and the prop seems to have kept the nose from too much damage.  We spent a while trying to figure out what to do with the plane, and ended up leaving it there.  I had been thinking I was going to drive them up to Auburn (where they came from), but Byron offered to fly them back up (as it's a lot quicker).  After all that, I didn't feel like flying any more :o)

April 17th

Once it had warmed up, I went over to the airfield to work on the plane - sadly with all the ideas I'd had about fitting stuff, it didn't work out how I'd intended, but I've fitted the LED navigation lights (I had thought about adding 2 strobes, but there isn't any space for them at the end of the wing).  I figured out how to mount them, made the bracketry up for the left wing, then tried to push my spare cable inner wire down the tube, to pull the electrical wire.  It kept hitting mounts inside the tube, and I was trying to figure out how I could run the wire inside the wing instead.  That wasn't going to work, so I worked on straightening my cable, with a little bend at the end, and that eventually went in.  I pulled the wire through without any problems, and soldered everything up at the wing end.  I cut the zip ties for the side cover, and got the switched 12V power line for the strobes sorted out, and soldered the resistor to the end of the (3V) strobe line.  Testing it, it worked just fine, so I moved on to the right wing.  I got the bracketry sorted for the end all sorted out, pushed the cable down (first time!) but then had the electrical wire catch several times and come unhooked.  I eventually got that sorted out, and soldered everything up, but I was having trouble getting the earth connection for both wires in the connector, so I soldered them together, making it that bit easier.  Everything works, so I put everything back together and headed home.

April 16th

Still off work, so I spent the morning playing Warcraft while I waited for it to warm up a bit.

I noticed that there was a problem (again) with the solar power:

I spent a bit of time talking to the installers, and they're going to talk to the inverter manufacturer to see if this is anything they've seen before.

I tinkered around in the garage, and made up some brackets for the plane, but I need to get some tiny screws.

In the evening I rode over to Lincoln for Corl's talk on ADS-B / NexGen, which was quite interesting.  Doesn't look like I'll need to do anything for where I fly, which is just as well as I don't think I have the power to run transponders, WAAS GPS and the transmitter system :o)

April 15th

I've taken a few days off to kill off some holiday, as I'm no longer accruing any :o(

I started out looking at the camera (that had been taking pictures of the eclipse), and the bloody thing stopped taking pictures after about 2 hours.  All I got of the eclipse was this.  Bah, at least there are 3 more eclipses in the next 18 months.

Jim came over with his friend Michael, who has a brachial plexus injury, too.  He's wanting to look at getting back onto a motorcycle, so he looked at the DRZ at length.  He has a mountain bike with linked hydraulic brakes, so I'm interested to see how that works :o)

April 14th

After work, we watched the MotoGP race.  WTF?  At least <anybody but Pedrosa> won :o)

I set up the camera to take pictures of the eclipse, then went to bed.