6 hours.
I got a bit of a late start, since I spent about an hour trying to source a Heim joint of the correct size from a local speed shop rather than waiting for ACS to ship me one. In the end, I was unsuccessful, so I made my ACS order and headed out. Once I got to Oxnard, I stopped in at Aswell Trophy on Oxnard Blvd and they engraved my data plate while I waited. Took about 15 minutes.
This was the first task of the day. After that, I went on to the process of weighing the airplane. The scales are for weighing race cars, so there are 4 inputs, but I was only using 3. The measuring unit connects to big metal pads that the airplane sits on and totals up the readings from all of them.
Some clever person at EAA723 built these ramps to roll the wheels up onto the scales, which was awesome. I couldn’t find a soul around when I was doing this and I couldn’t get enough oomph behind the airplane to roll it up on there by myself. I didn’t want to get too big of a running start at it because I didn’t want the wheels to overrun the chocks at the end of the ramps. So I turned the ramps around backwards, wrapped a strap around my tailwheel spring, hooked that up to my truck hitch, and towed the airplane, very slowly, into position. The reason you see the wheel pant sitting on the wheel is because I wanted to account for the fairing weight and I haven’t actually finished the fairings yet. The clecos will probably equal the fastening hardware, and if not, they’re well within the margin of error on the scales.
The airplane needs to be weighed in level flight attitude. This means the tail has to go up. I used my smart levels on the longerons and cranked up the tail on Ron’s old lift with the tailwheel on the 3rd scale. With all that stuff in place, I came up with these numbers:
- Left Wheel: 524lbs
- Right Wheel: 523lbs
- Tail Wheel 67lbs
- Total: 1114lbs
So not too bad. The reference example they give in the construction manual totals in at 1111, so I’m 3lbs more portly than the book.