16 hours.<\/p>\n
Going to have to sum up last week as well. \u00a0 Last weekend I did the fiberglass layups on the intersection fairings. \u00a0 I hate those things. \u00a0As is typical with Van’s fiberglass, the fit is garbage. \u00a0 Add my lack of skill to that, and the result is a set of ugly \u00a0fairings that just barely managed to get the job done. \u00a0 I may wind up reworking the whole landing gear fairing mess, but for now, these will do. \u00a0 I think if I actually make them smooth and trim off the excess, I’ll get a couple of knots out of them, but the process went like this: \u00a0Saturday – Fiddle with wet fiberglasss layups all day. \u00a0 Sunday – trim the extra bits off, install some platenuts for mounting hardware, go flying.<\/p>\n
That’s when I noticed the wing wobble. \u00a0running flat-out, with ground speed at around 190mph, trimmed up, the slightest bounce on the stick would cause a divergent oscillation.. \u00a0This is without the autopilot, au naturel. \u00a0 Bump the stick, the wiggle starts and just gets worse. \u00a0 \u00a0So I had to leave it for another week.<\/p>\n
This week:<\/p>\n
2 hours fiddling, almost 3 hours flying. \u00a0I can live with that. \u00a0 First thing on the agenda was to double check the gear leg fairing alignment. \u00a0 No issue there. \u00a0 Next was clocking the governor back a couple of notches on the control shaft to get more RPM on my takeoff run. \u00a0It currently tops out at 2549, when it should be around 2600-2650. \u00a0 One notch is too coarse of an adjustment; I wasn’t able to cycle the prop during runup, so I had to set it back to where it was. \u00a0 \u00a0With that fixed, \u00a0I went up just to confirm the oscillation, and sure enough, predictable and repeatable. \u00a0 So I came back down and checked my rigging. \u00a0Turns out, one of the ailerons was off. \u00a0 Not sure how that happened, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to cause a problem with the gear fairings and wheel pants off, at least not until the autopilot was engaged. \u00a0 The AP couldn’t keep up with the oscillation either. \u00a0 \u00a0And, because I’d read about it, I checked the trailing edge of the ailerons. \u00a0The control surface is supposed to be absolutely flat from front to back, and then it wraps around where the trailing edge is bent. \u00a0 This being a quickbuild kit, you’d think they’d be just fine. \u00a0 Not so. \u00a0If the surfaces bulge outward at all, they can cause instability, so you do the heavy-wing treatment: Squeeze the trailing edges so the top and bottom are flat and not curved outward. \u00a0 Even a little convex is OK. \u00a0 But the idea is to go easy, not even enough to notice visually.<\/p>\n
That was the magic bullet. \u00a0 \u00a0Hands-off, the stick stayed rock solid. \u00a0 Repeating the bump test had the wings settle back to trimmed bank angle. \u00a0 The autopilot was still a little twitchy though. \u00a0 The fix for that was to move the AP control linkage to the innermost hole on the servo arm. \u00a0Less motion, more precise control increments in the stepper motor. \u00a0 So that was awesome. \u00a0 Being able to steer the plane with the heading bug is cool.<\/p>\n
With everything trimmed up, balls to the wall, I managed to get 192mph ground speed in level flight. \u00a0 The fuel burn was absolutely decadent, but it was pretty cool to go almost 200mph. \u00a0 Oh, and the oil door stayed closed, which was nice.<\/p>\n
So I did some more speed runs and spent some time getting familiar with the new handling. \u00a0 A little different with gear fairings. \u00a0 It doesn’t slow down as fast, for one thing. \u00a0 I landed at SZP, went back to OXR, then spent some time in the pattern. \u00a0 Landings are a little different as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
16 hours. Going to have to sum up last week as well. \u00a0 Last weekend I did the fiberglass layups on the intersection fairings. \u00a0 I hate those things. \u00a0As is typical with Van’s fiberglass, the fit is garbage. \u00a0 Add my lack of skill to that, and the result is a set of ugly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[68,77],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4495"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4497,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4495\/revisions\/4497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}