It Flys! (Getting Through Phase 1)

 

4 Sept 2008 The first 40 hours, or 42.1 to be exact, has come to a close and with that Phase 1. The log book is signed off and I took along the first passenger, which also happened to be Alex's first ride in a small airplane. We just took a small hop from Auburn down to Pierce County WA for lunch. Nice clear day, but a little bumpy. Here's the happy passenger at left.
3 Sept 2008 I was getting low on gas so it was time for an after work flight up to Skagit, about 30 RV minutes or so. Gas is about $5.49up there while everywhere else is still running 5.90+ OK, I'm going to eat up the savings in fuel burn to get there, but that's not the point. It's cheap gas in a relative scheme.

Panel shot was taken on the return to Auburn, everything just humming along.
  After installing the targa strip, I ended up with a really loud wind whistle and I figured it was coming from the front lip of the canopy. Not sure why, but I suspect that the air entering had an easy time exiting. Now that the exit is blocked, it creates a whistle and  I have about a 1/16' lip on the canopy which serves as a scoop. I made up a couple fiberglass shims to gauge the build-up I need on the boot cowl, then taped them on with speed tape. I'll bond and fill these later as it did reduce the noise a lot! There's still a bit more and I think I know where that's coming from. At this point, I'm really glad I held off on painting until all this was worked out.
  This is a shot heading north, just west of Tiger Mountain. If you look closely, you'll see about 15 to 18 paragliders buzzing around. Tiger Mt. has the local launching point so on nice evenings, there's a lot of activity and they can get up several thousand feet.
  Mt. Si on the return, pretty much abeam Lake Sammamish.
  Issaquah, WA in the foreground, looking at Mt. Rainier in the background with an approaching sunset.
  Camino Island as I passed heading south.


17 Aug 2008 Still don't have any real new pictures as I've been pretty busy between work, Oshkosh, and flying the RV. So, where am I? I currently have 35 hours on the engine/ airframe and it continues to fly nice. It's still without gear leg and wheel pant fairings but I'm seeing about 179 TAS (MPH) at 7500' wide open right now. If I add 20 MPH for pants and fairings, I'm in line with Vans' numbers.

Oil change was done at 25 hours and I swapped out the mineral oil for Ashless Dispersant. The rings have evidently set and CHTs are all fairly level in the mid to upper 300's. Oil consumption was 1 quart in the first 17 hours or so. I really think the rings has set in the first couple hours.

I did find a number of things on the first oil change. The dipstick tube had worked loose a little allowing some oil droplets on the firewall. This was tightened and re-safety wired. There were a couple cylinder head cover screws that loosened up, and a baffle screw from the upper right baffle/ case was found in the bottom of the engine mount, next to the firewall. Stuff really gets lose if it has chance. My Precision FI servo has an AD against it, and upon doing the inspection again, the plug was found lose. This was tightened to 90 ip. in accordance with the  AD. I do have a new gasket to install the next time I have the cowl off. And speaking of the cowl, The lower right side of the lower cowl was starting to show some heat damage so I added some reflective aluminum sheet tape. Seems to be fine for now.

I've started adding weight to the passenger seat and currently have 120 lbs. now, with another 70 ready to go. I'd like to simulate a passenger before I get a real one in the right seat!. Mike Seager taught me to come down final at 85 MPH, which seems to be a little high. At this time, about 78 seems to work fairly well with a stall speed around 53 MPH. Also, with the constant speed prop and the 180 HP, it's difficult to trim out the nose heaviness on final at the slower airspeeds. The extra weight really helps that.

Avionics seem to be working well. I did return the 480 to Garmin due to a crash and some ongoing problems. They did replace the GPS receiver "as a precaution", and once I re-seated box, everything seems to be working well. Basic GPS operations and autopilot functionality seem to be working as advertised, but I now need to figure out how it would be used in an IFR approach. The en-route operation is straight forward. The Flo-Cal unit is also pretty close, but still reading about 1.5 gallons high over a tank of gas. I've already moved the GRT flocal setting from 200 down to 193, but it might need to be brought down a couple more units.

Overall, it seems to be doing well. For 35 hours since early June, maintenance has been minimal and I think I'm getting the bugs worked out.  I'm starting to explore aerobatics with rolls, chandels, wing-overs, split-s, and a whole raft of stalls. I can't wait to finish Phase 1.
  15 July 2008 No new pictures to post as the local weather is still holding and the mountains, Seattle, and islands still look the same!

The RV continues to fly well. With a little left aileron squeeze, the heavy right wing is basically gone. The Tru Trak seems to work well, following both GPS and GRT Heading course selects. I wasn't sure that the HDG mode was working, but after looking at this in flight, I noticed that the heading change just took a while to turn; I may need to up the gain on the turns. VOR picks up the Arlington localizer just fine, and auto pilot seems to intercept as designed. Cool stuff. I did take a flight out to Whidbey Island and made an approach to Langley airport, 2500x25. It's a narrow little strip with trees a little too close. I need a little practice for this one.

In a previous flight, I had been out doing a good set of stalls: accelerated, full flaps, 1/2 flaps, and departure stalls. The trick is to release the aft pressure just enough to minimize altitude loss. Aileron rolls are pretty easy and I did do a couple 4-point hesitation rolls, but I need to work the barrel rolls a bit.

Landings are coming along, but still doing 3-pointers. Most are a little bouncy, but every once in a while, I get a greaser. I figure I'll start figuring out wheel landings soon. I also need to procure some weights and start loading up the plane to expand the GC a bit.

My GPS is still a little flakey so this weekend I need to wring out the antenna a bit to see if that's the problem I'm losing all GPS satellites during flight and this time, they didn't come back. I can re-boot and the system seems to retain the UTC time stamp, but it's lost the seed position and won't take a new one. It's not the antenna, it has to go back to the shop.

I now have about 23 hours on it and I'll be doing the oil change in another 2 hours. This time moving to AD oil.  Then there's the gear and wheel fairings. The weather has been way too nice recently, and it's just way too much fun to fly to take it down for more fiberglass work!
  6 July 2008 The weather wasn't too bad today with about 3000' ceiling, good enough to go fly the plane. The real goal today was to check out the VOR and autopilot so I departed Auburn (S50) and headed east to the hills, then south. Once clear, I engaged the autopilot and it seemed to be functional in the roll axis. Next step was having it run the self calibration, which is only done in flight. I hit that on the set-up and the RV flew all four cardinal points by itself. Interesting. Next, I headed north to see how it tracked so I programmed in Arlington, configured the EFIS, and selected GPSS on the autopilot and away it went. All I had do was monitor the systems, I can really see this is going to be useful for cross-countries. Got to Arlington and did two stop-n-goes, then headed further north for a stop-n-go at Skagit. After a taxi-back, I headed south again, aiming towards Pierce County, pretty much at the south end of the test area. While en-route I checked out the VOR antenna and it seemed to work which is a good thing. I'm still finding my way around the GPS and learning how this all works together; it's a steep curve! After a taxi-back at Pierce County, I headed back to Auburn for a 2.4 flight today. In almost a month, I've been able to put about 19.4 hours on the plane, which seems pretty good for a new airplane and the northwest weather. 10.6 to go in Phase 1.
  5 July 2008 The weather still isn't cooperating, so I was able to get a little more work done on troubleshooting the autopilot servo. After shooting some wires, it looks like I wired up the roll servo DB9 connector exactly backwards. Evidently I looked at it the wrong way! Short, story, pulled the pins and got it re-wired. The binding in the servo is gone so I just need the ops check.
  4 July 2008 We had the annual BBQ here at the house but I took some of the morning to head down to Auburn to do a couple things and brought Alex along. There were four things I wanted to get done, fix the NAV antenna, do some minor trimming on the forward center fuel line cover, troubleshoot the roll servo, and put some gas in it. It was almost successful as I got three out of four. I still need to do the roll servo fixed. I did manage to get the NAV antenna working; the wingroot had a 90-deg crimp BNC, and the center pin wasn't set deep enough for connectivity. I was actually surprised to pick up the SEA VOR on the ground at Auburn. Now to see how far it receives in the air.
28 June 2008 The weather over the weekend around Seattle was really nice, for about 3 days straight, which has to be some sort of record. I promised my old hangar partner I'd help with the clean-up of our Arlington hangar so first thing Saturday AM, I headed to AWO. This takes about an hour by car from home, but about 30 minutes by air from Auburn, and heck, it classifies as a cross-country at just over 50 miles. I'm pretty lucky as my test area is about 100 north to south, and 50 miles wide along a line between Auburn and Arlington. I had the camera with me so it was a good time to show off the test area. Overall, I did 3.2 on Saturday, including a 2.5 hour endurance flight.

Here' s down town Seattle with Mercer Island in the the middle with the Olympic Mountains as a backdrop.
  Departing AWO and heading north, this is Camino island, and just beyond Whidbey Island.
  This is Skagit Regional Airport, just about at the northern boundary of my area. I did one stop-n-go there today.
  Mt. Baker. It was a really nice day. A little headwind but not too bumpy and a toasty 78F at about 4000'.
  Here's the valley heading towards Darrington and the Stillaguamish River.
  Just south of Lake Stevens looking to the east, this is just the ho-hum Cascade view out the window.
  Snoqualmie Falls. The mountain snow is really melting and the results are a really tremendous waterfall. I've stayed at the Salish Lodge there at the falls and they put on a very nice brunch. Highly recommended if you're in the area.
  Heading south, here the local famous volcano Mt. Rainier with Mt. St. Helens in the distance to the right. 
  And at the very south end of my area, here's Rainier again.

Overall, the airplane continues to fly well. At around 16 hours, the engine has yet to consume a full quart, but once the oil settles before the next flight, it may be due. High ambient temps into the upper 80's today had CHTs just over 400 but did come back down into the upper 300's so that seems to be doing well. Although my roll server is disconnected, I did test the ALT HOLD and that seemed to do it's job very well.

After winding up some standard rate 360 turns, left and right, then doing steep turns to put on some G's, I did a chandelle, followed by some nice wingovers. Finally, I did some aileron rolls, left and right. It sure flies like and RV!
26 June It's the end of June and I had to vacate the Arlington hangar and get the RV down to Auburn, about 50 miles. The plan was to fly the RV around the AWO area for about 10 hours before I ventured too far, and I reached that point. The weather had been great this week so Dave Parsons agreed to pick me up at Auburn and haul me up to Arlington. We pulled out the RV and both of us flew back using the time for airspeed comparisons. Dave has a -7A, but they are about equal in speed right now. I may be a bit faster when the fairings and wheel pants are installed  (hee hee hee).

At left are both airplanes now at home. I scaled both airplanes in Visio to see if they were going to fit and sure, enough, they fit just as Visio said they would.
No Pic 22 June Alex was on a sleep-over at his Aunt's so I had the opportunity to be up early and heading to the airport. I was at the hangar about 7:30 AM which was kind of nice and really quiet. The flap drive was fixed and I ensured that the jam nut was tightened and this time, I used some .040 safety wire instead of the .021 stuff. With a little extra time, I headed out for a couple trips around the pattern but before launching, I tried the GPS one more time, setting the seed position with another GPS. This time, it seemed to take. Cool. It even started to capture satellites and showed a good fix. Everything seemed to be working with the GPS finally. That is until about 10 minutes into flight when it decided to show a GPS Loss warning and then showed a Fault code and a cycling of the unit eventually. Bummer.

Well, I was heading back for some pattern work and did a couple stop-n-goes. Flaps worked fine and I decided to do a taxi back to see if I could get the GPS up again. This time, a reboot on the unit did the trick.  Once again, it ended up showing a Fault code, this time a little different, but it eventually brought itself back on-line. I've already submitted an SR (Support Request) to Garmin so I'm interested in hearing what they say; I'd really like to get some confidence in the GPS since it feeds both the EFIS and transponder.

Overall, a good flight and racked up another 1.1 for a 3.7 this weekend and about 11.5 on teh plane so far.
21 June 2008 OK, pretty lousy picture from the phone camera but it shows a 12,000 overcast looking out at the San Juan Islands.  I did another 2.6 today and spent the first 1.3 going back and forth between Arlington and Skagit. On the second flight I headed south about 40 miles since I'm now outside my first 10 hours and feel a lot more comfortable getting away from the airport. I did manage to do some steep turns and a 1/2 flap stall.

Heading back to Arlington, I did one touch-n-go, and on the second (maybe my best three-pointer yet) the flaps came 1/2 up, then dropped to full down. Well, that ended that flight. Bummer, I was looking forward to a little more pattern work. Upon disassembly of the flap drive covers, the drive shaft had broken the safety wire, and the shaft backed out the rod end bearing. If I'd been at another field, this would not have been fun. Luckily, I just taxied back and parked it.

The GPS still doesn't want to find itself and I spent 2 hours waiting for it to do a Master Reset. The other main issue remains the NAV antenna and I suspect a bad BNC connector at the splitter.


14 June 2008 I've been able to get some decent time on the airplane this weekend with almost 6 hours since Friday afternoon for a total of 8.3. The weather here finally broke a bit so I was able to get up to about 5000' and just make big orbits around the airport to continue the engine break-in under nice blue skies. The #1 CHT was running about 50F cool,  so after a couple flights testing some speed tape on the front of the jugs, I managed to get the CHTs within about 4 degrees. Good enough. EGTs are also close and I'm continuing to monitor.

I had a right yaw at cruise so a little rudder trim corrected most of that. My heavy right wing is almost gone and I'm continuing to work that a little at a time. The right outboard aileron was standing a little above the tip, so I've been lowering that a little at a time. I can now fly for over an hour without my arm getting tired of holding the wing up and I'm still cruising around at 24 squared, showing about 170 MPH indicated.

Avionics are causing some annoyance. Evidently I shut down after flight and didn't shut down the GPS first, thus dumping the seed position. I've been trying to get the new seed position in but I've evidently been off on the UTC time. I may just do the Master Reset and wait the 20 minutes.

I'm not getting a NAV signal with the Archer antenna. Neither the GNS480 or SL-30 are receiving the signal off the antenna so I suspect a bad connector somewhere in the feed. The upside is that both radios seem to be working well and I'm picking up traffic 75 miles away with no strobe interference so evidently I wired that up correctly.

It's also nice to see the fuel flow showing a reasonably accurate number. Fuel flow indication is showing just over 5% high, which is decent considering I haven't modified the configuration yet. The left/right float indications aren't that great, but the total remaining is very good.

I'm still amazed that the airplane is actually flying as well as it is considering the complexity of the plane. I did have some minor excitement on take-off today with a pretty stiff left crosswind. When the prop bit, I was a behind on getting the right rudder in, so I ended up looking at the left side of the pavement. Luckily, the RV was airborne in seconds!



8 June 2008 On Sunday I headed back to the airport to attempt a little more time on the plane. This time around, I filled both tanks full to get some idea of the additional weight on the plane. The only major difference was the inability to fully trim out the nose at landing speed. At this time, the airplane is about the lightest it's going to be with no interior except for pilot's seat, and full tanks.

With 1400' ceiling, I departed with the intent of just circling the pattern again for a while. One thing was the GPS wasn't capturing a signal and I just had the LOI annunciation on the 480. This was traced back to a cross threaded TNC connector at the antenna. The pitot heat didn't work and this was due to a blown fuse.

I had a slightly heavy right wing and burning off the left tank didn't help. I really need to burn off the right tank first, then determine how much it takes to even out the load. Van's says anything under 18 pounds or 3 gallons is minimal. I also want to check out the aileron alignment.

Overall, I flew about 1.0 for the first flight and again un-cowled the engine. SO far, no serious oil leaks. The only one noted was a little seep around the oil temp probe.

I went up again and did another .5 and this time the GPS was working fine, but the GPS data isn't finding it's way to the GRT H1 displays. I suspect that I've overwritten the config settings in setting other limits.

On the engine side, CHTs are all running in the normal range although it was only 50 degrees OAT. The #1 seems to be running 40-50 degrees cooler than the rest so I'll use some aluminum tape to block off a little of the cooling, which should also help bring up a slightly low EGT.

Otherwise, it seems to fly like an RV and so far, I'm happy with the results.









7 June 2008

Mid-Morning on June 7, RV-7 303P finally levitated off the ground, 4 days short of 6 years, and 14000 rivets, since the empennage kit arrival. This first flight was conducted under  1800 broken/ overcast sky at Arlington, WA (AWO). The weather has been exceptionally cruddy recently so I was looking for enough airspace to go out and run circuits around the pattern to get the engine exercised. Dave Parsons was standing-by on ground crew this week after we called off the flight last weekend due to low clouds. The RV cranked on the 2nd try (I really need to figure out the best way to start this)and I proceeded to the Three-Four hammerhead for run-up. All systems looked good an I started the data recorder for flight #1. There was a Cessna 140 in the pattern, but aside from that, I had the area to myself which was good. The plan was to remain in a high pattern and just make a couple laps to test the engine systems, slow down, come down to pattern altitude, make one low approach, go-around, then a final full-stop.

 I took Runway 34 and slowly advanced the throttle. In what seemed about 100 feet, the RV levitated off the ground. I don’t recall having enough time to actually raise the tail and the departure angle seemed ridiculously steep. It really didn’t’ take long and I was at about 1700’ by crosswind and I just let it accelerate. The GRT  was only seeing about 1800 RPM but the engine sure seemed to be doing it’s thing so I figured I had an indication problem. I raced around the circuit several times, then pulled the power back a bit to start a decent into the pattern. At that time I started hearing a faint thumping on the fuselage and I wondered what that was. I did see 197 MPH on one downwind, full throttle with no gear fairings or wheel pants, so I’m thinking this airplane is going to match Van’s numbers. Very cool.  

 Well I managed to get the airplane slowed down and extended the flaps 50% per Mike Seager’s training. So far no problem but on base leg, that thumping was more pronounced and I decided to put it on the ground. Full flaps, 85 MPH, and I had the runway made. Taxi back was a non-event and I shut it down. Total time was .5, just right for the first flight. Time for breakfast at the local airport café, as well as some well-needed time to relax.

 On inspection, I found that the left rubber wing root seal had pulled free a bit (it was too long) on the bottom aft end, and was thumping in the wind stream so it was a good decision to cut it short. Dave and I pulled the cowl and found about two drops of oil in the bottom of the cowl which was attributed to a slightly loose #3 cylinder head oil return line at the case. This was tightened.  As for the RPM, I dug through the GRT EIS manual and determined that the RPM config setting was incorrect. It was 0 and should have been a 1. I also lowered the idle RPM slightly as I thought it was a bit high (this has a knock-on effect). OK, that’s fixed. I cut the wing root seal a bit and got that reinstalled.  

 Dave had to head for home, but there was time for one more flight. Plan was basically the same but I wanted to validate the RPM fix. Once the engine started, it was evident that the RPM indication was fixed. Taxi and run-up were normal and it was time to fly again. Departure once again was a blast. With ½ tanks and no passenger, this really climbs. I spent about .5 running round the pattern again, this time at 2400’ as the ceiling had come up a bit. This time I had some time to relax and just watch the airplane and It really seems to fly nice. I thought the right wing was a little heavy, but it trimmed out with the ailerons still in line with the wing tips. I did get back down to pattern altitude and with a nice little cross wind on 34, about 7 kts or so, made a decent 3-point landing. Remember the bit about adjusting the idle? Well, on rollout, things got quiet, really quiet. And by the time my brain figured out the engine was winding down, it had quit, and I just missed the first turn-off. Bummer. Well, I shut down the avionics (which dumped my flight 2 data) and pushed it off the runway where we finally got it restarted. A couple RV guys from AWO helped get it going again.

 Post flight inspection showed no oil leakage at all this time so I was pretty happy. We did pull the cowl and re-set the idle with the proper instrument indications. Other than the RPM indication and the left wing fairing seal, the flight went really well and I’m happy with the airplane. If the weather holds, I’m back up tomorrow. This is soooooo cool (and so worth it)!

 Side note: Russ “Erbman” Erb, good friend and fellow founding cohort of EAA Chapter 1000 at Edwards AFB, CA, spent the last 11+ years building a very nice looking plans-built Bearhawk (http://eaa1000.av.org/pix/erbpix/erbpix.htm) . As luck would have it, we both had DAR inspections on the same date and as if it weren’t possible, both of our projects had first flights on the same day! Congrats Russ!