newt
Well Known Member
I bought this airplane from its second owner ten years ago.
By GA standards, it's been a cheap couple of seats. It's been reliable, maintenance has been painless, and an RV grin every weekend is a lot cheaper than therapy
But it's more than 25 years old and 2000 hours now, and I've owned it for ten years and 1000 hours. I'm not just an owner, I'm a custodian for the next owner. Time for a refurb.
My goals were safety, reliability and maintainability, in that order. I think I hit the mark on all of them.
The Engine
VH-SOL's engine is (was) an O-320-D2A.
It's the 21st century, and carburettor icing shouldn't be a flight risk anymore, so I didn't want to re-fit it to the aircraft without fuel injection. A Precision Airmotive EX320-2 FCU kit (includes flow divider and lines) was acquired.
I also didn't have a huge desire for an ignition system designed in 1905, so I selected P-Mags. For risk amelioration I wanted them from separate manufacturing batches, so I bought them both separately several months apart.
I bulk-stripped the engine myself in the Riverina Airmotive workshop in Parafield, South Australia, in mid February 2021. The crank went off to Aircraft Specialties in Tulsa for machining to M003, the cylinders (which only had a thousand hours on them) were reconditioned, new camshaft, new oil pump, high pressure fuel pump. One of the rods showed up with a manufacturing defect when it was NDT'ed, so that got replaced.
Riverina Airmotive rebuilt the engine and sent it back to me in late May, zero time and good to go.
The Avionics
Over my years of ownership, I'd progressively improved what I started with. The panel had two Garmin G5's with a GMU11 in the starboard wing, an MGL INFO-1 g-meter, a Garmin GNS430W, a Garmin GMA340 audio panel, a GAD29 to connect the GNS to the G5 system, a TruTrak 385 autopilot, and a Trig TT21 ADS-B-Out transponder.
It also had a UHF transceiver connected to COM3 on the GMA340 via a CRI-1 "commercial radio interface," and a lighting bus.
Here's what it looked like on the last flight before it all ended up in a pile on the hangar floor:
The replacement consisted of a Garmin G3X Touch system. One of the G5's was repurposed as a backup flight instrument. ADHARS and EIS systems were added. GDU460 and GDU470 PFD and MFD displays were provisioned. The GAD29, GMU11, GNS430W and GMA340 were retained. A GDL50R was acquired for ADS-B-In. New Garmin pitch and roll servos and an autopilot controller panel. The Trig TT21 and lighting bus were kept, but repurposed. A GTR20 remote-mount VHF was installed as COM1 (the GNS430W is COM2).
I did system design throughout late 2020 and early 2021, paying particular attention to redundancy and failure modes. An auxiliary power bus was designed into it, which keeps the PFD, EIS and ADHARS running for more than an hour following complete failure of the aircraft's main bus.
The installation was mostly performed by Lyndon Tretheway at Custom Aircraft Centre at YGWA in South Australia, with me doing the odd splice, handing over tools, assisting with design direction or wiring pin assignments, or annoying him with idle chit-chat. I think he gave me odd jobs to do to get me out of the way
Lyndon fabricated a new panel, using the old one as a cutting template and a component donor.
The old one was removed, with copious wiring strippped-out and discarded. The retained wiring was substantially tidied up.
A patch and stiffener was fabricated to fill-in almost all of the penetrations through the subpanel, substantially improving it.
Circuit protection was rebuilt from scratch, using klixon 7277 circuit breakers in a breaker field on the starboard side of the panel, all properly loomed and laced with main bus, avionics bus and auxiliary bus.
Cable looms to all the instrumentation are easily accessible with service loops for maintenance.
.../continued
By GA standards, it's been a cheap couple of seats. It's been reliable, maintenance has been painless, and an RV grin every weekend is a lot cheaper than therapy
But it's more than 25 years old and 2000 hours now, and I've owned it for ten years and 1000 hours. I'm not just an owner, I'm a custodian for the next owner. Time for a refurb.
My goals were safety, reliability and maintainability, in that order. I think I hit the mark on all of them.
The Engine
VH-SOL's engine is (was) an O-320-D2A.
It's the 21st century, and carburettor icing shouldn't be a flight risk anymore, so I didn't want to re-fit it to the aircraft without fuel injection. A Precision Airmotive EX320-2 FCU kit (includes flow divider and lines) was acquired.
I also didn't have a huge desire for an ignition system designed in 1905, so I selected P-Mags. For risk amelioration I wanted them from separate manufacturing batches, so I bought them both separately several months apart.
I bulk-stripped the engine myself in the Riverina Airmotive workshop in Parafield, South Australia, in mid February 2021. The crank went off to Aircraft Specialties in Tulsa for machining to M003, the cylinders (which only had a thousand hours on them) were reconditioned, new camshaft, new oil pump, high pressure fuel pump. One of the rods showed up with a manufacturing defect when it was NDT'ed, so that got replaced.
Riverina Airmotive rebuilt the engine and sent it back to me in late May, zero time and good to go.
The Avionics
Over my years of ownership, I'd progressively improved what I started with. The panel had two Garmin G5's with a GMU11 in the starboard wing, an MGL INFO-1 g-meter, a Garmin GNS430W, a Garmin GMA340 audio panel, a GAD29 to connect the GNS to the G5 system, a TruTrak 385 autopilot, and a Trig TT21 ADS-B-Out transponder.
It also had a UHF transceiver connected to COM3 on the GMA340 via a CRI-1 "commercial radio interface," and a lighting bus.
Here's what it looked like on the last flight before it all ended up in a pile on the hangar floor:
The replacement consisted of a Garmin G3X Touch system. One of the G5's was repurposed as a backup flight instrument. ADHARS and EIS systems were added. GDU460 and GDU470 PFD and MFD displays were provisioned. The GAD29, GMU11, GNS430W and GMA340 were retained. A GDL50R was acquired for ADS-B-In. New Garmin pitch and roll servos and an autopilot controller panel. The Trig TT21 and lighting bus were kept, but repurposed. A GTR20 remote-mount VHF was installed as COM1 (the GNS430W is COM2).
I did system design throughout late 2020 and early 2021, paying particular attention to redundancy and failure modes. An auxiliary power bus was designed into it, which keeps the PFD, EIS and ADHARS running for more than an hour following complete failure of the aircraft's main bus.
The installation was mostly performed by Lyndon Tretheway at Custom Aircraft Centre at YGWA in South Australia, with me doing the odd splice, handing over tools, assisting with design direction or wiring pin assignments, or annoying him with idle chit-chat. I think he gave me odd jobs to do to get me out of the way
Lyndon fabricated a new panel, using the old one as a cutting template and a component donor.
The old one was removed, with copious wiring strippped-out and discarded. The retained wiring was substantially tidied up.
A patch and stiffener was fabricated to fill-in almost all of the penetrations through the subpanel, substantially improving it.
Circuit protection was rebuilt from scratch, using klixon 7277 circuit breakers in a breaker field on the starboard side of the panel, all properly loomed and laced with main bus, avionics bus and auxiliary bus.
Cable looms to all the instrumentation are easily accessible with service loops for maintenance.
.../continued
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