What did you do with your RV this weekend? (3/27 - 3/29)
 

With the stay at home orders expanding, I suspect that fewer of us did much with our RV this weekend. But, certainly some flew theirs, and others progressed on their build. So... what did you do?

Friday I flew my RV to get a few things from Aircraft Spruce, and then to meet up with another VAF member to talk about a panel upgrade. Then back into the hangar it went..

Today, I rode over to the airport and gave the RV a dry wash. Looks so much better.

I made 10 landings at Eastern Washingtion region airports. 4 pilot lounges were closed. Trying to collect stamps for the Fly Washington Passport program. Solo flight with thousands of feet of social distance FUN!

Did a 1-hour flight to empty my left tank so I could do some work on it and to see if I had found the source of a nuisance oil leak. Mission accomplished on both.

I followed your example Doug. Marked one airport. The rest of the weekend spent hiking. Found a perfect chew for Dave12’s German Shepard. :)

Stirred the oil for 1.7hrs over western Florida. Achieved 5000? vertical social distance. A beautiful way to calm the mind. Weird seeing empty beaches this time of year.

Peter

Big Bend Ranch State Park
 

Flew to Big Bend Ranch State Park. As best we could tell, we were the only hikers and possibly the only visitors to the 300,000 acre park on Saturday afternoon. That?s some pretty good social distancing. Trip write-up here: http://www.vansairforce.com/communit...d.php?t=180862

RIR
 

Filed TEC from LGB to RIR to top the tanks and keep the brain used to working in the system. Then VFR to Elsinore to check out the old Hang Gliding site. Then VFR back to LGB. Couldn't get Flight Following on the way back as SoCal had controllers working multiple sectors and they were busy! Oil stirred and back in the hangar.

Then an auto trip to drop off 2 large sacks of dog food to German Shepard Rescue of Orange County (https://www.GSROC.org) who do great work with getting rescued dogs placed in furever homes.

-Marc

Real live airplane noises...
 

Finally the fateful has arrived to see if all this assembly of airplane parts actually can actually make airplane noises.

I went through all the pre-oiling procedures discussed here on VAF and in the Lyc docs, tested for good oil pressure, fuel pressure, fuel flow, the whole nine yards. All good.

Towed the plane to the nearest pad that had a pad-eye, tied her down, hooked up a car-sized battery in lieu the little Odyssey - in case there were lots of cranking involved

Turns out that the external battery was soft and it had a hard time turning the engine over with the plugs in. However, it only took one blade to start once it got around and then we're off the the races!

Obligatory evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6wuyqh9ejE

Only significant issue is that the CHT2 reads about 10% below the rest, but tracks well the other 3 well. No CHTs on this run above 275 F. EGTs track tightly.

And, I found that the Andair fuel pump is a noisy beast when the pressure comes up. It purrs like a kitten with no load during fuel flow testing, but it's quite noisy when pressure comes up. You can clearly hear it in the video prior to the start. Anyone else have this experience.

First flight getting closer!

This weekend was the first where ATC facilities across the country reduced staffing to somewhat of a skeleton crew..

Rudder coverage
 

After flying my -8 for 3 years, I FINALLY vinyl-wrapped my rudder in orange vinyl to match the ailerons.
[IMG][/IMG]
[IMG][/IMG] Oops...can't see the aileron.