The day was perfect, Sunny and light and variable winds in the morning. I arrived at around 8AM for some last minute items to go over. A fresh BFR endorsment in my logbook performed an RV7 made me confident in my ability to at least keep the airplane in one piece.
I finished buttoning up the cowl by installing the bottom hinge pins and then it was an hour or two of waiting until my wife and close family arrived at the airport.
A friend of mine that I wanted to be on the ground manning the radio and looking for oil smoke, fuel streaming, or parts departing the airplane was asked to go on a short hop over to another airport to look at a RV8 that a local is looking at purchasing. So I waited till he returned to go for it.
Once he was back, I was ready.. The waiting and staring at the airplane had me anxious.
I took a few deep breaths, kissed the wife and huged the family. Had prayer and jumped in. The emotions were on overdrive as I was buckling up.....
Getting set:
On the taxi out, several of the hangar rats were sitting on the front row of the hangars just waiting for the show to begin... I waved and taxied to the runnup area.
Taxi out:
At the runnup area, I went over my checklist at least 10 times. Ran up the engine, mags, etc. A few seconds of full power to make sure it was going to run strong.
I announced my intentions as "Cessna ---oh, hahahaha, Correction, Experimental N159SB intending to take off on runway 23 and this is the first flight of this airplane and if I were you, I would give it a wide berth!!!"
The takeoff was awesome!!! The airplane steered straight with no issues. As you can see from the pic below, these things have awesome performance. I am a fat man and even with full fuel, this thing was well off way before the 1000ft marker. I was not trying at all for a short takeoff roll and I was still about 20ft high before the marker.
1st Takeoff:
The flight was going well, the climbout did heat up the engine. The climb produced CHT's on a couple just over 400? so I lowered the nose and powered back a little and the temps came down to around 365-375. During circling the field, the oil temp was around 182? and the EGT's around 1300-1325 and the CHT's around 365-375. It is a new rebuild so I wanted to run it hard.
I started noticing a strange high freq sound and it was different depending on if I was turning or how fast I was going. I decided I needed to figure out what that was so I cut the flight short and came on in.
The landing was not bad at all. I was way high on final and had the flaps all out so I decided to slip it all the way down. The flare and landing were just like the plane I did my BFR in so all was well. A little hop of the mains and some bouncing of the tail but acceptable. I did have about 7 knots of quartering crosswind to deal with as well.
1st Landing:
The following needs no words to describe!!!!
The RV Grin!!!:
The noise seems to have originated from the front baffles behind the spinner. I left them too long and they were vibrating against the ends of the screws that go in the front inboard inlets of the cowl.
I cut those off and the second flight did not have this noise. Time will tell if I got that issue resolved.
Linear Mode
