September 4, 2006

I was hoping to get to the hangar both Friday and Monday this weekend, as I was off work both days. On Friday, I had an appointment at the BMW dealership to check out an M3. I’ve been looking for one for a while now. Anyway, I liked what I saw, and ended up spending the day buying it. Sweet!

We were in Chicago on Saturday and Sunday, so no work onthe plane then either. That left me with Monday. I recieved stuff from SteinAir, which included log books for the engine, prop, airframe and avionics. I also got the female BNC connector I needed to finish up the wing tip stuff.

Here, the Marker Beacon antenna is done and glassed in. Clayton was here today, and between chatting about the car and messing around with stuff on it I managed to get him to do the fibreglassing, since he loves getting his hands dirty! Wingtips are ready to go on the plane.

Here I am putting in some screws. It was bout now I had this notion to test the nav/strobe lights. I don’t know why, I just did. Well, we’d tested them previously, and since these are simple, I expected them to work, and they did. However when we flicked the switch this time, there was nothing. Great. The tail light was on, so it wasn’t a fuse. Must be something else. Time to take off the wing tip. Doh! All those screws!

We isolated the problem to the ground lead that’s soldered to the whelen lamp receptacle. The wire had broken in the classic place, right at the insulation. I soldered the wire back on, and put on some new heat shrink. This was fun squeezing in here let me tell ya. Once that was done, the wingtips went on the plane. Done!

I wanted to insulate the firewall too somehow. I’d ordered some foam form www.soundproofing.org but it hadn’t arrived yet. I got hold of some Butyl stuff with aluminium on it, and was going to use some on the firewall on the larger panels, just to help damp it some. We did a heat test on it first though to see how it would hold up.

The answer was - not very well. The stuff just melted and fell off. No good for us! I guess it’ll just be the foam then when it gets here.

The N Numbers arrived from Aircraft Spruce too, so we stuck them on. We are now official! I wasn’t sure where to stick the numbers really for the best looks. I figure these are only temporary anyway, so it didn’t matter too much where they were.

Other small tasks we did included starting the routing of the ignition leads. Clayton took all the number tags off the original leads and put them on the new leads, then we started routing. I need to order some more Adel clamps though in order to complete this task.

We also put the last screw in the end of the rear canopy track. It’s one you can’t reach on your own, so it waited, and waited, and waited. Finally it’s done.