No biplane content here, just a little black-and-green Champ.
I took the Champ in to the mechanic two weeks ago, to check out some brake weirdness: the right brake pedal liked to stick forward. These are cable brakes, and I suspected the cable might be fraying around a pulley or something. Turns out I was right, but it was fraying around a Bowden tube, and in playing with it to determine the problem, the mechanic broke the final strand. I got it to the shop just in time. They're replacing those Bowden tubes (and cables, obviously) on both sides, and claim to have re-routed it so the bend isn't so sharp.
Unrelated, I finally decided to pull the trigger on an engine monitor, and ordered an Insight G2, about which I'll have more to say once I actually get to fly with it. The short story is that there was a suitable hole for it in the panel, and it did most of what I wanted it to: EGT and CHT for all four cylinders, and fuel flow/totalization. The timing coincided nicely, so the brake work and the engine monitor install all happened at the same time. The engine monitor is getting finished up today, now that the appropriate breaker has arrived.
In another thread, I posted a picture of the fuel flow transducer. While looking at that, I saw an odd little mark on the gascolator in the crappy cellphone photo of my engine compartment. It was just about where I'd expect a crack to form, where the drain valve screws into the bowl. The shop is far enough away that I can't casually run down to check out this kind of thing, so I passed the photo along to the A&P, and today he got back to me: definitely a crack. So, new gascolator on the way. Damn. And I was really looking forward to getting the plane back in the air today. What's another $600+ on the repair bill, right?
This is where I spotted the crack. Zooming way in, I couldn't tell if it was a crack, or maybe a pen mark:
I took the Champ in to the mechanic two weeks ago, to check out some brake weirdness: the right brake pedal liked to stick forward. These are cable brakes, and I suspected the cable might be fraying around a pulley or something. Turns out I was right, but it was fraying around a Bowden tube, and in playing with it to determine the problem, the mechanic broke the final strand. I got it to the shop just in time. They're replacing those Bowden tubes (and cables, obviously) on both sides, and claim to have re-routed it so the bend isn't so sharp.
Unrelated, I finally decided to pull the trigger on an engine monitor, and ordered an Insight G2, about which I'll have more to say once I actually get to fly with it. The short story is that there was a suitable hole for it in the panel, and it did most of what I wanted it to: EGT and CHT for all four cylinders, and fuel flow/totalization. The timing coincided nicely, so the brake work and the engine monitor install all happened at the same time. The engine monitor is getting finished up today, now that the appropriate breaker has arrived.
In another thread, I posted a picture of the fuel flow transducer. While looking at that, I saw an odd little mark on the gascolator in the crappy cellphone photo of my engine compartment. It was just about where I'd expect a crack to form, where the drain valve screws into the bowl. The shop is far enough away that I can't casually run down to check out this kind of thing, so I passed the photo along to the A&P, and today he got back to me: definitely a crack. So, new gascolator on the way. Damn. And I was really looking forward to getting the plane back in the air today. What's another $600+ on the repair bill, right?
This is where I spotted the crack. Zooming way in, I couldn't tell if it was a crack, or maybe a pen mark:
