With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Electric Gyro lives again

2012 April 16 00:09

I bought some Mooney instruments from ebay last fall. They were from a late 1960s model, which is the sort of thing I'm hoping to buy in a few short years.

The turn coordinator in those Mooneys was dual powered; that is, it would work powered by the airplane's instrument vacuum source, OR via electrical power. The motor in the gyro is apparenlty a multi-phase AC motor powered by a DC to AC inverter. In the TC that got, someone had cut the cable from the inverter to the instrument itself.

You can sort of see the back of the TC chassis in the background. That's the valves and plumbing for the "Positive Control" wing leveler system. The post-1965 planes had a system that basically used the TC's sensitivity to bank to kepe the wings level (and thus roughly a constant heading). It was operated by vacuum; thus the hoses coming off the back of the TC to controll the parts of the PC system.



The other half of the system. This takes DC input and creates 3-phase AC to the TC.



So I cut up the cable and spliced each wire together.



Then I tested it by connecting the DC input to the inverter to a test DC power supply. It worked! That was pretty fun.