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A few photos taken in and around the time of the long annual. The
cats looking resplendant.
And again.
Also during this time, we were gearing up for a big project that went
over the summer through the fall. We'd been thinking about adopting a
child internationally, and this spring we got serious about it. It
involves a LOT of paperwork and scanning and stuff, so here I'm doing
that.
Among the various paperwork required are statements about your
household and asseets, so I took an artsy photo of the house,
and had to go to the local police station to get fingerprinted
(slightly odd).
One other thing:
While I was at the parent-in-law's that spring, I went to the regional
battery store and got a proper battery for their generator. It's
shown here, installed.
This brings the chronology up to May 10, 2015.
Spinner bulkhead re-attached with new hardare.
Getting inspection panels re-installed without dropping them inside
the plane is sometimes tricky, especially
when they're on vertical walls. Here's the trick my mechanic taught
me about that. Form a handle with tape:
which allows you to hold it in place until you get the first couple of
screws attached:
All buttoned up, ready to fly.
Getting ready to fly the plane home after the annual; charging all the
things.
Heading home, loading the plane.
April/May 2015 was the first annual for my airplane since the propellor was replace and engine overhauled in 2013-14. This was the first semi-normal annual. Still plenty of work done, but not major systems were replaced.
Taking apart the spinner to annual the propeller.
The pressure plate was a bit rusty and wasn't holding pressure on the
front spinner bulkhead.
We painted the pressure plate so it at least wasn't corroding.
Prop dome with the spinner bulkhead removed.
Electric fuel pump, fuel selector and fuel system sump at the bottom
of the photo.
While parts came in and we worked on stuff for the annual, I was
driving my father-in-law's truck around.
When we had a break, I took a couple of days and drove to HQ and spend
a couple of days in the office. Here's the office recharging setup.
I spent a good bit of time during this trip testing chargers in the
truck for use
in the airplane.
Back to the annual, all the belly panels off.
It was my first time taking the panels off. Over a couple hundred
screws; I stripped three and had to extract them by cutting a slot
with a dremel tool.
We did some work on the landing gear. Here's the plane on jacks, gear
retracted, looking vaguely Airwolf-like.
It's been a long fall. And November was very rocky, for various reasons. Oy. Mostly the election. Double-oy. I frankly still have an emotional hangover from that, five weeks later. But trying to put the pieces back together, I guess I'm also trying to resume normal life.
So last time I was blogging about the past, I was back up through April 4, 2015, roughly. We continue the narrative from there. I bought a new phone then, so photos since are from my current phone, the Droid Maxx, which I got because it has MUCH better battery life than the LGE.
Here's Pangur reviewing the Verizon bag my phone came home in:
and the other cats editorializing what they think of all of this:
I was still working on commissioning the front stoop/porch. The gate
didn't close well with two hinges, so I added a third spring hinge in
the middle.
And finally, my mother's mother, who had been in declining health for years, died in such a way that we had a time window to go to the funeral. My wife and I flew to Omaha and then rented a car to drive up to South Dakota for the funeral.
In all my travelling for work starting in 1994 through now, twice I've
randomly received a cheap rental car upgrade to any car on the lot.
Once in 2010 when I was in Minnesota to get my instrument rating, and
the other was trip I took in March of 2015 to California via
Minnesota. I was all prepared to get compact sedan, but she wanted to
get a fun car too, so we got a Dodge Challenger:
The drive up was along Interstate I-29 along with Missouri river
valley, which has an 80 mph speed limit. We spent the time driving 85:
What was amazing was we got almost 30 mpg. The engine was only
turning 1800 rpm:
It had Sirius Satellite Radio. Of course, this was on:
Not much of an entry, but I wanted to get back into it. That takes us through April 12, 2015.