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I meant to come and have the annual of the plane take 3 or perhaps 4 days. *sigh* It's not super-bad, I get to stay and play with the parents-in-law who are awesome, but it's been two weeks as of tomorrow and I miss my wife and cats.
This post is about what I've been doing. Early on we cleaned and check
spark plugs; everything looking healthy there.
One of the big things I've done this trip is take all the belly panels
off my plane for the first time. Here they are laid out with piles of
screws.
I forgot to put something in the picture to scale; the panels
are about 2 feed wide, top to bottom in the image. There's about a
few hundred screws holding them to the airplane.
Getting the screws out wasn't trivial. Three of them had actually
completely frozen, so I had to cut a slot in their heads with a dremel tool to
get them out.
Another thing I got to mess with was taking off and putting on the
spinner.
I painted the pressure plate (highlighted by the red
arrow), and then installed the forward bulkhead with new screws. Just
waiting for the mechanic's approval to put that part back together.
So what's the fuss about? Why did I stay longer? Well, I needed to
have a spacing collar installed in the nose gear for better handling.
THe collar is the silver ring; the white plate is the pressure plate
at the top of the gear doughnuts.
And as long as we're taking the nose disk shock tower apart, I decided
to have the shock disks in the nose gear replaced.
Also, while I've been driving back and forth to the hangar (1 h 20 min
each way) I've been testing chargers to see which one worked best
charging my iPad mini.
So tomorrow, hopefully by mid-day the nose gear will be back together and I can start planning for the trip home.
Here's what I've been doing with the Stratus. Here's my working
cardboard template that I'm getting into shape.
I'm basically making
a basket or tray that holds the stratus along the axis of the
airplane, so that I can see the status lights, and so that it doesn't
slide off into my lap from the glare shield. I did this very early in
the year.
A few weeks later, I put together a more precise version of the tray.
Here I've put it together.
Eventually the thought is to make the tray
out of Aluminum so it's stiffer, but the cardboard will do for a
short-lived version.
The green cord is a USB power cord that runs along the top of the
glare shield and then comes over by the pilot to power the iPad.
The cardboard tray, cable tied into place on the compass mounting
tube,
with the Stratus sitting in/on it. And the power cable to the
Stratus:
Here's what the setup looks like from outside the windshield:
If I park the airplane just right, I can get the car into the hangar
with the airplane still in it and shut the door:
A closer view of the above shot. You can see the oil cooler nicely
here in the lower corner of the cowl. You can also see the Stratus in
its mount under the windshield.
And after a couple of hours of futzing and prepping, the airplane is
ready for its trip to Texas (another post).
The weather was likely to
be fairly cold the morning that we left; you can see the extension
cord going in the oil door on the cowl; it's attached to the engine
heater plug and comes from a timer on the other end. I set it to
start warming the oil several hours before we got to the hangar. It
worked great.
Last year sometime, I bought a charger to go in the airplane. It has
three outputs, with different current capacities marked on the
USB ports:
It worked pretty well for my accessory electronics in my airplane
while I was flying. The 2.4A output was enough to charge the Stratus
GPS/ADS-B unit, and the lower 1.5A output would charge my iPad.
Well, I got another one to charge the two devices, a newer one without
the labels, with the hopes that since all the outputs were the same,
it would be able to supply full output current to all three outputs.
Not so much, it turns out. Only output that can charge the Stratus is
the top on, and the other ports act the same as the labelled one. So
in other words, the unlabelled one is the same as the labelled one
just without the physical labels. Oh well. More recently I've been
investigating other charging solutions. (Both of the 3-output white
chargers are "Bolse" brand.)
One interesting thing I ran into while testing the newer charger was
that if I pushed it into the power socket (formerly lighter socket)
all the way, it would trip the breaker. Looking inside, you can see
why:
The yellow dot indicates the tang on the hot part of the socket. You
can see it's scored on the edge where it's touched the side. I
suspect that someone put the back part of the socket from a car into
the socket from the airplane. This is something I'll have to talk to
my mechanic at annual (which is soon). My temporary solution is the
red cardboard strip that keeps the tang from touching the grounding
barrel.
The reason that I'm getting the charging stuff set up is that I
bought an iPad mini 2 for my electronic charts.
Next to my hand is my
old iPad 1 that I've had for a few years, and farther away from my
hand is the mini. Both are running foreflight here.
I have a RAM ball mount on the bottom of the pilot's yoke in my
airplane. I have a RAM mounting arm and an iPad mini mount to hold
the mini in front of the yoke. Here you see how I've modified the
arm, so that the arm will sit up flush with the yoke shaft:
And here's the iPad mini on its mount on the yoke. This is basically
my view sitting in the pilot's seat.
The full-size iPad is pretty
bulky, but the mini is perfect. I can read the approach plate (as
shown) but I can see the panel and switches just fine. I've flown
four big cross-country flights with it mounted this way, including a
real instrument approach in significant IFR conditions, and this
worked great.
Oh, and another thing: The Bolse charger wasn't able to charge the Stratus and the iPad mini continuously for all the flights. Sometime during the second flight, it stopped charging the stratus. I don't know if it gets too hot or what, but the flights were finished under battery power. Which is fine, but I wish I could get a solution that would continue to charge for arbitrary amounts of time.
I realized the other day that I don't have any ANY photos of the
airplane in the last dozen or so blog posts, here here are a couple.
This was March 1 when I went out to the hangar and test the fit of the
iPad and test the charger. After two weeks of basically being snowed
in, we were able to get out of the house, but the hangars still had a
ridge of snow from it falling off the roof of the hangar building.
And just because it amuses me, a closer version of that same photo:
I love the asymmetric look of the nose, the landing light on the right
side and the oil cooler on the left. If you look closely, just to the
right (from our point of view) in the windshield is the Stratus taped
to the glare shield. The saga of the mounting technology for the
Stratus is another post entirely.
Wow--March was quite a month. Even in January, March was already shaping up to be a busy month. I had significant trips/commitments early in the month and late in the month. Then I had the bright idea to stick a really busy work trip with personal travel on both ends in the middle. So March was very busy with travel; as I write this on April 6, it's just finally settling out and this week should be back to a normal-ish schedule.
The first journey was a trip up to Cincinattii to help my wife run a conference. This was an absolute committment on my part, and has been on my schedule for at least six months. The two weeks of snowmageddon at the end of February were not encouraging for this trip. The conference was Friday/Saturday. Earlier in the week, the state of Kentucky wasn't doing too badly, but it was looking a lot of the state would get snow dumped on it on Wednesday and Thursday, so us just getting to the conference was looking iffy.
Given the snow that was expected to land on Thursday, if we started heading north on Thursday morning, it was likely we wouldn't be able to get out of town. So we decided to outmaneuver the weather. Wednesday afternoon (in fine weather) we drove to Lexington and stayed in a hotel right on the north side, next to the interstate, so the roads we would be driving on would have the best snow removal possible.
That worked fine. But we did get the expected snow over night. When
we got up, the car was caked with nigh on a foot of snow:
That morning, I did the first clear-start-scrape-defrost cycle
I've done in many many years. I know people in Minnesota do that
every day in parts of the winter, but it's been a while for me. I
also backed it across the parking lot so that it was clear of the snow
piles around it. The end result was pretty good:
While we were having breakfast I made some poor attempts at bird
photography while we were having lunch.
Due to the higgledy-piggledy of the snow and its effect on the
conference schedule, the conference days itself were super-busy, so I
really don't have anything to show. One really nice thing: right
across the street from the hotel was a Joe's Crab Shack:
I think if I were reviewing that as a design for an establishment in a
game, I would perhaps ask them to pull back the character a bit.
And last thing: on the way home, I saw this advertisement in a truck stop bathroom. It got me thinking more about car (and also airplane) USB chargers, which is another topic that I've been working on this past month.
So the trip to Cincinatti was the opening salvo of the month. The big trip in the middle of the month was yet to come.