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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.