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Today my goal was to fly about 1 hour to heat up the oil, then oil change, then fly some more until the sun was down. Well, I met 2/3's of my goal! I noticed some air was coming into the cockpit under the panel. It almost felt like the fresh air vents were leaking. I have some gaps on the side of the canopy. Here's the left side.  And the right side gaps.  Van's gave me some of this cheesy weatherstripping for who know what. The adhesive on it was just terrible. Barely stuck to anything. But I figured it would be a cheap way to see if the air was coming from here or not. It did make a difference, so I will probably find some better stuff until I decide to fix this.  Here was a welcome surprise today. In climb (after I throttled back to 25 squared) my #3 CHT was much lower compared to what it usually is.  In cruise all my CHT's are within 6 degrees of each other! I keep on liking the GRT screens more and more. The circle to the left is my fuel flow (I don't have a label on it yet), and above that is the relative wing at my altitude. Right now it is telling me the direction the wind is blowing from (arrow), velocity (20 kts) headwind component (8 kts) and side component (19 kts from the left). Cool stuff.  It was a little hazy out today, and bumpy too.  Wow, a commercial airliner below me? Hard to see in this pic, but it was a turbo prop destined for BWI.  The landing today was just awesome. Having the idle set back made a big difference. 9.9 hours on the engine, so time to do an oil change!  My first airplane oil change. Needless to say I made an utter mess.  I leveled out the tail to make sure all the oil went to the front of the sump.  I heard getting the oil filter off is the worst part of the change. I thought I would be smart and ordered up this device which pierces the oil filter and allows you to drain the oil out of it so it would be mess free. Unfortunately, the device interfered with the governor so it didn't really work. I did a good job of getting oil everywhere.  After some work I got the new filter installed and topped her off to 6 quarts.  Hmmm, my backup GPS antenna popped off its mounting plate. This was epoxied on. I think the vibrations popper it off.  Doh! I cranked down on the hose clamps holding the neoprene to the plenum and cracked the fiberglass. The left side if much beefier, so I will lay some 1" glass on here one night this week.  Finally I RTV'd the GPS puck antenna on. That should do the trick hopefully. 
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Last Modified: August 13, 2023 |