Sign off and first flight!

Good news!

We received sign off on the plane this past Wednesday, however being that it was right before the holiday I was unable to get the insurance changed over and all of the paperwork finished before I had to leave town to spend time with the family.

The current plan is to fly the plane for first flight on Saturday Dec 5th at/around 4PM.  This will be heavily dependant on the weather and specifically the winds.

 I realize it's pretty late in the day but if you would like to come out for the flight please just drop me a note below.  Everyone is welcome and if we get enough I'll grab a pizza or two :)

I will post updates as we get closer and closer to this weekend and as the weather situation gets more and more exact.

Cleaning up

Starting to clean up and put everything back together on the inside of the plane.

She is starting to look less like a project and more like a real airplane again.

New vac pump

Well we knew that eventually as we continued to run the plane that little things would start to shake out.  Tuesday we were running the plane and I noticed that I had lost all suction.  

A quick inspection and we confirmed that the vac pump had failed.  These guys are mostly plastic so this we to be expected as the plastic was hard and brittle.  

A quick trip out to aircraftspruce.com and another pump was on the way!

We installed the pump today and she ran great!  Suction was good and all the instruments came back alive.

Small update and more crazy pictures

So just a quick update on the Cherokee.  Now that airshow season is behind us and the shop seems to be settling in for the rest of the year I spoke again to the Senior AP and he asked that that I 'run the mess' out of the plane this weekend doing as many run ups to full power (no more than 2-3 minutes) at a time and running it up and down the runway.

If everything checked out then he would try and take a look at it Monday/Tuesday and get me all signed off. 

We went out yesterday and ran it really good, her pedal brakes are a little softer than I would like but the parking brake is strong.  That tells me I have probably got some air in the pedal cylinders so I'll need to bleed those brakes one more time to see if I can get it all buttoned up.

Other than that she ran strong and well. 

As most of you guys know we had an airshow on field last weekend and word quickly spread through the performers about the little cherokee.  As a result she had quite a weekend where as a majority of the performers at one point or another wanted to go over and take a look at it.  The rain caused the main show to get shortened and caused us to have long stretches of downtime, the Professional Photographer asked if I would like to have some fun and take some pictures with my plane.  Of course I said "SURE!"  when else am I going to be able to get fancy pictures made.

I must say they turned out pretty hilarious just the absurdity of taking pictures like they do with warbirds made the cold and wet of the weekend worth it.

Rainy Airshow

 

When your airshow gets rained out you end up taking ridiculous pictures of your airplane with the professional photographer. Thank you Ricardo von Puttkammer for the photoshoot! I feel all important and stuff....

More pictures coming

Small update...

Even with the preparations for the airshow well underway I was able to sneak in some time on Saturday to finish up a few minor things.

We were able to get the newly energized ELT reinstalled in the plane...and we were able to put in the last replacement piece of air tubing under the cowling.

That's pretty much all the repairs that needed to be done...I have informed the senior AP on field that I am now ready to get "on the schedule" for final inspection and sign off.

I don't anticipate anything will happen this week or next week due to the insanity that comes with putting on an airshow.  But hopefully by mid Nov I will have more updates and possibly a date for the test flight.