I spent most of the morning cleaning up the hangar and organizing my shelves.

Next, I tried to tighten the set screw that anchors the pilot’s control stick grip, but ended up cracking the wood in the grip a little bit.  I flexed open the crack and filled it with epoxy before clamping it.  I also drilled a small hole where the set screw sits so that the set screw will screw into a hole instead of just applying pressure to the stick.  This should be a much more secure way to attach the grip and it can never loosen.

I also reattached the aileron boots.  I still need to apply the foam tape where the narrow end attaches to the push rod so that I can zip-tie that end.

I fixed the oil leak we had yesterday and made another pass through every bolt and fitting firewall forward to make sure nothing had moved.  We got the spinner installed as well as the plenum.

Finally, we cowled it up and pulled it out for the first taxi test.

I spoke with Andair about the pump, and they’re sending me a new one (great customer service by the way).  Without the electric pump, the engine driven pump has to pull the fuel during engine start, so the engine takes a few extra revolutions to fire over what it will once the new pump arrives.  Anyway, my brother and I jumped in and did an initial taxi test.  Other than needing to finish seating the brake pads, I was able to accomplish all of the taxi testing goals in one engine run.  Here’s a video of the taxi test.

My brother and I came out to the airport early and got final assembly taken care of.  We bolted on the elevators and rudder, torqued and adjusted the ailerons and hooked up the flaps.  My buddy Greg came down and we got most of the safety wire on the propeller done.  We did a very thorough pre-flight and then pulled the plane out for first engine start.

We tied the plane off to my car and chocked the wheels.  Greg and his son Nicholas were on handheld radios so I could be in contact with them.

We spent a little time trying to diagnose a problem with the Andair fuel pump, but it looks like it’s not working correctly.  I’ll have to call Andair tonight to see what they want to do about this.

We decided to go ahead and try the first engine start with just the engine-driven fuel pump.  We pre-oiled the engine by pulling the plugs and spinning the starter until we got oil pressure and fuel pressure.  Unfortunately, that killed the battery, so we had to hook it up to jumper cables for the final start.  After reinstalling the lower plugs, it fired up pretty quickly.  Here’s a video of the first engine run.

Everything about the start went beautifully.  The engine ran perfectly and we were able to verify all engine controls are working correctly, both ignitions are working correctly, all pressure and temperature senders are working correctly.  There is one small oil drip from the cap on the oil cooler, but other than that, everything is tight and there were no problems.

I repaired the bracket and got all of the wing attachment bolts final torqued.

I also finished installing the rear spar bolt and cotter pinned it.

My brother wrapped up the vertical stabilizer.

We also installed the prop and my brother spent some time learning to safety wire.  We ended up cutting off every try we made and we’ll try again later.