I wrapped up the condition inspection today. It was too dark to take it up for a test flight, so I’ll have to do that later. Other than the few things I mentioned, I didn’t find anything wrong.

Fortunately, I was able to pop off the extra glass and flox mixture I used for the gear leg fairing attachment.

I then fabricated and epoxied some 0.063″ aluminum strips onto the fairings. I curved the upper ends to follow the curvature of the gear legs.

I drilled some extra holes in the strips and then countersunk them so that the epoxy would flow through and help lock the strips to the fairings. After the glue cured, I sanded everything flush with the strips.

One of the fiberglass ears at the top of the gear leg fairings broke off on the left fairing.

The one on the right is cracked all the way through and is likely to break soon.

I had used electrical tape to hold the brake hose to the gear leg. This broke in most of the spots, so I took it all off. I didn’t get a picture of it, but I just wrapped the electrical tape around the gear leg and then used some zip ties to secure the brake hose.

I pulled the tailwheel fork off to clean and lubricate it. While it was off, I swapped the control arm with one that has a hole for a tie-down hook.

I cleaned out the coking that occurs in the check valve that dumps into the exhaust pipe. It was maybe 20-30% blocked and is easily scraped out.

Since I added the tee into the breather line to add an extra check valve as a safety measure, the hose clamp on the upper side of the tee was rubbing against the engine mount. I shortened the hose below the tee to get the hose clamp to clear the mount.

This allowed me to just use the adel clamps to secure the check valves to each other and to the hose. You can also see that I painted the place on the engine mount that was scratched.

One of the two welded brackets for the heat shield near the alternator also broke. I’ll have to order another one of these.

It’s been a long time since I updated the blog, and I’m trying to fix that. I have around 157 hours on the plane now and it’s time for its second condition inspection. I know it’s Valentine’s Day, but Jenn had a bunch of work to do today, so she joined me at the airport while I got started.

I started by draining the oil.

While the oil was draining, I inspected the engine and baffles. Surprisingly, one of the baffle attachment bolts on the #4 cylinder was missing. Fortunately, this didn’t seem to cause any problems (likely because the plenum keeps everything from moving).

One odd thing I noticed was that a couple of pieces of the chrome plating on the #2 cylinder’s intake valve pushrod cover flaked off. This is just cosmetic, but it’s peculiar that it happened and only happened in just this one little spot.