Monday, December 30, 2013

Phase 1 of Phase I

Now that I am back in the flying business again, I started on completing Flight 1 of the Production Acceptance Procedure (PAP) which is the very phase 1 of Phase I. I tried to do a mix of maneuvers from the PAP and keep the fun part up by flying the plane a bit for sight-seeing and playing with the SkyView to get more comfortable with the avionics.

Basic stalls out of slow flight, straight and  level and with slight bank angle have all been completed during the 3rd flight that verified that the pump was working ok. Then I also checked the 120 knots behavior in an extended dive from the exercise altitude of 4500 AGL.

Today I completed the 4th flight of N128TL and the most demanding yet. I took about an hour of flying time trying to stall the plane from a 10-15 degree bank angle. It is almost impossible to do that as the plane resists to get the nose up at lower speeds and the pressure on the elevator becomes very hard to overcome. You have to be very heavy handed to get into a stall on a turn at 60 knots.
I also tried to squeeze the left flaperon trailing edge to reduce or eliminate the heavy right wing. So far I made little progress on the heavy wing but my hands were pretty tired after two runs along the trailing edge.

Here are some pictures from the airstrips around my home airport.




I also covered the oil cooler just a tad to get the oil temps up to boiling water level. This amount works great in 10C ambient temperature.


Now that I am done with Flight 1, I am having a problem to continue as the next flights require me to run the engine at the maximum continuous RPM of 5500 and my tachometer is still misbehaving at around 5000. I have no clue at this point what it could be and don't know what to do about it. I'll see if the forum can help ...

Update: The forum helped but even more so did Mel, a friend of Gary who also finishes an RV-12 at Marana. Mel suggested to increase the inline resistance of the RPM signal path from the 30K Ohms Van's had put in to an overall 50K Ohms. I will try to add the additional 20K Ohms on Saturday and test the result.

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