Well, now is the time to catch up on what has happened.
In between flights I tried to remove of the sticky vinyl that had turned out to be the Blue Plague. Now all that's left are partial two segments of the outmost lower left wing sheet.
A few weeks back I hopped in the plane with one of my Sport Pilot instructors and flew in and out of Tucson International which is a Class C airspace, and it's one of the busier ones. This was to get my endorsement for Class C Airspace as these explicit sign-offs are one of the unfortunate disadvantages of having a Sport Pilot ticket instead of a Private Pilot license. Class D and Class C are down and I might go for Bravo in a while to legally be able to fly through the VFR transition area over Phoenix International airport.
The plane reached 25 hours of engine time on the Hobbs meter last weekend and this means it is down for an oil change now. I wanted to use this mandatory cowl removal opportunity to extensively check for any kind of chafing on hoses and wires and also do a few fixes. One of them is to up the resistance value for the RPM wire a bit as it is still fluctuating on initial climb-out.
Another one is to finally prime and maybe paint the fiberglass cowl. This necessarily also included mulling over a possible paint scheme or if I want to add that dead weight of paint at all.
I came to the conclusion that my favorite scheme would be something close to this:
However, at this point I am still in strong opposition to anything that adds weight without any direct benefit.
The decision I made was to paint the fiberglass to protect it for now and to use a color that I would also fit this paint scheme in case I would end up having the plane painted some time down the road.
Priming and painting the cowl will take a little while and I took this opportunity to fix the problem of one of the exhaust springs rubbing on the inside of the cowl. It's the forward left spring.
I have already cut out the fiberglass and glassed in a sphere that curves away from the spring to give it some room. Here is the same area with the hole cut out and the edges roughed up for glassing.
and here after the glass was laid up.
After it had cured, I smeared some light-weight epoxy filler around the edge of the sphere in the tunnel...
... and put 3 coats of ceramic heat shield on the inside.
It's drying over night right now.
The oil change itself was a funny mess. I had ordered some of these copper crush washer that go underneath the drain screw head of the oil canister but when it was time do the oil change I could find them anywhere.
I put the old one on in the hope that I might get lucky as some sometimes they can be reused once. I was not lucky and have a very slow drip leak on the washer which will get replaced before I put the cowl back on.
I was also not able to change the filter yet as Rotax decided in its infinite wisdom to change the shape of the back of the oil filter a few years after I had built up my stock on Rotax and Rotax-compatible oil filters and TOOLS. Sure enough the filter wrench I had did not fit the filter to remove it. I have ordered new tools to do that when I get back to the hangar.
On a good note, though, I did not find anything wrong under the hood. No signs of chafing of hoses or wires or any leaks of anything - other than the contact point of the exhaust spring on the lower cowl.
And also the heat indicators on the electronic ignition modules do not show any sign of overheating (yet).
So now the plan is to finish up the fix on the lower cowl and then apply the Stewart EkoFill that I had bought a while ago to prep the cowl and spinner for painting. And I believe I might try to paint it with Latex paint from Sherwin-Williams. Maybe I try it on the spinner first ...
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