Phase I completed

Over the weekend I took a moment to install the Kroger Sunshade to get out of the searing sun, at least some of the flight time.

This sunshade is very effective and super light-weight, so it's a no-brainer in my book.

On Saturday and Sunday I collected some more climb data and various airspeed data to compare against the GPS groundspeed by eliminating the wind factor.
The toughest was the 50kt box as the plane is close to stall and not very maneuverable without getting completely out of balance. It took me a while but I was able to collect some good data.

After the duties flight testing were completed I went back up to 6500 feet and took some more photos of the beautiful winter scenery around Tucson.

Then I headed out West to Silverbell Mine.

On the way I took a shot of my home airport, KAVQ, from the North.

And on the way back from the mine I passed my old home field where I trained for my Sport Pilot license and where I had my Rans S-12S stationed for a while, 4AZ8, The Ultralight Strip.

All in all a very nice and relaxed flight to finish off Phase I. The plane is very easy to fly and has absolutely no surprising characteristics. The next weekends should be fun when I can finally leave the 25nm radius around KAVQ.

After landing and hangaring the plane, I made the important Phase-I-completed logbook entry and removed the 5-gallon water ballast tank from the passenger seat.

The seat is now available for human passengers if they so please to come along with me.

3.75 years after pulling the first rivet on a pile of aluminum sheet metal, I am sitting in this contraption and am flying around in it.

Absolutely amazing!

Would I do it again?

You bet, I would!

Grounded by the Flu

I have just been made aware of the fact that although it looked like I was in full flow with the flight testing procedures the postings here suddenly stopped coming.
Well, the reason - as the title strongly suggests - was not at all voluntary silence but a bad case of the flu (yes, I did get the flu shot in November).
Yesterday, I had just been out at the hangar again and the first time for what appears to have been two weeks.

During my unplanned hiatus I was busy getting a canopy seal kit from Van's as well as a glareshield. The glareshield fits perfectly without any trimming and smoothly aligns with the canopy frame without too much clamping force needed. I will try to complete the surface preparation during this week, so I can spray the paint on the weekend and then install it when the paint has cured. I still have quite an amount of the Dupont Flat Black that I used for the instrument panel. If that turned out to be not "flat" enough, I could always cover the top with fabric later on.

I was also getting ready to install the Kroeger sunshield yesterday but because of teh flu being rather tiring I did not feel up to the task of marking the center of the canopy for the correct alignment of the center slide of the sunshield. I just did not trust myself enough to do a good job in this condition, so I refrained from continuing the installation.

This will all have to wait till the next weekends but the good news is that I am feeling better every day and that there is only a bit more of climb data to be collected before I can sign her off.

Climb Data Collected

Another take-off confirmed that the RPM indicator is still somewhat jumpy on take-off and initial climb-out. It seems to jump between two discrete values and is much more stable than before. Surprisingly enough, the indicator is rock solid as soon as the initial climb-out is done. Subsequent climb-outs work work just fine and show a constant RPM. I can absolutely live with this until I remove the cowl anyway for some other reason. Then I would try a 30K resistor instead of the 20K one and see if this would completely solve the problem.

I have also alleviated the roll problem by extending the pushrod for the right flaperon by one turn of the attached fitting. To get there I had to remove my split floor panel and squeeze my hand in there but it only took an hour to complete the task. If I ever have to open the floor panels again, I might add another half turn as there is still a very slight roll tendency left.

After doing this fix, I wanted to fly to confirm that the airframe was still balanced and to collect some climb data and do some speed boxes.

I did all that but the really impressive thing was the shot I took once I got to 9000 feet.

Both have been taken north of El Tiro Gliderport at about 9000 feet. Breath-taking!

Overall, the data suggests that my propeller is a bit too high in pitch. I was not able to get to 5500 RPM in straight and level flight at density altitude of 7500 feet.
So, I might have to do this before the next flight and then verify that I am doing better. By the way, the left EGT sensor was working ok during the flight and did not vary too much but after I had hangared the plane again and let it cool down the SV showed a cross in place of the left EGT temperature. That usually means that the sensor is dead or not connected. Oh well, there is always something, I guess ...

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.

She's Flying Again

After closing everything up yesterday and doing a successful engine ground run with some time at WOT with pleasing fuel pressure and flow indications, I did a 50 minutes test flight today.
I can say it feels good to be flying again and the fuel supply did not show any issues whatsoever.
The only problem that is left is the erratic RPM readings once I reach 5100 RPM. Obviously my attempted fix in securing the plug that connects the avionics to the cable coming from the Rotax did not solve the problem. I will have to dig into that at some point but don't see the need for it right now.
Currently I am more hampered by the small test flight area of just 25nm around my home airport. At 110 knots you reach the edge of the area pretty quickly! The following pictures shows the North North-West edge of that area.

and the Skyview at the same location, showing 117 knots TAS at 4900 feet and at only 5070 RPM. This plane is really fast, and I haven't even installed the wheel and leg fairings yet!

Now I have to read into the flight testing exercises and get to it!