Enough Snow Already! Time for Spring upgrades

The last month has seen a succession of snow storms. Last week, the area was without electricity for almost a week. Enough already.

I am looking forward to getting back into flying season. As anticipated, I ordered some equipment to upgrade the systems in the plane. I have done some light maintenance and tried to get some flying time here and there as weather permits, but it has been few and far between due to the constant severe winter weather.

Since it's been a while since I posted, I thought I'd put up a few pictures to show what's been going on.

_____________________________________________________________

Ryan is a Navy pilot who had been following the blog and corresponding with me during his deployment in Bahrain. He got back to the states a few weeks ago and drove up from Virginia with his wife to take a look at the Velocity in person. The weather cleared up just enough to go up. His wife was nervous at first, but we convinced her to go along.

__________________________________________________________________

Ryan takes a turn at flying the plane. He really enjoyed it. I think it was bigger, faster and more capable than he pictured.

_________________________________________________________________

Here is a view of the chilly countryside as we do some sightseeing and give him a chance to get a feel for the plane.

____________________________________________________________

Cruising along at 170 knots indicated, the air is smooth as can be.

_____________________________________________________________________

Ryan's wife decides it's not scary after all. We had a good flight, lunch and called it a day. Nice visit and I hope to see them again.

______________________________________________________________


Here are the upgrades I bought for the plane. I am going to install an air/oil separator to eliminate that greasy streak on the belly, an engine preheater an Ardenna Skyradar ADSB receiver to give me free traffic and weather and a 406 ELT. This sounds like a short list, and was a small box from Aircraft Spruce, but set me back a couple of  thousand dollars, so that will be it for a while.

Now, I just have to find time to get the plane over to my trusted friend and A&P Dennis Glick at Dutchland Aviation to install them in his nice heated shop.

____________________________________________________________

 Until I get my fancy aircraft grade preheater installed, I thought I'd show you the low cost alternative I came up with in the meantime.

I bought a $15 heating pad at the drug store. It fits right into the cowling and slides under the oil pan. As you can see from the EFIS picture, it raised the oil temperature from 30 degrees to 59 degrees in only an hour.

 __________________________________________________________________

I went out to check on the plane several times to find it looking like this - dripping with condensation on every bottom surface. I'm glad it's fiberglass and not metal. If anyone has a fix for this, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

_________________________________________________________________

This would be typical of "good" flying weather in the winter here. I took her up for about 30 minutes just to heat up the oil and knock off some rust from my flying skills.

__________________________________________________________________

On the maintenance front, I noticed that my fancy Aveo nav/strobes had clouded over and were almost opaque. I called the company, expecting to have a warranty issue. Turns out, I was supposed to keep them waxed and could buff the coating off.

I have used Flitz metal polish to repair Plexiglas with great success in the past, so decided to give it a try.

_________________________________________________________________

Here is the Flitz. It is great stuff for metal and Plexi polishing. I decided to just try a little hand polishing with a clean terry towel.

_________________________________________________________________

After just a minute, it is obvious that this is going to work. Notice the difference between the forward and aft ends of the strobe.

__________________________________________________________________

All done and it looks brand new. That was an easy fix once I had the right product.

__________________________________________________________________

I am starting to plan our first trips for the Spring. Andy Millin and his wife may be joining us for a trip to Key West. We are also going to go to New England and to First Flight. Can't wait for the weather to get better.

Stay tuned for more.

__________________________________________________________________