Lessons learned
I got really close to finishing the test phase, but the weather on Sunday didn’t cooperate. Rain and low clouds kept me grounded.
Monday was a different story. Ceilings were around 4500′ when I took off in the morning. It was very bumpy and not much fun flying. After about 1.5 hours of that, I was ready for a break. I went back up after lunch and the clouds were starting to break up. I found a big hole to pop above and found an incredible sight. It’s like sticky your head out of a cave to find a beautiful sunny day. Above 6000′ there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and all the mountains were out in full glory, Rainer, Hood, St. Helens. I went up to 7000′ where it was very smooth and flew around for a while.
Here’s a pic of the panel in flight. It looks like I’m in the clouds, but it’s just super bright outside compared to inside.
There were a ton of boats out on the water near Olympia.
And here are the Olympics just barely peeking above the clouds.
Up north, the clouds completely disappeared. I did some climb testing at 90, 85, 80, and 75 knots. The climb rate kept increasing, but not by much once I hit 75 knots. Trying to climb at 70 knots would be a crazy steep angle and the engine would cook. Not worth it.
After that, I was down to about 15 gallons. I decided to land and get some fuel before finishing off the last few hours. Port Townsend was handy and I’d been in there before. Turns out the power was out. No fuel. The cafe had also closed, but they were still around and sold me a cookie. There were a few RVs there including a beautiful silver and polished RV-3 fastback.
I didn’t hang around long and consequently the engine was still warm. I have yet to find the optimum starting procedures. It would catch, but not keep running. It took several attempts before she roared to life.
When I got down to the run-up area, I found the right brake was a little weak. It’s been making a squawking noise ever since I re-bent the line to fit around the leg fairing. I’ve been tweaking it to try to eliminate the squawking, but haven’t been successful. I was able to do the run-up, but not at full power. I thought about jumping out and taking a look at the brake, but wasn’t sure what I’d do stuck out in Port Townsend. I never use the brakes to land at Renton as the runway is so long and wide, so I decided to just go for it.
Apparently the brake situation distracted me from doing the rest of the checklist. As I pushed in full power and started to lift off, I found I had forgotten to latch the canopy. I had heard of this happening to others and knew it wasn’t a huge problem. The canopy wanted to ride about 4-6″ open. I held it down a little with the handle while I flew the plane. Once off the ground, I attempted to close it without success. I climbed a bit steeper and was able to slow down enough where I was able to pull it closed. In retrospect I should have been more worried about flying the plane than closing the canopy, but it turned out fine.
I flew a fairly direct route back to Renton, landed without incident and still had over an hour of fuel left. Once I hopped out of the plane, I noticed brake fluid dripping out of the right brake. Apparently all my futzing with the brake line loosened the connection at the fitting.
Anybody who’s read accident reports will recognize the common themes above, a sequence of problems (no fuel available, hot start problems, brake problem, canopy not latched) combined with a case of get-there-itis. Luckily, it all turned out fine. So now I’ve learned not to ignore/delay maintenance issues and I’m going develop a mental checklist to augment the written one I have for pre-take-off. And if I ever end up taking off without the canopy unlatched again (which I won’t), it’s better to abort take off.
End result is that I got to 38.2 hours. I can easily work on the brakes and get that time knocked out next weekend.