It has been a few weeks since I have written, but there has been some flying, and work done on the plane.
On September 30th I took her up to run the right tank dry. The sump valve under the wing has needed to be replaced for quite some time and after my last flight I was left with just a few gallons in the tank so this was perfect. I took her up over Lake Matthews and just flew around working on some turns. I thought I was paying attention to the fuel pressure but apparently I lost track and instead of catching it as the pressure dropped the engine quit. It was a non-event though because as soon as I reached down and switched tanks it started right back up. I headed back to the airport and got the valve changed out.
Another thing I have wanted to get done for quite some time is to repair the overhead vents. There is a duct that runs from the inlet in the roof above the rear seats to the four overhead vents. However it is made up of pieces of sheet metal and over the years they just don’t fit well together anymore. I pulled the headliner out and sure enough there were a lot of gaps, with a huge one at the front. Repairs were made pulling off old foil tape and replacing with new tape. The old fiberglass insulation was replaced with super soundproofing closed cell sheets.
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- Repaired duct with super soundproof on the left hand side installed.
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- Old fiberglass insulation
After getting everything back together I went up for a short flight October 7th to see if there was improvement in the overhead vents. The improvement was amazing! Where before you could barely feel any air movement out of the vents it was now a nice breeze coming through them. As I made the short flight over our house and back to the airport I was wishing I had made those repairs at the beginning of the summer, not the end…