Friday 2 December 2016

Getting close to that first flight

It's been a good week.

Firstly I dropped off the silencer and pipe to our local guru welder Chris Baglin of Merlin Engineering.

Chris turned the job around in 2 days flat and only charged me £50 which I thought was very reasonable. The work was of an extremely high standard too.

While that welding was being done I took the opportunity to make up some new deflectors for the front cylinders. The previous version - Mark 2 - still did not bring the temps close enough, with a difference of between 10 and 15 degrees from the front to the back (the back being hotter).

So Mark 3 deflectors were made up - these cover almost the entire front half of the front cylinders. I overdid it a bit and now the temps are too hot at the front! But the difference now is only 10 degrees, so I will cut down the deflectors a little bit and hopefully they will be close to 5 degrees difference, which is what I've been aiming for all along.

A chat with my test pilot Chris Burkett revealed that Pete's Twisters have up to 20 degrees difference between cylinders. This can't be all that good for them.

So today with everything back together I did some more high speed taxi's.

See the video by clicking on the link below.

https://youtu.be/PiEsoSg89Cc

All would be ready for a first flight on Sunday (and the weather looks good too) but Rex my inspector has gone to France this week and won't be back till next Friday so we've lost another week. Oh well it gives me time to thoroughly test this new weld and make sure the exhaust is not cracking again. Murphy's law says that next weekend will be crap weather.

Also I've now been approved by the LAA to help Chris with the test flying. Chris will still be the lead pilot and do the initial flights plus the aerobatic schedule but I should be able to take over after that if there are no other issues.

Mark 3 deflectors - a bit too much as it turns out. Not riveted or RTV'ed here yet.

Beautiful welding from Chris Baglin of Merlin Engineering.

CHT's just after shutdown. Some more tweaks to the deflectors needed.

High Speed Taxiing. (the Video link is in the above text.)

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