Took a work colleague for a trip around the Metroplex on Saturday. We flew from Dallas Executive down to Cleburne to see Jesse, who is the builder of my plane.
The air was a bit bumpy low down, but smoother above 6000 feet.
Jesse, being the sort of person who has to be building something, built a Cozy IV after he built the Long-EZ, and the Cozy lives at Cleburne, ironically, in the same hangar in which James Redmon first began building his Berkut. It's a small world...
The first thing I discovered is that fuel prices at Cleburne, TX are a bargain - only $2.85 a gallon for 100LL. I promptly took on 28 gallons, which should keep me flying for a while. While I fuelled up, Jesse took Ron for a ride in the Cozy IV, which impressed him, mainly because of the acceleration on the take-off roll. Ron has been training in the classic collection of under-powered certified aircraft such as the Cessna 152 and Cessna 172.
Jesse has almost finished repairing minor damage to the Cozy caused when it fell over on its tail outside the hangar. A gust of wind lifted the plane's wing, and because the canard was off for the Annual Condition Inspection, the plane was tail-heavy, and up into the air went the nose...Jesse was unable to catch it in time, and even his weight was not sufficient to bring the plane's nose back down before the winglets and wheelpants hit the ground hard. Fortunately, the lower winglets took the brunt of the damage, and they are (relatively) easy to repair. The wheelpants were also damaged, but Jesse has already fixed them and they look as good as new.
The main lesson to learn from that incident if you are a canard pusher owner with a 3-blade prop is - always park the prop with one blade at 12 o'clock. Because Jesse had the prop parked at that orientation, the prop was not damaged. If a single prop blade had been pointing towards the ground, he would have become the owner of an expensive wall ornament.
We flew from Cleburne over to McKinney, to meet up with James Redmon, who had been flight-testing new baffling inside his lower cowling, designed to equalise the CHTs on his engine. When we arrived, James had already completed a successful flight test, with the CHTs now within 10-15 degrees. He then proceeded to make me salivate by showing off his newly-arrived Garmin 396 GPS, complete with XM Radio and real-time weather. Damn my current lack of spare cash...
We then met up with Gerhard, who was busy replacing a cylinder on his Cessna 172. The 100 hour inspection revealed that compression on that cylinder was a stunning 5/80...clearly something was amiss there. Removing the cylinder showed cracks in the cylinder head, but more seriously, damaged valve guides. The engine was operating as a 5-cylinder Continental. The cylinder was being replaced with a new Millenium cylinder, and Gerhard was expecting the plane to be back in the air mid-week.
We then flew back to Dallas Executive, detouring over Greenville to climb up to 8000 feet to weave in and out of some of the fluffy stuff, and show Ron the general performance of the Long-EZ. Then back to Dallas Executive.
When I inspected the exhausts after putting the plane away, I noticed oil residue on the prop and inside the #3 exhaust pipe. I have always suspected that #3 cylinder was not entirely healthy - this may be an indication of sticking rings. We may need to take a look at this issue before Rough River.