I had a few things to take care of after the first flight. Right after that flight, I jacked the plane up and found why the gear was not retracting properly – newly inflated tires not fitting into wheel wells. I opened up the wheel wells so they fit in easily at 55psi and also lowered the tire pressure to 45psi, just to be sure. The other issue I noticed was one cylinder got a bit hot on climb out. So, this morning I took the top engine cowling off and had a look at the plenums and noticed a couple things. I forgot to silicone around the fuel line that enters thru the plenum – big air gaps there. Also, the top of the runners were not sealing up against the end of the NACA ducts – fixed that. I recalibrated the magnetic compass this time by taxing around, establishing a GPS heading, then calibrating. That seemed to take as I got no more caution messages indicating a GPS/mag heading mismatch on the subsequent flight.
So, it was time for another flight. Unfortunately the winds were favoring the shorter runway 33 (5000′). That’s plenty of runway, but I’d prefer to use the 7000′ 29. I took my passenger out (3, 50lb bags of sand) just to be safe, and headed out. I flew essentially the same as the first flight, once around the pattern then landed. The only issue was the PTT on my Garmin SL40 wasn’t working properly. It was sporadic on the first flight, but I thought I had diagnosed it to the headset and was using a different headset. Mid-flight I switched to my ICom radio which worked fine (so its not the switch).
For this flight, I had the camera working. Also, I was logging the flight using CloudAhoy – a very cool iPhone app. I didn’t realize how cool it was until I looked at what it logged. It essentially just collects GPS (and probably intertial) data, then after the flight, it uploads it to your CloudAhoy online account for analysis. There it breaks the flight down to taxi, takeoff climb, flying, landing et cetera. You can watch your flight playback either top down over google earth or via a cockpit few. My camera mounted under the wing was working as well, so I have the video from it, too.
A couple things on this flight. You’ll notice that after takeoff, I stayed low and built up some speed before starting a climb. After I got to ~90kts I was able to establish a decent climb achieving ~1000FPM. I got a little fast near the end of the climb out and my climb speed dropped. I also forgot to raise my gear until I was turning cross, which didn’t help. Once I was on downwind and lowered the RPM’s to ~2000, notice how quiet it gets -the mic on the GoPro camera makes the IO-360 sound like a lawnmower, but once I got to altitude and throttled back, I even noticed in the cabin, it got nice an quiet. Oil temp behaved itself all flight, and all cylinder heads were fine – I think the changes I made to the cooling plenum helped.
Here’s a link to both the video and the CloudAhoy flight analysis:
Second flight captured by CloudAhoy (make sure you try the cockpit view – you’ll notice you can see the ground speed and altitude while its playing)