I was out this morning and put in an hour. That makes it 38.2hr in Phase I, so a couple more hours and I’m free from my box.
Everything has been going well. The only minor issue I was battling over the last couple weeks is the camber of the pilot-side main gear wheel. After I overheated the brakes, I noticed that the main gear wheel on the pilot side was splayed out a little (negative camber). I replaced the brakes with ones with more braking capacity, but when I reassembled them, it was still out of camber. built up the gear leg with fiber flox and a couple layers of BID, but it still needed a couple shims to get it cambered correctly.
This weekend, I loaded up the plane to full gross and tested it. I loaded the rear seats with 240lb, the front seats had me (225lb) and some 180lb of sand bags. I first took off with half-fuel and flew for a bit to get used to the extra weight. It took off and climbed fine. The only big difference was the amount of trim needed. To climb out, I was at full trim and a little stick pressure. I then filled the tanks to put it at full gross (1000lb load, 2400lb gross). Still flew well. Did some slow flight and did a dirty stall at 60kts. The Velocity does a nice well behaved stall buck both with full power and low power.
Today I moved some of the weight from the rear seats to the front seat so I had me at 225lb and 240lb in the co-pilot seat (none in the rear) and about 40gal of fuel. Again, lots of trim needed, but it performed very well. It is cool here, tho (~37F).