Because I'm Impatient

As long as I had the cowling off to do my still secret project, I thought the time was ripe to install an oil preheater. This is a simple little device that does nothing more than provide an electric heat source to keep the oil at a reasonable temperature in the winter. There are a number of reasons to do so, ranging from protecting the engine during those first few minutes of running with cold, thick oil to saving engine wear and gas costs while waiting for the oil to heat from temps in the low teens to the required 120F before taking off. Those are valid reasons, but the primary reason is that I am impatient.  I hate sitting there for twenty minutes waiting for the oil to heat up.

Being as the preheater kit is comprised of nothing more than a couple of electric heating pads and some wires to tie it all together, it seems the height of extravagance to pay $230 for it, but in the long run it's usually worth it. And installation is nothing more than gluing one of the heating pads and a thermostat to various places on the engine/oil tank - how hard could that be?

Right.

Harder than I ever expected.

"Harder" probably isn't the right word. It was more.... finicky.

First things first. In this case that meant putting a heating element on the oil tank. That actually was easy. It strapped right on around the circumference of the tank.

The next step was to glue a flat rectangular heating element to the bottom of the crankcase. That is a difficult location to get to, but by moving the oil cooler off to the side I was able to gain access. The first difficulty arose with the glue that was included with the kit. It's an epoxy glue, and it is shipped in what amounts to a plastic envelope. To mix the epoxy, we are instructed to roll a socket on top of the envelope for a lengthy amount of time to ensure a good mix. The glue is very thick, so it was hard to even tell if it was mixing at all. It was even harder to coerce it out of the envelope and onto the heating element. Finally, it was a challenge to find a way to hold the element in place for the 24-48 hours it would take the epoxy to set.  I came up with this method using a spring clamp and a big socket:

Next was the installation of a thermostat, the function of which is to keep the oil from getting hotter than 150F. The thermostat is a small white tab at the end of a wire, and it gets glued to the bottom of the oil tank.

The glue was every bit as hideous for this application as it was for the first heating element. Basically it wanted to stick to everything but the oil tank. I grabbed a roll of masking tape to use to try to hold the thermostat in place while the glue cured. It was a three-hand job, but I have yet to be blessed with the evolutionary sprouting of such a handy (heh!) extra appendage.

C'mon, Darwin, do a bro a favah.

I glued the thermostat in place and held it with one hand while I tore off a strip of tape with the other. It was immediately apparent that a single piece of tape would not be sufficient, so I reached for the roll to tear off another, only to find.... nothing.  I had to keep one hand on the thermostat lest it just fall off of the oil tank and hunt around for the tape with the other, but no matter where I looked... nothing.

I finally gave up and resigned myself to the fact that I would just have to let the thermostat fall off. I would have to clean the old glue off and try again, once I found that daggone tape.

Which.... took a long, long, LONG time.

I did eventually find it, though:

At that point, I decided that it would be prudent to get better tape. I ran home to get duct tape.

Fast forward 24 hours and there I was with Pete,ready to put the cowling back on. Just as we started, the thermostat fell off.

It was time for better glue, too.

The J-B Weld was called out by name in the installation instructions as a replacement for the G-D Hideous glue that came with the kit, but a dire warning came with it as well: it won't set up if the ambient temps are below 76F.  They were. They will be for another four to five months.

Fine.  It would just have to he heated.  Finally, a use for those blasted incandescent spotlights.

Yet another 24 hours later, the glue had set up as strong as, uh.... a weld!  J B would be proud!

After that it was just a matter of strapping down the wires. After what seems like a month of diddling around with this, that, and the other, it is finally ready to fly again!

'N Sync

Most of us have forgotten this, but there was a 'boy band' in the mid-90's named 'N Sync. They never amounted to much, but I remember them because they came around for their brief period of notoriety right around the time young Co-pilot Egg was starting to take an interest in things like that. One of the members, Justin Timberlake, went on to have an equally lackluster career as a Hollywood actor.

All in all, they left me cold.

Which has to be one of the most labored segues ever to appear on these pages.

I may or may not have mentioned this before, but one of the reasons that I was reluctant to remove the carburetor when I was working on my soon-to-be-unveiled project was that I would then have to re-sync the carbs.

In saying this, I realize that some of you have no idea what that means, while others, who may have tinkered with motorcycles at one time or another, are nodding along and thinking, "Yeah. That sucks."

They don't know the half of it.  Syncing airplane carburetors is a hundred times worse in the summer, and a thousand times worse in the winter. Yet there I was: needing it done and 33 degrees showing on the in-car thermometer.

The reason for synchronizing the carburetors is that one carb is managing the fuel to half of the cylinders while the other is responsible for the remainder of the cylinders. If the carbs aren't delivering the same amount of fuel to their respective cylinders, the power pulses being delivered to the common crankshaft will vary in intensity.  This sets up a lot of stress and vibration, two of the worst enemies of engine and airframe longevity.

The process for syncing the carbs involves inserting a balancing device into the process. This device is inserted between the tube that runs from one carb to the other. It can be a simple mechanical device that is really nothing more than two pressure gauges, or it can be a fancy electronic thing that, as it turns out, works far, far better than the mechanical device.

I own one of the mechanical devices.

Kyle, official Syncopation Composer for The Jackson Two, has one of the electronic models.

Synching the carbs, just like moving a sofa to the fourteenth floor of a hi-rise condo, is a two-person job. And, just as with the sofa, the owner gets to do the nasty part. With the sofa, that means walking up fourteen flights of stairs backwards. With carb syncing, it means standing behind the propeller of a running engine, enjoying a buffeting wind chill factor of roughly -25 F while the helper, in this case Kyle, sits in the relatively warm airplane diddling with the screen settings on the Skyview.  No, really, I have photographic evidence of that!

Now, to be honest, this would be my first time syncing my carbs; Kyle's Dad did it for me last November.  It turns out that there is a bit of a learning curve, similar to, say.... learning to set up a tent for the first time when you reach the last base camp prior to the final push to the summit in a Mt. Everest climb, just as a winter storm hits.  Really: it was JUST LIKE THAT!

Having bought the mechanical gauges, I wanted to try to use those rather than the fancy device those spoiled modern kids are using. That was a waste of time. The carbs were so out of sync that the needles bounced around so fast that they were nothing but a blur. No meaningful information was to be had. I suppose they smooth out once the carbs get closer to being synchronized, and we could have done that by not skipping the first step in the process (which is to set the idle stops on each carb to be more or less identical), but it was easier to just ditch the mechanical gauges and hook up the electronic thingy.

Which, when activated, sent its display so far off of the scale that no amount of diddling on the adjustment nut would bring it back towards the center.

We shut down the engine and set the idle stops.

With the engine running again and the indicator now responding to changes made to the adjustment nut, I was able to get the display centered. It wasn't easy - standing behind the blast of cold air pummeling me with hurricane force wind made it very difficult to see what was going on. That, along with the vibration of the engine, made it very difficult to make adjustments to the little nut. Eventually, though, I got it centered.

But not before I decided that I needed to protect the exposed skin on my neck. I hunted around the hangar until I found an old, ratty beach towel and MaGyvered* myself a scarf out of it.

Hey!  That's not my Dynon screen!  Someone's been fiddling with it!

The centered indication lasted right up until I tightened up the jam nut to hold the adjustment nut.  Doing that threw it way off the scale again and I had to start over. I tried the same thing three or four times with the same result. Eventually I figured out that I had to keep the jam nut tight and make adjustments using a two-stage process of slightly loosening the jam nut and tightening the adjustment nut back up against it, watching the indicator the entire time.

If I thought it was tough managing one little wrench in all of that wind, I had no idea what it was going to be like to have to coordinate two of them.

It's done now, and for that I am thankful, but I don't think I will ever attempt to do that job in the winter months ever again.

And I will be buying the electronic tool, too.

UPDATE: It is also possible, as I have been informed by a reliable source, to smooth out the bouncing needles by partially (by which he meant "nearly completely") closing the ON/OFF air valves on each of the two hoses. That still seems overly finicky and since the majority of the cost of the thing was in the hoses, which worked just fine with the electronic version, I won't be losing much if I buy one of the electronic ones.

* MacGyver is an American action-adventure television series that ran for seven seasons from 1985 to 1992. Resourceful and possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, MacGyver solves complex problems with everyday materials he finds at hand, along with his ever-present duct tape and Swiss Army knife.

Winter is coming, Jon Snow

And it's time to do something about the air blowing in through the sides of the canopy. Sure, it was nice in the summer, but now? Not so much.

Easy, easy fix, though:

  

The Wright brothers would have been flying by 1895 if they had just had a Lowe's....

Blonds and Carburetors

It was a long time ago and I don't remember when or why I said it, but I do remember telling someone of a tidbit of parental wisdom shared with me by my father: stay away from blonds and carburetors, they're bad news.  He never said it, of course, but even so it has been a tenet that has served me well, particularly with carburetors. My perception of them has always been that they are delicate, finicky, internally complex, and quite simply best left to experts. That could be true of blonds as well, but I have never had occasion to find out for sure. That is no longer true about carburetors.

For reasons that I will get into in a future posting, I had occasion to remove the left carb from the plane to provide better access to a recalcitrant nut/bolt combination. I didn't consider the simple removal and temporary re-positioning of the carb to be especially risky. They've been off before as part of the initial engine installation without any harm; it's really a simple operation involving not much more than unhooking a spring, loosening the screw on a clamp, and wiggling the body of the carb side to side to remove it from the rubber cuff that holds it in place.

Upon replacement of the carb after the work was done, I ran the engine to make sure all was well.

It was not.

I almost immediately smelled fuel, and that was definitely not a sign of all being well. I shut down the engine and clambered out of the plane to see what was causing the smell. It wasn't hard to find - fuel was pouring off of the drip tray under the left carb.  "Well," I thought, "that's not good."

Yes, even my internal dialog is almost British in its level of understatement.

Once I mopped up the puddle of fuel remaining in the drip tray, I turned the master switch back on, which in the RV-12 also turns on the electric fuel pump. And there it was: fuel streaming out of the plastic overflow tube on the side of the carb. As frightening as that was, it proved that the problem was in the carb and therefore not associated with the other work I had been doing.

And thus began a series of restive nights of sleep, with the even-the-least-little-thing-causes-panic hours between 2:00 and 3:30 AM rife with angst over the broken carb. It's difficult, when you think about it, to come up with something more stressful than an engine problem on an airplane located on an airport that doesn't have a qualified engine mechanic handy to offer a helping hand. Sure, I was able to more or less calm myself by repeatedly telling myself that "it's nothing money can't fix," but those last two hours of sleep weren't easily achieved.

Let's leave it at this: between the stress of a broken airplane and the normal day-to-day grinding of my soul into a fine powder from the constant frustrations of the day job, well, my nerves were pretty frayed.

Mitigating that was the helpful advice available through various sources, all of whom diagnosed the problem as most likely being caused by a stuck float. That sounded about right because I had has this problem once before, back in the days when I drove cars acquired for under $1,000. I had a Honda once that developed a leak in the carburetor float. Unfortunately for me, it did so while I was down in Florida. I will never forget the drive home which was made possible by the use of a pair of vice grips carefully adjusted to squeeze the fuel line just enough to allow for a steady 55 mph.

While that was enough to keep the car running, it had two bad side effects: it was 55 mph on the flat parts only; uphill was much slower, downhill was much faster, and it burned through gas a prodigious rate. A rate, in fact, that quickly outpaced my impecunious economic lifestyle of the time. At each fuel stop, I would have to completely clamp down the pliers to keep fuel from pouring into the carb while I was filling the tank. That then required three or four stops on the side of the highway to get the vise grips set just right for the next 100 miles.

So yeah, I know what a stuck (or sunk) float does.

We're never alone with a problem these days and in short order I had taken the advice of Kyle, Chief Mechanic for The Jackson Two, and subscribed to Rotax-Owner.com, provider of DIY videos and other helpful data for Rotax engines. I viewed a video called Rotax Carburetor Disassembly and noticed that gaining access to the floats was so easy that it was accomplished in the first 10% of the video. This alleviated my fears that removing a part of the carb would cause it to spew forth springs and such like the coiled spring snake that jumps out of a joke can of peanuts.

So I did it. I dropped the float bowl.  And there they were, floating in a tub of fuel without a care in the world, bobbing up and down with no inclination to stick in an untoward position.  Like a pair of healthy kidneys, they were.



This did not prove that they hadn't been stuck before, of course. I had laid the carb on its side and it's possible that they had become temporarily stuck. I decided that I might as well put the bowl back on the carb and try again.

It gushed fuel like it couldn't stand the taste of it.

So much for sleep that night.

Figuring that I had done all I could do, I started the search for a Rotax mechanic that would make a house call. It took a full day, but I was able to find a guy in Delaware, OH that would make the trip down to take a look as soon as he could find time in his schedule. In the interim, another suggestion came across the transom: perhaps it was the float needle itself that had become stuck. That didn't mean a thing to me, but I did remember seeing it mentioned in the disassembly video. Still, this was too much. I had to know how this all works.

I figured Google would know since those nosy freaks know what I had for breakfast six days ago, and I wasn't disappointed:

Surprisingly, none of that mattered in the least with regards to the immediate concern, but it did make me feel a little smarter.

Pressing on, I returned to the hangar (again) and removed the carb (again) and dropped off the float bowl. Again. I'm getting pretty good at it, truth be told.

And sure enough, there was the float needle all nicely attached and moving freely, just as Rotax intended.

Having ruled out the float needle as the culprit, I was truly at a loss. I decided to just leave the carb partially disassembled for the mechanic to look at. I went back home to give him a call.

Then it hit me: just as with the floats before it, the fact that the needle wasn't stuck when I first jiggled it didn't mean it hadn't been stuck before. It was worth one more try. I went back out to the hangar and put the carb back together. With Co-pilot Egg manning the fire extinguisher, I started the engine up again.

Purred like a kitten.

Not a drop of fuel spilled.

FIXED!!

I actually fixed a carburetor!!

Now I gotta go find me a blond...

From the Mail Bag

Jean-Pierre Bernoux said...

Hi Dave, I am curious to know where the feature on exchanging frequencies between radio and Skyview is described. This is an awesome feature and I want it!

Jean-Pierre is right - I did gloss over what I was doing it and why I was doing it when I installed the missing wire the would complete the communication path between the Dynon Skyview and the Garmin SL-40.

Many of you will no doubt remember that I was one of the group that got caught up in the delays arising from the shift from the older Dynon D-180 to the newfangled Skyview. This is perhaps nostalgia talking, but I also remember being as patient as I can be, thinking that surely the ongoing improvements to the Skyview would make the wait well worthwhile. Well, it was true. I think I'm on the third major version of the Skyview firmware in less than a year after installation. It was either this most recent version or the one just before it that introduced the concept of using the frequency data stored in (and displayed on) the Skyview to 'push' frequencies to the Comm radio.

Unfortunately, for one reason or another (and trust me, this was exhaustively debated on the RV forum) one of the wires that would enable this capability was excluded from the wire bundle supplied by Van's. A lot of work went into figuring out which wire was needed and where it needed to be installed, and as is the laudable norm in that particular forum, the results were shared with the rest of us. It all looked somewhat complicated to me, and I didn't consider the feature to be worth a dive below the avionics cover. At some point, though, someone on the forum mentioned that Van's had begun to include the wire as part of the avionics kit.  As it was more than just a simple wire (it's shielded and has a grounding terminal spliced into it), I decided to order one. The part number is WH-F1102 and I can't provide a price because Van's did not charge me for it.  The revision page that details its installation can be found here: http://www.vansaircraft.com/pdf/revisions/RV-12/42K.pdf

Operation is pretty simple, albeit not as simple as just dialing in the frequency manually. You just navigate the Skyview to the airport info page and select the COMS tab:

Then you just select the frequency you want using the right side joystick and press 'TUNE COM'.

The Skyview will push the selected frequency into the standby frequency in the SL-40.

As they say in the orchestra, Viola!

Fall Colors and Other Misconceptions

Let's start with "other." There seems to me that there must be some kind of misconception over the topic of annual flu shots. They make me sick. Each and every year, I feel lousy after getting a flu shot. This is NOT to say that I believe the shot has given me the flu!  Yet every time I mention being sick as a result of the shot, I get lectured that "dead flu cells can't give you the flu!"  Never said that they could, did I?  

Why so huffy about it? Well, because I just had another miserable four days after getting my flu shot. And insult to injury, the girl that gave me the shot also managed to give me a bruise that I still have a week later.

I often wonder if it might be better to just roll the dice on getting the flu.... at least there is some chance that I won't.

This is also the time of year when people ask me if the fall colors are spectacular from the air. Intuitively it must seem so, but in reality, not so much. First of all, the trees don't all change at once. It is very rare to see vast expanses of fall colors; it's nearly always a mix of green, brown/orange/red, and barren deadness.  Second, there is almost always haze in the air that deadens the ground colors when viewed from above.

Every now and then, though, we get a few super clear, cool days. Case in point:

I flew over to Urbana for breakfast with a group of other pilots, mostly to give me a chance to test the new position/mount for the standby GPS. I was quite please with it:

Another hallmark of fall flying is morning fog. It was light and well spread out:

The breakfast we well attended. I have nothing but admiration for the guy that flew a Pietenpol Air Camper in the briskly cold weather. Open cockpit with temps in the high 30's?  Huh. I wouldn't do it.

Nice looking bird, though. I wouldn't mind having one for summer evenings.

Being as I was already halfway there, I continued on out to the farm. Conditions were perfect for giving the Schmetterling CEO a quick ride in the newly painted plane. We just flew down south from the airport and circled the ranch.

The timing was perfect; the air was still glass smooth and the temps were just about perfect for not-too-hot, not-too-cold.  By the time I left for home, it was a completely different story. The winds had picked up and the air was choppy all the way up to 5,500'.  Still, with the clear air and bright sky, it was a nice enough ride.  By the time I landed, I had completely forgotten that the sickness-that-cannot-exist wasn't bothering me anymore.

Behind the Panel

There hasn't been much going on around here in general, and even less when it comes to the airplane. With the days getting ever shorter, I find that my hibernation genes are starting to secrete whatever it is that makes me tired by 3:00 pm and in bed by 8:30, with very little energy ready and willing to be expended in the brief interim between the two.

But....

There were three things that I wanted to do on the plane that would involve the removal of the avionics cover, a task that I used to think would be easy to do whenever the urge struck, but I am now learning is a royal pain.  I think it all comes down to a predefined progression of doing things that would look something like 'Remove these specific screws, position the canopy thusly, remove this other set of specific screws, etc.', if only I could remember it. Instead, we get this:

I (yet again!!) managed to get it in a state that necessitated the removal of the canopy, and this time also resulted in scratches in the new paint.  Argh!

Once inside, I noticed that the installation of the intercom was less robust than one might hope - it's not supposed to sag like that, one would think.

There. Fixed.

For now.

Job one was a more robust installation of the iFly GPS that I bought to act as a backup to the Skyview. Holes needed to be drilled and little itty-bitty nuts needed to be put in place with surgical precision:

It didn't take long at all, and I'm quite happy with the result.

Next was the installation of a single data wire that runs from the Skyview to the Garmin Comm radio. This wire wasn't included in my avionics kit, so I had to request it from Van's post-install. It required the removal of the radio tray which, if I'm honest, is a gigantic ouchy in the derriere.  It's so much more painful to retrofit than it would have been to install with the rest of the stuff that Van's sent it to me free-of-charge, presumably out of a well-earned sense of abject guilt.  Or they just forgot to charge me.

Whatever.

Once the tray is out, it's a simple matter of shoving the pin into the connector and adding another grounding terminal to the tiny little easy-to-lose screw in the bottom of the tray.

Viola!, as they say in the orchestra.

Van's included simple directions for telling the Skyview that there was a new member of the team to consider when calling audibles, but they were wrong.

Figuring that they might have simply been sitting in the wrong pew but in the right church, I checked neighboring menus and quickly found the right one.

Bada.

Bing.

As they say.  Now the Skyview can push frequencies into the Comm radio as I pick them out of the onboard airport database. It's a handy little feature!

The third thing I wanted to fix involved removing a big connector from the junction box and swapping a couple of pin locations. Pulling pins out of those connectors is one of my most hated things. The swap didn't fix the problem, so they had to be pulled out again and put back where they were in the first place.

The less said about that, the better.

It's all put back together now, so now I'm just back to waiting for a nice day to fly.

My Big Day Out

Poor Co-pilot Egg. She loves her living quarters away off to the east where she's going to college except for one thing: fair week. her little house is right next to the fairgrounds and the noise is bothersome to say the least.  Loud bands, even louder tractor pulls, and don't even get her started on the two nights of demolition derbies.

I can sympathize with her plight after a couple of years of living in a far worse place that was also adjacent to the fairgrounds; in my case, it was the Ohio State Fairgrounds. I remember quite vividly being awakened by someone pounding on my back door at some ridiculous time like 2:30 am. I groggily opened the door to find a large female police officer. 

"Sir, it looks like a carney has broken into your car. Could you please come out and verify that it is, in fact, your car?"

"Uh, sure," I muttered as I began the long walk through the back yard to the alley, where I had had to park because fair traffic had completely parked-up the road in front of the house where I usually parked.

"Sir? SIR!  Could you please put some clothes on first?"

So, yeah. I get what it means to have to live with fair week.

So, I thought it might be nice to use one of my few remaining vacation days to go visit her and walk over to see what the fair was all about.  The Co-owner accepted the invite to go with. We got an early start by having breakfast at Egg's favorite diner, which she is quite proud to have discovered on her own.  

The fairgrounds are very well kept, and I am intrigued by the oddly shaped livestock barn.

They have a neat little gift shop, too.

The midway is the typical collection of flim-flammery.  Toss a ping pong ball, win a soon-to-be-dead goldfish.

In addition to the gold fish disposal game, I also remember this one from back in the day. Air-powered BB machine guns: that's what this country used to be about. I'm more than a little surprised to see that it's still legal.  I remember one other thing about this game: it's might daggone hard to get every single piece of red off of that card!  The only reliable way to do it is to just shoot a line horizontally across the card to cut the bottom part off, but they are fully aware of that tactic and have banned it, as can be seen the rule posted on the far left.

I'm not sure I trusted the mechanical stuff even back in my more credulous days.

Everyone loves fair food, and I particularly like the specialized things like deep-fried cheese curds. There were lines at those places, but the we-do-it-all Walmart-of-Fair-Food place was wide open.

This is what I mean by specialization - I really, REALLY like it when they also have a motif:

I'm always amazed at the tremendous breadth of competitions they have.  Dried beans? Corn on the ear? Potatoes??

They even had a category for the most mutated potatoes!

The peppers provide a colorful display. I remain unclear as to what the judging criteria is, though:

We used to call this Indian Corn. Chances are it is now known as something less incendiary, now that it takes next to nothing to getting agitators worked up into a self-righteous lather:

Egg made another little piece of clutter for her house:

I didn't stop to see what constitutes a 'Hobo Steak," but given the means of your typical Hobo, I had to assume it isn't what we would normally refer to as "steak."  I was, as it turns out, quite wrong.

Ha ha ha, that little lamb wears glasses!

Egg is a huge fan of little pigs, which could have a lot to do with her blatant sigh of disgust when I said that it looked like they were practicing to be bacon:

It's amazing how county fairs bring back childhood memories. We had one of these on the farm when I was a kid. I'm not likely to ever forget the day I drove it off of a 6' bank into the creek. It took a Holmes 750 tow truck to yank it back out of there.

I don't think I've ever seen a cow so enjoying being groomed:

That was it for the fair, and we still had plenty of time to get home before I had to depart to the east for a chore that had cropped up unexpectedly for later in the day. Which was good, because we had passed a place on the way that I wanted to stop in and check out.

The deal with this is that I am starting to think about retirement. It's still pretty far over the horizon, but it's never too early to start trying to decide what to do with the second half of your life. My current thinking is that I want to move out of Ohio, mostly because I value novelty over the same-old same-old. I need a new playground, in other words. This is nothing spur-of-the-moment - we have made a couple of trips out west to see if there's anyplace out there that would work for us. 

My current thinking, however, is to move to Tennessee, where we would buy a condo. I'm thinking that somewhere in the Knoxville area would be good.  Athens, TN is a front-runner at this point. From there, we would only be five or six hours from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, the Carolina coast, and the Mississippi River region.  And, of course, the Cumberland area and/or the Smokey Mountains.

Perfect travel distance for something like a nice 5th wheel.  The only problem was that I wasn't really very familiar with the quality of life to be had in a travel trailer, and I am somewhat accustomed to my luxuries. And the Co-owner would need to be fully on board with the idea, too. So, I thought, maybe we could pop in to the RV dealer we had drive past and check out what these trailers are like.

It went well, to say the least. As we stepped into our first trailer, the Co-owner could only say, "Wow!"

As to be expected, it didn't take long for a sales guy to come out and talk with us. His name was Jess, and he was the perfect mix of knowledge, willingness to listen to our neophyte questions, and no pressure at all to make an immediate sale. At some point mention was made of my airplane (seriously, I could work it into a conversation with a funeral director) and he asked if I would consider taking him for a ride. Well, sure!  I can't remember ever turning down a request for a ride - gives me an excuse to burn some gas!

The first trailer we looked at was fabulous, but it was also right up at the very top of the cost and weight chart. High weight means more expensive tow vehicle, and high cost means... high cost. Jess led us to a lower-cost (about half!!) trailer that we also liked quite a bit, mostly because of the more open floor plan.  It also had a pair of doors to block off the little living room from the rest of the trailer - togetherness flourishes when there can also be moments of privacy. I grabbed some pictures of this particular trailer from the dealer's web site:

It sure gave us something to think about!

We made it back in time to meet Kyle, Chief Charter Pilot for The Jackson Two, to give me a lift to Cadiz to pick up my plane from the paint shop.  I couldn't have timed a day off of work any better, as it turns out. What luck for the plane to be done on a day I had already scheduled off, and with such amazingly good weather!

I had seen a low-quality picture of the finished paint job, but it was ever so much better in person!

All I had to do was remember how to fly it after two months. It wasn't too bad.  The benign weather helped.

The only problem arose on the way back into Bolton. I called the tower when I was directly over Rickenbacker, which is about 10 miles east-ish from Bolton.

"Report two mile right base for runway four."

Piece of cake!  All I had to do was angle off slightly to the south so I would reach the airport at the base leg, rather than at midfield.

When I was five miles out, a Cessna that was doing touch & goes was turning left base. We would be going nose-to-nose.  I fully expected a call from the tower to ask for an update on my position, and sure enough....

"Four Delta Golf, say your position."

I figured he really just needed the distance since he should already have a pretty good idea of where I was headed, having given me the directions himself, so I just said, "Five miles east."

"Four Delta Golf, enter a midfield right downwind runway four."

Huh?  My mind went blank as I tried to visualize what he wanted me to do.  As I've said before, the flying skills deteriorate a little after a long gap in flying, but the ATC skills plummet.  Meanwhile, he gave the Cessna clearance to land. He came back to me.

"Four Delta Golf, did you hear my request?"

It finally came to me that he wanted me to go back up to the north a little bit, then turn left into a downwind to bring me back down to where I already was. He was trying to make space between me and the Cessna.

I keyed the mike, "Four Delta Golf copies: head north to enter a midfield right downwind, runway four."

He was testy. I had heard him struggling with a student pilot just a few minutes before - his patience was, it would seem, worn pretty thin.

"Four Delta Golf, if you are where you said you are, you would not need to go north for a midfield entry. Are you east, or are you south east?"

Not wanting to get into a discussion of being a mile or so south (or, in other words, being precisely where he instructed me to be) I just told him "I can make midfield easily."

Dripping with disgust: "Well, if you're already southwest, just report a two mile right base."

Fine.  Do what you told me to do in the first place. Got it.  Although what actually went our over the air was "Wilco."

At least the landing was good.

Oh, and this ain't nuthin': I HAVE MY AIRPLANE BACK!!