The road to recovery has begun in earnest. I’m still splitting time between Victor Fox and the basement, but I have decided to go with the GRT EIS engine pod. That will keep me from having to run all of the engine instrument wires back up the electrical conduit after pulling the oil lines outs. To that end, I have pulled all of those instruments out of the Blue Mountain EFIS/1, and pulled the wire back to the cowling, and pulled the hard-tubed (3003) aluminum oil lines out as well, and cleaned up the oil in the nose and cabin. The panel and all of the seats are out, so we’re in a good position to make our repairs. I have 2 new oil lines on order, made from SS braided hose, and I’ve decided not to put any valves in up front. It just ended up being too complicated, so both nose oil coolers will always be in the loop. If the oil gets too cold in the winter, I’ll just block the inlet air from the fresh air cooler, and if the nose is too hot in the summer, I’ll ventilate the nose. Also, Jerry and Bob kindly helped me get the damaged copilot wing to Jerry’s shop, and all of the delaminated skin and damaged foam has been removed back to the spar, and Velocity is making a custom forward wing foam block to replace it with (they wanted it to be one chunk of foam – thanks guys!). So most of the thinking and decision-making is done, and now I’m mostly waiting for the parts. Check out the repairs page.
Posted By: Brett FerrellSunday November 9th, 2008 at 8:38 PM