Man and Machine

This weekend was filled with airplane related activities.

First, a fella I conversed with on one of the (many) RV related websites stopped by to check out my newly opened (and inventoried) empennage kit. I showed him the tools I had purchased, how the kit came in the box, and how small (and cold) my garage is.

I’ll be so happy once we get our new garage built - looks like we’ll be starting on it in January! This is great, though it comes at a pretty hefty price tag. While I couldn’t justify the cost if it was purely for building this airplane, it sure helps my motivation to spend that kinda dough. I’d really like to install a heating system, but I am reluctant to do so since I do not plan on using the garage as a workshop beyond the time needed to get the kit to a point where I’d need a hangar to work in (2 years max! Really! Well, maybe..).

Speaking of hangars and heated work spaces, Jeff (the guy that came to visit) and I headed over to Front Range Airport to meet up with Jerry B. Jerry has a very nice hangar there at FTG, heated with a propane reflective heat pipe dealy which works very nicely. Since he bought the hangar, he has had insulation installed and the concrete floor sealed with an epoxy coat. It very nice, well lit, and has plenty of room to work on his RV-7A. If it only had a bathroom you could live there.

Jerry got a Subaru H6 engine from Eggenfellner Aircraft. He was able to start it up for us, and yep, it sounds just like a Subaru. We grilled him on how hard it was to get attached and setup, and he told that it was no problem at all. Less than an hour from taking it off the crate to mounting it to the airframe. Another few minutes to hookup a temporary fuel pump and filter and voi la: the engine runs.

One of the major problems with traditional Lycoming/Continental engines in aircraft is vibration and noise. The Subaru engine has neither. It’s very quiet and hardly vibrates at all. (You can’t run a Lycoming in an enclosed area due to noise, and apparently if you don’t have the wings attached the vibration could cause damage to the airframe!)

I haven’t decided on my engine choice yet, but I will be watching Jerry’s project closely for the next year or so. There are a few concerns when using an “alternate” engine like the Subaru, so I may not go that route. One of the reasons I’m building this plane is so that I can allocate some of that time towards an A&P license. I figured experience with a “traditional” aircraft engine would be more beneficial in that regard, but in a year there might be enough data to convince me otherwise.

After Jerry showed us around and we oo’ed and ahh’ed at his bird, we took a look at his neighbor’s finished RV-7A. It seemed a little bit smaller than I had thought (though it’s wider than a current Cessna 172), but it certainly looked like a lot of fun to fly. I’ll have to get someone to let me fly around in one once I get to know the folks around here better.

That evening I headed over to Jeffco for the EAA 43 chapter meeting. I met a few folks and got to see most of the Rocky Mountain Regional Fly-in video, which was pretty cool. I didn’t stay at the air show very long, so it was nice to see footage of all the cool stuff I missed.

Then, on Sunday afternoon Cheryl had her first flight in a small airplane! The wind was a bit breezy out of the north, but didn’t cause any problems as we flew around and did a touch-n-go at Longmont. I landed a little flat, so it wasn’t as smooth as it could have been - I’m just a little bit rusty from not flying very much this last month or so.

All in all it was a good flight and she said that she’d fly with me again, so that’s a good thing!

I hope to start my IFR training (and my high performance, complex aircraft, and maybe the G1000 glass cockpit sign offs) here in January. Since I won’t be able to work on the kit anyway, I won’t have any excuses for delaying.