Pushing on with X-Air stuff

Wim and Sophie recently returned from their relaxing break away so it was with great pleasure that I dropped over to see them yesterday evening to resume our regular weekly ‘apéro’ sessions. We had a lot to talk about as it’s been over two weeks since we last saw each other and during the evening, Wim suggested flying together on Sunday.

I said that I wouldn’t be able to get the Savannah finished in time as I still haven’t received the screen parts that I need, but that luckily I’ve been pushing on with the necessary tasks to get 56NE ready for sale and as I’ve done the small prop repair and have rubbed it down, all I now need to do is varnish it and refit it to make the X-Air flyable again.

I’ve also hopefully solved my rev-counter problem. The old one works fine but always had a small dead fly under its glass that moved around and could interfere with the needle, so I bought a replacement to smarten the panel up. However, when I fitted it I found that even at maximum engine revs, it wouldn’t read above 4000 rpm, so I informed the seller and sent it back for testing.

They maintained that it worked fine, so I told them to hang on to therefore it and just return my purchase price, which they did. But that still left me with no rev-counter. Someone suggested some time ago that maybe if I could manoeuvre the fly into the gap around the stem of the gauge needle and hold a vacuum cleaner tube against the vent hole on the back of the gauge, I might be able to at least move the fly into the body of the gauge where it would be invisible and would probably do no harm.

I thought that under the circumstances, it was worth giving it a go, and it worked! So I’ve now polished up the old gauge to make it look a bit more presentable and will refit it when I refit the prop. We had light rain as forecast today but it’s now dry, although very humid. Even so, I’ve managed to give the prop an initial sealing coat of clear varnish, and here are both it and the old rev-counter on my workbench out in my back garden.

The weather forecast for the next few days is for more dry weather so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get the X-Air work completed and ready for the aircraft to fly on Sunday. That’ll be fun and afterwards I’ll be able to give it a thorough clean and tidy up and put an ad up on Le Bon Coin to sell it. If it sells, then I’ll only be left with two ULMs and not the small fleet that I have at present 😐