Another good day

In every way, actually. It was another beautiful high-pressure day for working outside on 28AAD, my French Weedhopper, with a high of around 21 degrees Celsius and no wind to speak of, and I also got a good bit done.

The first thing that I tackled was the non-working rev counter, which was easy to solve. An elderly male spade connector hadn’t mated properly with a new female one (shades of real life there…) and the wires had become unplugged. A few moments making the connection gave a fully functional rev counter, so then it was on to the next task, namely the CHT gauge.

Only one half of the dual gauge was working yesterday and I was pleased to find that when I switched the connections over, the fault moved across to the other side. This indicated to me that the connections were OK but that one sensor had failed.

Luckily Victor had generously passed over to me a couple of almost new sensors that were surplus to requirements on his Rans S12 because, like my X-Air, it has a water cooled engine. As they were in much better condition than the old ex-MYRO sensors that were on what is now 28AAD’s engine I was going to switch them anyway, and when I did sure enough I had a fully functional CHT gauge.

So, two out of two so far – could my luck hold with the non-functioning EGT gauge or had the sensors been damaged during MYRO’s recovery (the gauge is brand new)? One side of the gauge had seemed to function intermittently so I tried jiggling the connections a bit. One connector, that I’d recently repaired, snapped so that was probably the source of the ‘intermittent’ problem.

So I thought that I’d check the other pair, and found that when I connected either sensor on the ‘working’ side of the gauge, I got a reading. So both sensors seemed to be working and then it looked as though all I had to do was leave the working sensor connected and repair the connection that had snapped on the other side of the gauge. And sure enough, when I did that the dual gauge worked exactly as it should.

So that was three out of three and as the afternoon was drawing to a close (curses on this playing around with the clocks – we need the lighter afternoons and evenings, not the mornings) it was time to call it a day with another good result under my belt.

The weather is forecast to start getting a bit cooler after today with rain forecast for Saturday but I hope that if I can sort out 28AAD’s brakes tomorrow and get to the bottom of the wing pin problem I’ll have flown it over to Malbec and have it under cover by then. I hope so anyway.