{"id":11914,"date":"2016-09-22T20:46:11","date_gmt":"2016-09-22T19:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=11914"},"modified":"2016-09-22T21:54:54","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T20:54:54","slug":"keeping-the-balls-in-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/keeping-the-balls-in-the-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping the balls in the air"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve got a lot going on what with the work I’m doing simultaneously on all three of my ULMs, plus I haven’t even looked yet at the planning papers for the work I want to do on my house that were returned asking for ‘more information’ (no comment).<\/p>\n

There’s no point getting into a stew over the electrical damage to the Weedhopper’s 503 engine – it’s done and I’ll have to address it at some time. But not now – I can even do it when all the other work on the aircraft has been completed if I want to.<\/p>\n

Victor and I have both come to the same conclusion as to the cause. The voltage regulator that’s now fitted was the one that someone cut the wires of when it was on the X-Air at Galinat. We think that when whoever did it, their knife blade shorted across the black lead, which was connected to the 12V +ve supply and one or more of the yellow leads. In doing so, we think that it damaged the regulator internally.<\/p>\n

When it was connected to the engine, it in turn delivered 12V from the live black lead, that would usually have been protected by the system of diodes etc inside the voltage regulator (sorry, I’m not an electronics expert) as a dead short voltage across the coil windings of the generator stator and after a few moments, they heated up enough to cause the catastrophic damage that ensued.<\/p>\n

I can’t actually check this theory until I get a working multimeter and I won’t bother doing so or stripping the stator off the engine until I’ve done all, or most at least, of the oustanding work on 28AAD.<\/p>\n

My main objective today was to resolve the problem with the X-Air’s fuel pressure gauge. The fundamental problem is that when I cut the holes for the gauges in the X-Air’s panel, I hadn’t realised that the fuel pressure gauge is only 50mm in diameter and went ahead and cut a standard 57mm hole. Since then I’ve tried to pack the gap around the gauge out as best I could, without a lot of success to be honest.<\/p>\n

It came to me the other day that I have a lot of spare screen plastic lying around at the moment and if I could find hole cutters of the right sizes, I could quite easily knock up a plastic collar to fit over the gauge and solve the problem once and for all. I didn’t realise how easy it would be. The gauge diameter is 50mm and I have a 51mm hole cutter. The panel hole is 57mm and I have a 60mm hole cutter. These dimensions aren’t just close, they are exact!<\/p>\n

So the theory was to first cut a round of plastic of diameter 60mm and then to change over to the smaller cutter, reinsert the guide drill into the centre hole and cut out the centre taking care to carefully hold down the plastic while doing so.<\/p>\n

It only took 5 minutes to make the first collar in 1mm plastic and another 5 minutes to make a second one in 1.5mm. Here’s a shot after I’d given them a lick of black paint with the 1mm collar on the gauge and the 1.5mm one lying in front of it. <\/p>\n

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If only I’d thought of it before I could have avoided all the hassles that I’ve had with the gauge becoming loose (and eventually dropping right out this year) over the past two or three years \ud83d\ude15<\/p>\n

But there was still time to do a small job on 28AAD. I got hold of some lovely smooth black pipe insulation today from Bricojem at Rouffignac which was perfect for replacing the damaged padding on the aircraft’s fuselage rear tubes. I thought that it wouldn’t take that long to do, so after I’d had my evening meal I went outside, ripped the old padding off 28AAD and replaced it with this nice new stuff. Here’s how it looked afterwards.<\/p>\n

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This means that as soon as the fuel tubing that I’ve ordered arrives, I can go ahead and install it up to the fuel cock on the cabin side tube and then fit the fuselage rear cover. Now that I am really looking forward to. It may even be tomorrow, but I have to reinstall the X-Air’s fuel pressure gauge first as the weather on Saturday looks as though it’ll be just too good to miss \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve got a lot going on what with the work I’m doing simultaneously on all three of my ULMs, plus I haven’t even looked yet at the planning papers for the work I want to do on my house that were returned asking for ‘more information’ (no comment). There’s no point getting into a stew … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11914"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11929,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11914\/revisions\/11929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}