Finally done with the Colt and flew .7 today. Now on to the KR again. But first, todays lesson will be that no matter how hard you try you will miss something. My flight today after 10 months of work was anything but uneventful. The small oil leak turned into a big oil leak. Good thing I am staying right over the airport and flying oval tracks. Oil cooler line was dripping a little but I couldn't find the source. Oh well lets go fly it and maybe the leak will stop. It only got worse. In 45 min I lost 3 qts that mostly resides on the belly of the plane now. Lesson...find and fix the damn leak. The second thing was that if you know a plane and then make a change,,,in this case I added about 40 Hp. Then you should expect to relearn the plane...I was not expecting all the torque and extra right rudder I was going to need. While learning that lesson I fail to notice that I had no airspeed by time I looked at it I was half way down the 1900 foot runway. Oh and 40 extra ponies make things happen faster too. So I decided we were going flying even with airspeed stuck on 0. Flew fine for 45 min and watched the oil pressure slowly slip down...down... down, at 50 psi it was time to land. Time to make an approach and see how thing felt since I only have 1900 feet. First approach looked good so I went around and came on in. Finally something that went as planned and the landing was uneventful. Turned out that when we reskinned the belly we forgot to open the static tubes. A hot soldering iron fixed that. So even though we had 3 people (1 was an IA) working on the plane we all missed that static vents. The oil leak was all my fault as I backed off a 45 deg fitting to get it to line up with my oil line. So even though we try hard to think of everything. We always will miss something. If were lucky, it a small something that does not become life threatening. Now back to that KR.
Craig www.kr2seafury.com
