Thursday 1
I hoisted the aircraft up by the engine mounts for a gear retraction test. Un fortunately it didn't go to great. With the wings attached I couldn't fully retract the gear. I poked and prodded and nothing obvious came to mind. The alternative of extending the gear lever gate is not very appealing so I sent a note of to the factory.
Friday 2
I poked at the gear retract problem and eureka I discovered it. I had put a 3/16 c/s bolt in the side of the swing arm to hold down the brake hose. As the gear came up the end of it was hitting the rubber block.
While I was messing around in the area I decided to extend the flap push rod a little to get better engagement of the arms in the outrigger mechanism. A few other little jobs got taken care of such as safety tying the bolts on the wheel and brake cylinder.
The last job for the evening was to do the final assembly of the push rod and bolts in the rudder assembly. Getting the nut on the bottom of the bolt was a tight spot, I am glad that I have slender fingers.
Now that I have got the fuel gauge working the next job was to find a place for the fuel pressure sensor. I decided to “T” off the fuel drain so I fitted in a “T” with a ¼ hose outlet.
Saturday 3 ~ Sunday 4
The first thing that greeted me when I entered the hanger was the smell of fresh auto gas. I found that the “T” I had fitted the night before hadn’t sealed properly and it had dumped fuel everywhere inside the fuselage. I pinched off the hose and remove the manifold and re fitted it. The next job was to put the blow heater in the back to dry out the fuel smell. Quite frankly I doubt if you ever get the smell of that stuff out, but after running the heater for a few hours it certainly seemed to clean up the odor pretty well.
Just to be sure that the fuel hose and sensor couldn’t come adrift I Reduxed a cable tie on the fuselage bottom to secure where the hose joins the pressure sensor.
It took most of the day to work finish off the Europa checklist. I also got one from the FAA and between the two it gives a pretty comprehensive list of things to run through. One thing I noticed with my LED wing tip lights is that they were too visible from the rear so I moved them further back into the wing tip and they seemed much better.
Last job for the weekend was a static run up. I tied the Europa off to the tow hitch on my car and placed an 80lb bag of salt on the tail wheel spring. I connected up my PC to the EIS engine monitor and let the engine warm up. It seemed to take a quite a while to get the oil up to temperature. I ran the engine up but I could only get 4000 rpm so I shut down to check out what was happening. I found that my recently run vacuum hose was hitting the throttle linkage. I repositioned the linkage and gave it another shot but I still could only get 5100 rpm and 34” of manifold pressure.
I rechecked my turbo waste gate setting and it seemed to be okay so I assume that the prop pitch might be a little on the coarse side.
Monday 5
I took the bottom cowling off to get ready for the inspection. As near as I can tell I am all set for the FAA to come and check it out.
I did notice a pretty bad scorch mark on the cowling where the starboard exhaust was close. Although I had modified it to get a bit more clearance obviously it wasn't enough. Unfortunately that means I am up for a repaint after I patch it up.
Tuesday 6
Well the FAA inspector came out with his avionics mate and went over the aircraft together for a couple of hours. He found a couple of things; in particular I had mounted the aileron push rod on the wrong side of the bell crank. He also didn’t like the way I had the fuel hoses connected to the fuel pumps. I was a little bit surprised that he didn’t give me a “to do” list, but he wanted to come back and re inspect.
Thursday 8 ~ Wednesday 14
Jenny had a few days off so we decided to go cruising in the Comanche. We decided to head south, and follow the weather. Our first stop was Memphis and then we headed Florida way, making it as far as to Key West. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for Sun ‘n Fun but I did manage to catch up with the Europa crew for a few days. Over the 6 days of touring we covered about 2500 nautical miles and I logged about 24 hours of flight time.
Thursday 15
I went to the local NAPA auto parts store and found some brass fuel fittings that looked like they will fit the bill for connecting up fuel hoses to the pumps so I pulled out the pumps and brought them home.
Friday 16
Made a new inlet assembly for the fuel pumps discovered that the hoses on the outlet side were not pressure rated for fuel injection pumps, including the hose up to the firewall, so it was back to the NAPA store to purchase 3 m. of high-pressure fuel hose. I made up the new inlets to the fuel pumps and replaced the short section of hose on the pumps with fuel injection hose.
Saturday 17
I installed the pumps and replaced all of the pump forward hoses with fuel injection hose. It sure would have been easier to fit the correct hose up the first time around. It took all day with plenty skin off my knuckles. At least I discovered my mistake before it caused a problem.
Sunday 18
Since the FAA inspector had looked in all of the holes I put the in the covers in the tail end. I had a few little jobs to do in the back before I could zip it up. The ELT batteries had expired and the FAA wanted to see an expiry date on the ELT case and the remote panel had to be installed. I was a bit surprised because I thought that the remote panel for the ELT was an optional, but apparently not.
The last job for the day was to drain out all of the fuel. I had put in about 10 gallons but it was is called reformulated gasoline, which has alcohol and a bunch of nasty chemicals in it. Apparently is has reduced emissions but it is pretty tough on rubber. I took a run out to the neighboring county, which does not have RFG and filled up 3 six-gallon containers.
Monday 19
I worked on the wing push rod assembly and put it together the way it is described in the manual. When I originally assembled the bell crank and push rod the wing was on the bench with the bottom side facing up and so I had put the aileron push rod on the bottom side of the bell crank instead of the topside. Last job before lights out was to put the inspection hole covers on the belly of the aircraft.
Tuesday 20
No building
Wednesday 21
The FAA inspector came by and took a look at the changes they requested and issued my "Special Airworthiness Certificate". It was a pretty quick visit, and most of the time was taken up with doing the paper work. After 5.5 years, approximately 2700 hours build time it was officially and airplane.
To be honest I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect with the FAA but I pleasantly surprised with the inspectors that came out. They seemed very interested in home built aircraft and were impressed with the Europa’s design. During the two visits they covered the aircraft pretty well and offered a bunch of useful suggestions, some nice complements and shared with me some of the not so great things that they had seen in the past. I suspect if I presented them with a poorly constructed or shabby looking project it would have been quite a different conversation.
Thursday 22
I searched around for the covers to cover the inspection holes under the wing but I couldn’t find them anywhere so I spent the evening making up some new ones out of Plexiglas. I fitted them up and they are really neat, you can inspect the bell crank assembly with the covers in place.
Friday 23
The final stage of commissioning the fuel gauge was to calibrate it. The process is to fill the tank and then drain it out in stages setting the 10 bar LED display as you go. You can make each of the bars light up at any stage, i.e. you can make it non linear if you wish. What I decided to do was to set one bar lit when it was one gallon off needing to switch over to the reserve side, and the remaining bars to be one tenth of the fuel capacity. The whole process took a couple of hours, but one advantage was that I was able to completely fill the tank, drain it through a filter and re fill it through a filter. This gives me some level of confidence that I have got the major portion of the gunk out of the tank. Actually I cleaned the gascolator screen before I started the process and it was quite frightening the amount of debris that it had filtered out. Its certainly something I am going to need to key an eye for a while.
Saturday 24 ~ Sunday 25
I fitted up the metal cover on my fuel sensor assembly and made sure that every thing was secure. I tidied up the cables and took a last look around and installed the baggage bay panels. One little job I did was to install a couple of eyebolts to give me something to secure elastic straps to secure my luggage. I fitted up the “D” panel along with the fuel filler pipe cover and now its starting to look like a finished airplane in the baggage area.
When I was in Florida John Hurst at Europa showed me the new Winter ASI’s they had in stock. It has a non linear scale and with great resolution at the low end of the speed range. I was pretty impressed so I purchased one. I removed the instrument and avionics panel and installed the ASI and while I was in there I noticed that the Tygon vacuum hoses were kinking. I got a tip from another builder that milking machine hose was pretty well kink proof so I will need to take a run out to the next county which has a farm supplies store.
I did some checking around on my intercom problem while I had the panel open and my first suspicion of broken cable between the intercom and the pilot side was wrong so I bundled up the avionics panel and brought it home. I set it up on my bench and got my oscilloscope out to start tracing things out. I rarely get my oscilloscope out and generally it means trouble when I do. Sure enough it appeared that one channel of the intercom had failed. I did not have a circuit diagram and all of the integrated circuits were surface mount devices so repairing it didn’t look likely.
I spent the evening researching miniature panel mount intercoms and I found an Australian made device take was the smallest one I could find sold by Aircraft Spruce so I placed one on order.
Monday 26
One thing John Hurst mentioned to me was that I needed to fit an idle stop and a gate for the 100 to 115 % power range on my throttle plate. I really didn’t want to make a new throttle plate so I went and saw my mate Gert (RV8 builder) who has a Bridgeport milling machine. He milled out some slots on the backside of the throttle plate which allowed me to fit in a pretty neat gate and adjustable idle stop.
Tuesday 27
No building.
Wednesday 28
I contacted Aircraft Spruce to see how my intercom was coming along and they said to expect it in the next few days, but some how I didn’t feel too sure.
Thursday 29
I took a 30-mile drive out to the nearest farm supply store to get some milking machine hose and sure enough it was very flexible and pretty well kink proof. I think I spent $20.00 in petrol to buy $2.00 worth of hose, but I am glad I made the effort because it is significantly better than the Tygon hose I had installed.
Friday 30
I booked in for a tail-wheel flying lesson tonight, but the weather conspired against me. We managed to taxi out about 100 yards and the airport was closed to VFR traffic.