In the vein of maintenance and legends, I sat in on the recent EAA Webinar presented by Bill Ross on engine compression testing, available now on replay.  Much of what was discussed in that webinar is based on Chapter 4 of Bill's book Engine Management 101 available online courtesy of  his long time employer Superior Air Parts. Regarding compression testing in particular, Bill points to Service Bulletins by Continental (SB03-3) and Lycoming (SB1191) that describe the Leak Limit test you should be doing on your compression testing equipment prior to doing an engine compression test.  He argues strongly against replacing a cylinder based solely on a compression test below 60psi if it is above the Leak Limit, and he is a big proponent of using borescopes for annual cylinder inspection. 

We are just over a month away until our first YE rally and we need our YE volunteers to have your youth protection training current by then.  I took 15 minutes today to renew my YP Training, and it will take EAA ten days to redo their background check, so I'll be good to go by May.  We're running out of time quickly so please take a moment to check your status and do your training if you're expired by logging into your EAA account, select 'My Account' at the top right, and on your account page scroll down and click on 'Go To Training'.

 

We're going to try moving the "What's Next" activity out to the observation area so that Leif isn't stuck all alone inside the clubhouse and easily missed by attending families.  This will take advantage of down time that families have waiting for their turn and will let more volunteers participate in that activity or at least learn for themselves about other EAA opportunities and perks for youngsters.  Leif also has a mini-ground school that he has used to entertain waiting YE's  to help them understand some basics about the aircraft traffic pattern and how the wind direction impacts the choice of pattern, and some things to look for during their flight. We'd like to get a few more chapter members involved in that engagement process; please contact me or our YE Coordinator Dale Seitzer if you'd like to get involved with that.

 

First, thanks to Dave Syverson for stepping up to take care of removal of the dead tree near our clubhouse, and for volunteering to be our Chapter Arborist, attending to the health and trimming of our remaining trees.

 

See Bob's chapter web page on Fly In information and please fill out his volunteer form with information about how you'd like to contribute to our effort this year. Chris Bliska has kindly offered to let us host the breakfast in his hangar, pending approval by his renters.  We'll borrow the Ch.25 grill again, but we could also use a second Blackstone style solid griddle grill, so please let us know if you've got one you wouldn't mind sharing that day.

 

Vicky Moore kindly offered the chapter a number of valuable tools, as she cleared out Pat's Hangar, to seed a chapter tool library. We need volunteers to host these tools in their shops and make them available to the membership either in their shops or to lend out.  See the Tool Library Spreadsheet to see what we have.  Ideally we would find a host who is in need of each tool themselves and would be willing to check the tool out to other users occasionally or give access to the tools within their own shops occasionally.  The spreadsheet has a column for where the tool is currently stored and a column for who is hosting the tool.  Please let me know if you would like to host one or more of these tools.  Tools that are listed as in storage are not in a workspace that can be used by others.  If we cannot find a host for a tool, we will need to sell the tool and deliver the funds to the donor.

 

We had several folks take us up on sitting in for our March Chapter Board meeting to see what we do.  The next board meeting is tomorrow April 7th, 7pm, online, agenda here. Please join us if you'd like (via this Google Meet link).

As we've mentioned previously we have openings for Facilities Director, Webmaster & Newsletter Editor, and Jay will move into a Development role after this year, so we'll need a new VP candidate for the November elections.  The VP's role is to line up our member meeting program speakers and introduce them.  We have plenty of members with good maintenance skills so the Facilities Director position is your chance to contribute with those skills, and it should be pretty easy for a while after all of the updates that Bob has done in the last 3 years.  The new Webmaster and Newsletter Editor will have an unrivaled opportunity to learn from the best EAA webmaster in the country and take over a well oiled platform.

 

I've pretty much wrapped up retirement project #1, which was to update my personal hangar space to an insulated and heated workspace.  My next aviation project is to resurrect my SkyRaider eLSA which has been grounded without ADSB since 2020. I want to get it back into flight worthy status by next year so I have something to fly while I do a bunch of work on my Cozy starting next fall.  The SkyRaider is a STOL aircraft and I also want to make it convertible into an amphibious seaplane using a pair of light fiberglass LSA floats that I picked up when I came across a deal too good to pass up about 15 years ago.  I've long thought the lake I live on, the many lakes nearby, and the St.Croix and Mississippi rivers near us offer hundreds of miles of runway that would be really fun to explore.  

Starting with a visit to Coremark Metals in N. Minneapolis, I've begun working on building the float rigging which I'm designing to be capable of changing quickly and easily between land plane and sea plane configuration with just 5 simple attach points, like this one at the rear float fitting.

 

The attach points include one attach point for each axle, which allows the landing gear to serve as part of the float rigging rather than be removed.  I found axle saddle clamps that would make the design easy but decided it would be time consuming each time I mount the floats to try line up the 4 bolts through the two saddle halves and into bolt holes in the square tube below while trying to get a nut on each from inside the square tube.  

So instead, I drew up some custom axle saddles using LibreCAD (freeware) and uploaded the .XDF design to an online metal fabricator called OSH-cut.  The parts get laser cut from 3/4" 6061T bar stock and mailed to me a couple days later for about $25 each.  I'll drill them for bolt holes myself.

 

Two of these saddles will be permanently bolted side by side to the square tube on each float. The axle will settle into the saddle slots as the aircraft is lowered with my ceiling hoist (after removing the main wheels). Once the axles are in the saddles, a rectangular keeper will be installed in the slot above the axle and pins will run through the upper saddle sides and keeper to secure the axle. 

I was thinking about where I could get the square tubes welded to the mounting plates the other day when Donovan Chase knocked on my door to say hello. He mentioned that he is teaching a metalworking class and has equipment for welding aluminum, so I think I've figured out where I can get that done. Chapter 54 seems to always have somebody who can help you whenever you hit a roadblock.

I'll see you all around the field at 21D and hopefully at the chapterhouse for our spring meetings.  And stop by to say hello at my hangar on taxiway Echo if you see me out there and have a few minutes to kill.

Thanks for reading!

Marlon Gunderson