11 November 2019

Maintenance: Second annual condition inspection.

The second annual was completed at 165 hours.  My inspection checklist can be found below and on my page with my POH, flight checklist and flight test cards.  Be sure to customize the checklist to your own aircraft, should you choose to use it.

Here is the aircraft with everything removed prior to the start of the inspection.


There were no findings of particular concern.   Here are the findings of interest:
  • The left brake pads showed that they had quite a few more hours remaining.  However, the right brake pads warranted replacement.  This is either due to my overuse of the right brake or that it drags.  I will monitor for both.
    • Right brake pads.
    • One of the left brake pads (forgot to take picture of the other).
    • What a new pad looks like.
  • The fuel filter trapped some material and collected water (the filter has a local low point) and subsequently rusted itself.  The source of the water is uncertain and I will take to sumping the tanks more frequently.  The rust was on the input side of the filter, however the filter has been replaced with a new one.  Below, on the left image you can see the rust (and other detritus) and on the right image, which is the filter casing, the rust is in the upper left (which is the low point of the filter).
  • Here I demonstrate the location of the water collection in the filter.  The blue area is the local low point where water aggregated (image modified from Figure 2, page 31-09).
  • My belly is an oil slick.  See inflight picture here.  This oil has been sucked in to the area underneath the baggage floor.  I will be installing an oil separator later.  Below shows the F-01446 Baggage Floor Cover removed.  You can see how the oil has been sucked in at the lap joint between the Aft Fuse (F-01478) and Fwd Fuse (F-01484) skins
  • As expected, the outside of the tires wear more than the insides (with the left wearing more than the right).  I removed the wheels from the hubs and flipped them to get another 165 hours out of them.  Left and right wheels shown below, respectively, prior to flipping the tires on their respective wheels.  It's worth noting that I shimmed the right gear leg to leave me with toe-in 0.07° on the right and 0.1° on the left.
  • The hat switch on my Tosten CS-8 stick on the left side no longer functions towards the right.  I verified it is not a wiring issue, so it's the switch that failed (my wiring writeup is here).  Unfortunately, the warranty on the product is quite short (90 days after A/W certificate).  It's not a problem for me since I don't have aileron trim (with properly balanced fuel, it hasn't been necessary).
  • I finally accurately calibrated my optical low level fuel sensors.  I really did a poor job on locating them.  I did not properly factor in the wing dihedral.  The sensors trip at 0.64 gallons on the left tank and 0.84 gallons on the right tank.  They are last resort, emergency annunciators, so with proper fuel management, they should never go off.  But if one does, it simply indicates that I must switch to the other tank very soon, and pending that tank's available volume, decide to continue flight or divert for fuel.
Going back to the brakes, I purchased a Rapco brake rivet tool to make the removal and re-insallation of brake pads relatively easy.


Greasing the wheel bearings was quite simple.  I used avgas (!) to degrease the bearings then used this "handy bearing packer" to repack the bearings.  Below you can see the advantage of degreasing prior to regreasing.


I also lengthened the F-14127 Flap Position Pushrod by about 5 mm.  This was necessary since the sensor's resistance reaches its maximum prior to its arm reaching full extension.  Thus, my EFIS' flap indicator would reach "fully extended" about 3 seconds prior to the flaps being fully down.  Lengthening the sensor pushrod kept the arm's travel without the bounds of where the latter's resistance would change.  In the picture below, the bottom rod was fabricated to plans-specified length.  The top rod is the length that worked best for me.  The rod I used was K&S Round Rod, 1/16" diameter, 12" length, stock number 87131.


The engine compression checks out.  All four cylinders are 80/80.  Next time I'll try testing at a higher pressure.  Below shows one of the cylinders, illustrating the intact cross hatching, using my cheapo borescope (the camera's angle mirrors are worthless as the camera continues to focus beyond them).


The plugs looked fine. Below I show when they were removed, prior to cleaning and gapping with my servicing kit.


Until next year!




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