Tuesday, July 26, 2011

She's alive!


She's alive!  Today they test ran the engines and is well.  The tubes hanging off the left engine are fuel lines so they can measure and adjust the fuel flows.  Almost ready for first flight, but unfortunately I have a six day business trip to Las Vegas scheduled... six days in Vegas is about 4 days past my tolerance limit for Vegas.  Waiting until I get back to fly it will be torture!  As soon as I get back I'll only have a few days before a scheduled trip to Hawaii so timing is getting interesting now.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Final mile

A few people have asked if the reason I haven't updated in awhile is that I'm too busy out flying.  Unfortunately no... but we are getting close to the final chapter in this epic saga... The left boost (aux) pump, was leaking from its drain which is located between the pump and motor sections. According to the logs the right pump was recently replaced and it does not leak. The cowlings have been painted and assembly has started. The fuel system on the right engine has been tested and the JPI fuel flow works as well. The JPI has been wired into the Garmin 430. The avionics tech noticed that the configuration for port 1 on the 430 was in the map mode which the JPI doesn't understand, so he switched it to a more universal setting of aviation or something like that. He mentioned that the G600 understands a couple different languages and that its a possibility that the mapping setting was for the G600, but apparently this new setting won't affect the 600 negatively. Here are some more pics of the final pieces of the puzzle...

The old and new fuel pump... $1400 !





The top nacelle cowl all painted




Looks great






There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle!



Thursday, July 14, 2011

Minor setback

Doh, a minor setback...
Adam,
I do apologize for the delay, we have had a couple busy weeks, trying to meet a few deadlines.  We plan on running the Engines later today, The Engines cores are nearly ready to be re-crated and sent back!  Cowlings Need Painting, as well as the Dorsal and installed. Gears need to be inflated for Uplock checks. Interior need to be put back together. The Switch you discussed with Chris still needs to be installed and the Data Port. The closer we get the further we get from our Friday deadline. We are pushing this as best we can, to get N17788 out, but we do not want to rush it and over look anything.

Looking like Mid Next Week....
Again, we apologize, we just cant leave anything incomplete!


Oh well... I've waited this long, what's a few more days?

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Getting close now

A friend was out at LVK today and stopped by MaintenanceXpress to check on the progress and snap a few photos.  Looking good, and getting close now!



The new strobe fences are installed along with the LED nav lights too. Still ned to get the JPI switch mounted below the G600 as well as the data port. I also ordered a new dorsal fillet since mine was cracked, which is not installed yet but that shouldn't take long. Hoping to fire her up on Friday!