The endless, measured, plod of progress ...

From a couple of emails, written yesterday and today ... hope springs eternal when it comes to getting an airplane ready to fly after a long layoff ....


4/28/2006 - to Mike:

Bob and I fitted the cowlings today to see how the new oil filter would do and found that there was some interference with the upper cowl half … so we did a little cutting and reinforcing and now we have a cutout for the filter … I’m going to borrow some aircraft zinc chromate from the hangar in the morning to prime the rivets and exposed edges and Bob has some AN Orange Yellow to touch it up. Ill get some lacquer thinner to degrease and we should be in prime shape for Sunday. I guess if we can rig the carb heat with that bolt and 2 nuts and get the Adel clamps in place for the primer lines and cabin heat, we’ll be set to fit the exhaust and cut scat tubing to put this bad boy back together. It sure will be great to at least get the engine going again – and fly when it’s done!

4/29/2006 - to George:

We spent the last couple of days tweedling with the Cub cowling ... first of all, I decided that after spending my retirement on a major overhaul for the engine (ok, just some of it) I wanted to install an oil filter. There is an oil filter adapter for my C-85-12 and I bought it. 2 kinds, long and short ... long adapter and short, long filter and short ... I wanted both to be short. At the end, the filter still interfered with the upper cowling. So we carefully measured, measured again, and cut a circle in the cowling following a precision template (traced around the top of a caramel corn jug), reinforced it, and now we have a cowl that looks pretty good and works really well. Around the filter, anyway.

Problem 2.......the lower cowl doesn't quite fit right - bumps up against the front of the case... This is a mystery, since it's the same airplane and the same engine and the same cowling ... oops....almost the same ... Wag-Aero sent me AN7-41 bolts instead of AN7-40 so we added a washer to shim it out so we wouldn't run out of thread on the engine mounts. Maybe a mistake there. So tomorrow we're going to re-shim and take out the extra 1/8 of an inch of length and see if that helps any at all.

Tomorrow we look at the exhaust system and see what surprises await us ... if all goes well, I hope to be able to put oil in the motor, install the propellator and crank it by the end of the day. Flight and joyous celebration to follow.

Hopefully ..

News at 11 ...