Mike S said:
"Rather exciting"
A bit of an understatement I suspect.
Come on, Milt. How about a few details and photos.
Mike
Actually I was quite exhausted.
After work Thursday I spent the evening and a good part of the night prepping for the inspection. Got no sleep and nervous as ****.
The DAR (Chuck Morris) was on time Friday AM and about as nice a person as I ever have met. Inspection was quite thourough and lasted a little over 2 hrs. He found a few items I had missed and had several excellent suggestions.
Spent the rest of Friday fixing problems and tightening fittings as well as a nose to tail hardware inspection.
Saturday AM tied the tail in a pit and did full power runups.Found a few more issues and fixed them. Had lunch. Put the plane together and taxied out for take off.
I am not embarrassed to admit I was scared sh%tless. I knew the plane was ready and had flown the prototype but I was really concerned because I had replaced the pressure carb with an AFP fuel injection system. I had been told by more than 1 "expert" that this simply would not work. This really worried me in spite of an uneventful full power static runup. I also had the 400+HP engine as opposed to the 360 HP on the prototype.
During runup everytime I exceded 1600 RPM the tail would come up.
Take off was quicker than expected and I quickly was behind the plane.
The plane had a strong tendency to roll left requiring full aileron trim to the right.
When i retracted the flaps it was all I could do to jkeep from rolling right.
Climb and cruise were uneventfiul and most systems worked well.
Engine was running a bit hot so landed after only 20 min. On approach the plane again rolled left as I dropped the flaps. Clearly a problem with rigging.
The porototype has 5" wheels and because I do a lot of grass I put on 6 " wheels with a bit larger pants to tire clearance. The resulting pressure blew off the leg fairings in flight with a rather loud noise and shudder.
All in all not too bad . It has been a long 2 years.