A fix it day.
Anthony started work on KRO with a view to finding out why it has a short battery life (ie the radio starts out working fine and then dies during the afternoon). He couldn’t find any fault at the instrument panel end. Whilst doing this, Dennis reported that the fuel pump on the winch motor was pumping fuel out over the back engine.
This sounded potentially bad. Fortunately the old truck winch in the trailer park had an identical fuel pump. This was duly transferred over. It took a while, but Christian learned some new tool skills and also learned why you don’t drop nuts and similar into the weeds…. And we now had a functioning winch which had not burst into flames. This was good as Dennis our illustrious CFI was test driving the winch.
Meanwhile, Peter Cassidy and Fiona arrived via Cessna 172.
Anthony finished up on KRO and concluded that the front instrument panel electrics were fault free and the probable cause was the battery leads being stretched to plug the battery in, causing a high resistance connection in the lead somewhere. The electric vario is definitely broken.
The swaging tool for the winch was missing. All present prayed for zero cable breaks. The brakes on the drums are not working too well for unknown reasons.
Mark N arrived to derig the PIK.
Peter C had a couple of checks with Mark N and duly went solo for flight of the day (62 minutes to 4,400′). Mark N and Anthony derigged WVA and put it in it’s trailer ready for Performance Week.
Anthony investigated the radio problems with FQW and eventually got everything to work. The problem appears to be in the headphones side of the circuit as the radio initially received through the speaker and transmitted through the headset mike. The headphones/speaker switch may be the problem. Dennis flew FQW and found that the radio worked, but reception was very poor.