My Airplane Was Torn Apart for Weeks… Here’s the First Flight

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Scott. Welcome back to Knard Boulevard. It's been a little while since I posted a video. Let me tell you why.

[00:00:11]So, I wanted to do some work on my plane. I wanted to put a heated pitot tube in, and I also wanted to put a different autopilot controller. I wanted to replace my 307 controller with a 507 for two reasons. One was because it had the heading and altitude dials on there that you can also sync to if you just push them. That's really convenient.

[00:00:32]When I was changing altitude before, I had to do it on the G3X. I could do my heading on the G3X, and I could also sync it by holding enter, and I could also do altitude on the G3X by pushing altitude and then changing it. But, in every instance, it was a two-step process, whereas having it right on the autopilot is really helpful because it's it's something that you change all the time.

[00:00:55]That was the first reason. The second was because it has a toga input on it, a toga switch for takeoff or go-around.

[00:01:01]Currently, I'm using one of the inputs on my GEA for that, and if I move that to the autopilot, that frees up an input on the GEA, which means I can hook up the landing gear, and then I can get landing gear annunciation and warnings on the G3X if I am down to a certain altitude or with a power pulled back, the G3X can now say, "Hey, dummy, your your gear isn't down. Put your gear down before you land." So, that is a nice to have, and it's something I've I've been planning to do for quite a while. In fact, I actually pulled the wires out last year from the landing gear system, and they've been sitting right here underneath the pilot seat, uh waiting to be hooked up. Uh I did that last year, and they've just been sitting there waiting for me to actually hook all this up. I also wanted to put stereo headset wiring in there. I have a stereo audio panel can do 3D audio, so you have one radio on the left side and one on the right side. It makes it easier when you are talking to ATC, and you want to pick up your uh ATIS, and you can hear the ATIS in one side and the ATC on the other. It's It's just nice to have. But, I needed have the wiring in place to do that. There was actually something else that I did that I forgot to mention. Uh I've had cold feet in this airplane when flying in at high altitudes and cold temperatures, and it's been that way as long as I've had the airplane. And the reason is that where the landing gear actuator comes through into the fuselage, it has to obviously go through the fuselage to get to the landing gear, and so there's a hole there, and it moves slightly up and down, so it can't be really sealed well. So, it had some foam rubber jammed in there to try to block it out, but it really didn't work that well, and air still got in. So, what I did is I took a piece of neoprene, like a wetsuit material, and I clamped it around the actuator, and then I RTV'd it all around that opening and sealed it. So, it No air can actually get through that neoprene now, and because it's flexible neoprene, it can move as the gear actuator moves up and down a little bit. So, now it's sealed, no air can get in. Just in time for summer. The autopilot installation was a tough one because the new controller was slightly larger than the old one, so I actually had to cut out the panel in order to do that. And of course, there was structure behind that, so I had to relocate the structure and redesign some bracketry. So, it was It was more than just pull out one and plug in the other.

[00:03:19]And plus, the new one hooks up differently. It uses CAN bus rather than RS-232 to communicate to the autopilot servos. So, I had to do all that. And then it was almost time for my annual condition inspection, so I started working on that. Seeing as I had to have the canard off in order to get to the wiring at the back, I'm like, well, my annual is due in June. I'm It's now May 25th, and I'm not going to take it all apart in a month to do it all over again. So, I'm going to do the annual inspection.

[00:03:44]So, this is my checklist, and I've actually almost completed it. There are only a few things that I found this year. I found a jam nut on the elevator control rod that had come loose. I found a nut on one of the exhaust stacks of one of the exhaust headers, the nuts had backed off the stud and it was just gone somewhere, so I had to replace that. I found the landing brake, the actuator where the actuator was actually mounted onto the landing brake was actually loose and it was the wrong bolt, so I had to take the whole landing brake brake assembly apart and redo it with the with the proper hardware so that won't happen again.

[00:04:23]And the last thing I found was the roll trim indicator is stopped working. It tells me where my roll trim is and I had actually planned to disconnect that anyway and hook it up to the G3X, so that's what I'm going to do today is hook that up to the G3X so that I have indication of where the roll trim is.

[00:04:43]So I have been out here all weekend. I was out here for almost 12 hours yesterday and the day before uh doing the annual inspection. You can see here a time lapse of that whole process and I'm pretty sore today. I was hoping that I was going to get it done for today and we actually have some decent weather. I could actually go out flying, but I'm a little ways away from that yet because I have to fix that roll indicator and I don't have the canard back on, so I've got to get that takes two people to do and of course the the cowls aren't back on. I did do an oil change and obviously it's part of the annual inspection and filters and so on.

[00:05:23]I also changed the oil return lines.

[00:05:26]They were original in this airplane, so they were 20 years old. They've seen a lot of heat over the years and they were definitely in need of changing. I had a look at them and when I was pulling them off, they actually cracked and broke, so they were pretty brittle and well in need of changing. So I'm I'm glad I changed those. That was a hell of a job.

[00:05:44]That probably took oh I bet 3 hours to get on and off those things just because the access to get up in there is is not easy. So, but I'm glad I got that done.

[00:05:56]All right. So, today we're going to be working on the roll trim. It's the only thing left on my checklist that I have left to work on and then we'll get the airplane put back together.

[00:06:08]Whether we fly today or not, I don't know. I hope so. It looks nice. If I can get someone to help me put the canard back on then I'll make you won't make that happen.

[00:06:17]As you can see, I did make that happen after a lot more work than I thought it was going to take. I did a very very careful involved pre-flight and then pulled the plane out to go fly.

[00:06:28]All right.

[00:06:30]It took another full day of work, but uh airplane is ready to fly. So, let's go do our first test flight with all this new stuff.

[00:06:43]So, this is a primarily a test flight going up just to first off make sure that everything is running and working as expected. The engine's running fine and all the systems are working correctly. Then I'm going to test the new autopilot panel, make sure it's working correctly. I have done ground test, but now we're doing the flight test. Going to test to make sure the pitot tube that the heat works correctly in flight. Also going to make sure that it is reading correctly and we're going to go up and do a calibration procedure where I'm flying in squares at various different airspeeds and that will give me my calibrated airspeed values for various indicated airspeeds. And it's it's a procedure that you can fly in pretty much any airplane. I'm also going to test the landing gear indication and annunciation on the G3X as well as the aileron roll trim indication, both of which I've already tested on the ground, but we're going to do the flight test now. And lastly, I had low compression in two cylinders when I was checking it during my annual inspection. You have to check the cylinder compression as part of that annual condition inspection. So, I'm going to go up and run the engine and get it good and hot because the airplane hasn't flown for, I think, 5 weeks. So, I want to get up and run the engine hard and then go come down. We're going to retest the compression and see if that makes any difference.

[00:08:02]I got deer running across the runway.

[00:08:05]That's a little bit concerning. Anyone that lives around where there are deer knows that there are rarely just one. If you see one running across the road, or in this case the runway, that usually means several are following right behind. So, I'm going to be watching very closely.

[00:08:20]Medina traffic, Cozy 797 does only my back taxi runway niner, Medina.

[00:08:25]So, why am I having low compression values on my cylinders? I have two of the four cylinders that are showing low compression, and I actually know the reason why because as part of the annual condition inspection, I also borescope the cylinders. I could hear air leaking past the exhaust valves and coming out the exhaust. So, I knew it had to do with the exhaust valves. So, when I looked at the exhaust valves with the borescope, I could see the reason why was that the exhaust valves were caked with lead. And that lead was causing the valves to not seat properly on the valve seats, and that allows exhaust gases to leak past, which means the exhaust valves get hot, and my exhaust valves were starting to show the initial signs of heat stress from that happening. So, my hope here is that by running the engine really hard here, I'm going to vaporize that lead and clear that out.

[00:09:14]And if that doesn't solve the problem, then we've got another option, which is to lap the valves. And I'm hoping we don't have to go there. Actually, as I'm recording this, I already know what the answer is, but I'm not going to tell you because we'll save that for the next video. We'll leave you in a little bit of suspense as to what the result is of my exhaust valve drama.

[00:09:32]So, why was that lead there in the first place? If you recall when I was flying those rescue dogs around, I flew about 30 hours in this airplane and I was doing it at reduced power settings just to save fuel. I mean, it's a donation.

[00:09:45]I'm I'm doing good work for these rescue organizations. I thought, well, no need to fly at 165 170 knots burning lots of fuel. I'll just do it slowly. And the problem is the engine in the cold cold temperatures, and it was very very cold, it the cylinders were not getting hot enough to vaporize the lead and instead it was it was building up inside the cylinders. So, that is the cause of it.

[00:10:09]I'm the cause of it by by running the airplane and the cylinders too cold and so we won't be doing that again. We'll just be flying the airplane fast like it's designed to to prevent this from happening again in the future.

[00:10:21]Now, I'm lined up. I'm checking all my instruments. I'm going to do the engine run up. So, you can hear I'm going to bring the engine up to about 1,800 RPM.

[00:10:29]I'm going to shut off the magneto and run it just off the electronic ignition.

[00:10:34]Make sure that the RPM drop is correct and I'm going to do the same thing shutting down the electronic ignition running it just off the magneto make sure that the engine drop in RPM is acceptable. Then we're ready to fly.

[00:10:48]>> Good night traffic cozy 797 Delta Lima departing runway 9er Medina.

[00:10:53]>> All right, full power.

[00:10:57]2340 that's good.

[00:10:59]Everything is in the green.

[00:11:06]Air speed is alive.

[00:11:11]40 And gear coming up.

[00:11:36]>> If you watch my left thumb, I'm not 100% sure you can see me adjusting the roll trim there, the aileron roll trim, because I'm not 100% sure where it should be, because it's now showing on a different indicator. So, I had it more or less in the center, but as soon as I got it up in the air, I could tell it needed to be adjusted. So, I'm just making a little a little adjustment here and there as I go up just to to take the pressure off the ailerons as I'm climbing out.

[00:12:00]Everything's staying green.

[00:12:02]So, I was able to perform most of the tests on the climb out, then I climbed up to 6,500 ft set for pressure altitude, and then I started flying tracks on the cardinal points, north, south, east, and west at various air speeds and recording what I was showing as indicated and true and and various parameters so that I could plug those into a spreadsheet later and get my calibrated air speeds.

[00:12:23]And then it was time to descend back down to the airport and land after a reasonably successful test flight.

[00:12:34]At this point, I do have the data collected to do my air speed calculations, but I am not 100% sure that the new pitot tube is actually showing me correct indications. So, I am looking at my indicated air speed, but I am taking that with a little bit of a grain of salt and putting a little bit extra speed on top of that just in case and looking at the window and just judging by how things look. As I get close, I can tell, "Yeah, I'm going a little bit too fast here." So, I'm just going to hold it in the flare and just let it float until the mains touch down.

[00:13:04]And there we go, and then I'm holding the nose off, and then the nose comes down and we brake. So, just a relatively normal landing, just a little bit fast, but I that's because I was carrying that extra air speed in the flare and down on final just in case.

[00:13:20]And that's it for this video. The next video we'll be talking about the low compressions and what the result of that is and what we ended up have to do as a result of it and we'll definitely have some more test flights going on. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions you want to see on this channel or about this video, leave them in the comments section below.

[00:13:44]I know it's been a few weeks since I posted a video last. I appreciate you hanging around and waiting for me to get my act together and get a new video put out. Hopefully it will not be as long for the next one. Make sure you click subscribe and that notification bell so that when I do post the next video, you get notified and don't miss it. Thanks for watching.