Flight to Provincetown on Cape Cod with Ellen! Fun!

I got my instrument rating! The checkride was yesterday and it went well (despite being super tired from not sleeping enough).

Here's my post on Facebook with pictures and videos:

 A recent flight with Ellen!

I haven't posted in a while, but I have been flying!  Sadie is a joy to fly!

Last weekend I took my daughter Julia to Jaffrey, NH to get some ice cream at Kimball Farm.  There's a closer one, but it's more fun to fly to one!

Cute airport in Jaffrey, NH!

Cherry Vanilla Chip - Yum!  Great ice cream at Kimball Farm!

Me and Julia

On approach into Jaffrey.

She waits on the ramp for our return flight.

I took my friend Kerry up today.  He helped me a lot in the last stages of the build.  We flew up to Sanford, ME.

Pease.  This airport used to be fully Air Force but is now just part.  The runway is HUGE...

On the way back from Sanford.

As readers of this blog know, a few months ago I got an open circuit indication on my Airmaster prop controller and it turned out to be a broken wire in the carbon brush assembly (a few hours of work, but not too difficult to replace). More recently, I got another open circuit indication and assumed that I had another broken wire (though it would seem strange that it would happen twice in a few months on a low-time airplane). A couple hours of work to disassemble the assembly and check it out and that was fine.

 
Further debugging and it looked like the pitch motor itself had failed. Voltage applied directly to the motor did not move the motor at all.

 
Turns out that the motors in Airmaster props older than a year (give or take) have a design prone to open circuit failures. So much so that they completely redesigned the motor and there are formal instructions for replacing the motor. The new motor is more robust and faster in changing the pitch too.

 
My new pitch motor arrives on Wednesday (thankfully covered under warranty). I'll have to update the controller parameters with this change and I've already got that file. I'll also update the controller firmware while I'm at it.

Photos show the disassembly of the hub to remove the pitch motor itself, which I'm holding in the last photo.

Very useful video on rod end bearings and fire extinguishers from Vic Syracuse.

I don't have any pictures, but I wanted to pass along how my last flight went.  This was the first flight since installing the preheater and the back seat seal and both worked like a champ.

The day was quite cold (upper 20sF (about -2.7C)), so I had turned on the preheater the night before.  On startup, the oil temp was almost instantly about 90F and ran smoothly from the first crank.  My experience on prior cold starts was that it would run pretty roughly for the first few minutes.  Not this time at all.  Smooth as silk.

Up in the air, I found the cabin quite comfortably warm.  That's never happened before on cold days.  The draft from the back seat was quite strong and as far as I could tell from the front seat, that was totally gone.

Big wins for winter flying!