Successful Test Flight

 

We finally have a day with the wind out of the south at about 7 knots on a warm comfortable day.  I wanted to use runway 23 (to the southwest) for the best emergency landing fields, and the runway is uphill in that direction if an abort was needed, much better than going down hill.

One more thorough preflight inspection just incase I've missed something.  

The plan was to do the normal run up checks then on take-off check that the plane is not wildly out of rig, if yes abort take off.  If that's fine climb in the pattern to 3,000 feet and stay over the airport getting familiar with the plane in normal and slow flight.  The slow flight was intended to understand the airplane and see what the airspeed indicator reads for landing.  There was no plan to do stalls at this point though.

The motor is running and it's time to get started.

Everything checked ok during run-up so were ready to fly.

I was a little jerky on the rudder pedals just before take off and I considered aborting but by then I was off the ground.  The plane flew nice with a light grip on the stick.  The rigging was good so on with the flight.

By the time I was at pattern altitude the cylinder head temperature was at 450 degrees F.  I throttled back to 2,300 RPM and the temp. dropped back down a few degrees and stabilized.  I decided to stay in the pattern at 1,000 feet AGL.  In this picture I'm in the up-wind.  

Any change in speed or power caused the temp. to go up so I decided to come on around and land without any slow flight practice.

In this picture I'm in the down-wind to land back on 23.  I'm sure the Airspeed Indicator has an issue because at one point I was up to 100 MPH, in the downwind.  This Fly Baby has never gone that fast before.  We'll check it out more on the next flight.

On short final the plane started settling very fast and I was slow getting the throttle up enough, One Good Bounce For Mankind.  I got the throttle in on the bounce and with almost all the runway left decided to land.  This time I made a much better landing.  Yay!!!

I discovered another small problem when I got back to the hangar.  The ignition switch wouldn't shut the mags off.  It worked fine every time I taxied the plane.  I shut off the gas and waited a minute or 2 for it to shut down.  We seem to have a weak ground from the switch so I'll probably replace the switch.  

I have some ideas where I may have cooling air leaks so we'll see how that works out.

A good productive day all around!