I've been beavering away on the last little stuff, making good progress. I ended up back in a phase where every time I finished one thing I saw a yet undetected new item that needed doing. In the past, I would simply add these new items to the big list, and put them off until "someday". But there aren't many "somedays" left until this thing must fly, so now if I see a new task, I try to do it right away, if possible.
I picked up the altimeter and altitude encoder from Woodlawn Instruments on Friday. They had done the required biennial adjustments and checks. They fixed a glitch with the encoder - when I first installed it, it appeared to be working correctly. But lately it was reporting an altitude that was hundreds of feet in error. And, now the altimeter reads within five feet of the one on the Dynon EFIS. Before it differed from the EFIS by about 50 ft.
Sunday I had planned to recheck the calibration of the EFIS ASI. I had checked it back in 2005, but the newest EFIS firmware has a feature that allows the calibration of the ASI zero pressure to be set, and I foolishly pushed that button. This probably means that the old calibration is no longer valid, so I decided to redo it. Before I started the calibration, I ran the ASI up to 220 kt to confirm there were no leaks. I found that the pitot system leaked a bit less than a kt per minute. This isn't a big enough leak to be an airworthiness concern, but it would make it very difficult to do an accurate calibration using a water manometer, as it takes some time to measure the water level, then read the ASI, and the ASI would be falling all that time. So, I spent four hours looking for the leak, tightening and resealing connections, then trying again. After four hours I gave up and moved on to starting to tidy up the wiring ahead of the firewall. I'll put off this pitot leak check until after I get flying. I'll attack it again sometime where there is a rainy day, and I'm in the mood for a puzzle.