I had hoped to get a test flight off on Wednesday, but there was too much low cloud due to a low pressure system slowly working its way through the area. Same thing on Thursday. But, early Friday morning was a winner, and I zipped out to the airport shortly after sunrise to do a test flight - flight 4. I flew for about an hour, then had to land as a layer of lower cloud started to move in.

I concentrated on engine break-in, and a flutter check out to 200 KIAS. I noted a significant drop in oil pressure as I pushed over to accelerate to 200 kt (the oil pressure decreased by 15 to 25 psi). The only possible explanation I could come up with was the oil moving towards the front of the oil sump due to the -10 degree pitch attitude.

During the pre-flight inspection I noted that the static pressure line going to the alternate static valve had been knocked off, which meant that the static system had been open to cockpit air. I don’t know when this occurred, but it puts the airspeed accuracy test I did on flight three into question.

Today I went back out to the airport first thing in the morning, and got another flight off - flight 5. This one concentrated on engine break-in and airspeed accuracy tests. I crunched some of the hand recorded data, and it looks like the system reads perhaps two knots too fast in the range of 110 to 150 kt. I’ll look at the recorded data later to refine these numbers.

Before this flight, I put two more quarts of oil in the engine. It was down perhaps 1.5 quart from the initial 8 quarts I had put in. With the higher oil quantity, there was no drop in oil pressure during descents at -15 pitch attitude, but perhaps a 5 psi drop at -20 degree pitch attitude. It looks like I’ll need to pay close attention to the oil quantity before doing aerobatics.

I had hoped to get a second flight off today, but the wind came up, gusting to 15 kt at 90 degrees to the runway. I’m sure the aircraft is quite capable of handling this, but I want to ramp up the crosswind limits more slowly that that. Instead, I pulled the cowlings and did a big inspection ahead of the firewall. Then I installed the wheel pants, landing gear leg fairings and landing gear to fuselage intersection fairings.

The landing gear intersection fairings are a builder fabricated part. Mine were built when the wings were not on the aircraft, and I discovered that I the upper edge of the fairings interfered with the wing to fuselage intersection fairiings. I had to remove quite a bit of material from the landing gear intersection fairings to allow them to fit.

Now that the aircraft is in the normal aerodyamic configuration, I can start on the full flight test program. I will concentrate on tests at higher engine power for now, as I am not convinced that the engine break-in is complete. When I pulled the lower spark plugs to inspect them, the plugs on three cylinders showed signs of oil.

I'm up to 5.1 hours of air time now, from 5 flights.