I’ve got a huge amount of banked time off at work, and the weather looked good on Friday, so I got another flight off on C-GOGO late Friday morning. The winds were directly across the runway, blowing about 10 kt when I took off, but they were a bit higher when I landed. It was just a 20 minute flight, as we wanted to confirm that the big oil leak from the first flight had been fixed. We pulled the cowling, and found just a tiny bit of oil - it wasn’t clear whether there was still a very small leak, or whether it was residual oil from the previous big leak. But it certainly wan’t anything of great concern.

Unfortunately, the winds seemed to increase a bit more - the report from Ottawa was 25 kt, and 18 kt at Gatineau, the two closest airports that have weather reports. I didn’t want to risk too much crosswind on an aircraft that I was still feeling out, so we cancelled the planned second flight of the day.

Saturday was just about perfect, so I did a 2.2 hour flight in the morning, with some engine break-in and a few stalls up at altitude. 2.9 hours on the aircraft, and 2.1 more to go to make 5 hours so Chris can fly it. We pulled the cowling again, and still saw a tiny amount of oil. Looks like a small leak somewhere.

After lunch, Chris was going to taxi the aircraft to the fuel pumps, to fill it up for my next (and likely last) flight. Chris had a Super Decathlon flight scheduled for the next morning, and would hopefully do his first flight in his RV-8 that afternoon.

But, it wouldn’t crank. The starter solenoid would click, but the engine didn’t turn over. We pulled the cowling, removed the starter cable from the started and hooked up a voltmeter, which showed good voltage at the starter. On a whim, Chris turned the starter a bit by hand, then tried cranking - it cranked. Hmm. Dead spot on the armature? We put the cowling back on, and he tried to start, but once again it refused to crank. Looks like a bad starter. I gave up and went home, while Chris removed the starter. We’ll try again whenever he gets this issue sorted out. Patience.