05.12.2010: I am back from my holidays, and working on my plane again. Next week I will do the first 25 hrs maintenance, in parallel I can now finish all the paperwork for the final certification. I have tried over the last few weeks to find a noise certificate from a SportCruiser with the same engine / propeller combination, but without success. This means that I will have to make the noise measurement next year during one of the EAS measuring campaigns.
12.12.2010: Unfortunately I did not consider my job in my plan to do the first 25 hrs maintenance. Since I returned from my holidays I have already been back to Australia for a week, and I am right now sitting in the plane to go there again. My revised plan is to do it on the 20th December, and to finish all the paperwork over the Christmas Holidays.
21.12.2010: Today I finally went to the airport to do the first 25 hrs maintenance check on my SportCruiser. Before I started I updated the software of all the Dynon instruments on our club’s SportCruiser HB-WYC. It still had version 5.1.1, but the current one is 5.4. Some pilots were reporting communication errors between the different Dynon units during flight, so let’s see whether this cures the problem. I also created a locked setup on the D-120 to prevent the club’s members from reconfiguring it to their individual tastes. I will do the same on the D-100, but our OPS guys first have to tell me how they want it to be configured. The whole story took me a few hours, so I could only start working on my plane in the afternoon.
First Silvan told me to check the Rotax website for updates of the maintenance manual, and indeed there is a new edition 2, revision 0, dated July 1st 2010. Contrary to the previous edition 1, Rev. 0, the 25 hours maintenance is now identical to a full 100 hrs check. That meant that I of course did not manage to finish everything in the remaining few hours of the afternoon, so I will be back tomorrow.
22.12.2010: Even though it was not planned I spent a few hours this morning finishing the 25 hrs maintenance check. Everything went smoothly, all looks fine. The oil filter, oil reservoir and magnetic plug show no significant traces of metallic chips, and also the exhaust does not show any cracks. A number of SportCruiser builders had cracks in their exhaust, but mine seems not to be from the affected lot. As it was not planned that I return today I could not finish all the paperwork, but I did do the post maintenance engine test run, which went perfectly well. I will return during the Christmas Holiday to finish all the paperwork.