Saturday August 23, 2025
Transition Training, Preparing for Inspection

This past week I flew up to Portland, OR, and drove to Vernonia, OR, where Mike Seager gives RV transition training. We spent 10+ hours getting me acquainted with the RV-7 and learning to land a tailwheel aircraft.

The first day was foggy, but it all cleared by the time we were ready to fly.

This RV-7 has nearly 7,000 flight hours, most of it doing transition training. It has a 160hp Lycoming in it, but still has great performance near sea level where we were flying. My plane with the 200hp engine should be fairly similar up at 5000 feet where we live.

Mike operates out of 05S, Vernonia Municipal Airport, which is a nice little grass strip. Each flight starts and ends from here, but we mostly worked out of nearby paved strips.

Learning to fly a taildragger is quite an experience and very challenging initially. By the end of our 10 hours, I could safely land in three point attitude and do a passable wheel landing. I will certainly be continuing to practice and improve as I fly my plane.

In other news, I have my airworthiness inspection scheduled for Monday afternoon. Today I removed all of the access panels, covers, and wing tips.

Before I did that, though, I fired the engine up again to continue to fine tune the idle mixture setting. I think it's slightly too rich still and the idle is set too low. After stopping the engine, I turned the idle mixture setting one flat toward idle and increased the idle stop slightly.

I noticed a very small oil leak near the pressure transducer manifold. The way it was dripping, I think it was coming from where the oil pressure transducer connects to the manifold. I pulled the transducer out, cleaned off all of the threads, reapplied permatex liquid gasket, and then reinstalled the transducer.

I also noticed today a slight rubbing sound when pushing the stick forward beyond neutral. It sounded like it was coming from aft. After some looking, I found the culprit: the right elevator was very slightly rubbing on the metal lower HS fairing on that side. When I took that fairing off, I filed a small notch in that area to prevent that interference.

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