Fiberglass work
With my prop governor on its way to MT for repair (update), I’m still plugging away at the fiberglass gear fairings. The governor should be back next week.
I’ve been out at the hangar each evening banging away at the gear leg fairings and wheel pants. I had to do some “major” reconstruction of the nose gear leg intersection fairing. It didn’t really match the gear leg very well at all. I chopped it up and used expanding foam to re-form the leg transition. Then did a glass layup (or two) and popped it off the airplane. Back at the bench, trim, fill, sand, repeat.
On the main wheel fairings, I glassed in a little transition lip onto the forward half of the pant to gear leg intersection fairing. Partly to cover up my sloppy part line. So I’m doing the same trim, fill, sand, and repeat operation on those. Also, I’m beginning to work through getting the two wheel pant halves to meet cleanly. Much more to still be done there.
Finally, I’m filling and sanding the upper main intersection fairings for shape. All of this is even in the stage before first priming. I usually still have quite a way to go after the first primer is put down on composite work.
I think I figured out why the Garmin 430W didn’t seem to be sending vertical nav commands to the autopilot via the ARINC 429 interface. After reading through the ARINC output definitions in the 430W documentation, all of the vertical command statements are in the 429 GAMA format, not the base 429 format that I had configured per the GRT efis documentation. Then going back and looking at the TruTrak Digiflight II VSGV documentation, low-and-behold, it said to use 429 GAMA. I can’t imagine how many times I have read that same documentation (it must be hundreds, I almost know it by heart) and missed that critical piece. So ARINC 429 GAMA output it is. I haven’t had a chance to test fly it yet, but this will certainly produce the expected results of the 430W flying the autopilot right down the glide slope on a GPS approach!