At approximately 12:40 PM Central time today, N886MJ again broke the surly bonds of earth. It had been a long winter as she sat in a cold dark hanger since September 2009 waiting for major surgery to be performed on her engine. Her engine, after destroying it's second cam gear, was given to Roy Sarafinski at the 2009 KR Gathering in hopes he could do magic and make it come to life again. After several months, a newly rebuilt case, a newly nitrided ground and polished crankshaft, a new camshaft and cam gear, a new crank gear, and a new Roy's Fifth Bearing installed, the assembled short block was returned to me after being completely worked over and fine tuned by Roy Sarafinski. I took the short block and completed the assembly using my Falcon heads. After installation back on my plane, she started on the second turn of the blade and has not hesitated since. Today, I arrived at the airport shortly after day break and using a DynaVibe, I fined tuned the vibration down to .050 IPS. At about noon she was ready for high speed taxi runs. I headed out to runway 21 with winds at 11 right down the runway, I applied full throttle and kept her from lifting off till I had to stop before running of the end of our 5,600 foot runway. I did a u-turn and another high speed run back down the runway. Everything was perfect, temps, throttle response, everything. I called for another high speed test run down 21 and hit the throttle. When I hit rotation speed, I called in that I was departing and lifted off and away we went up to 3000' where we stayed over the airport for the next thirty minutes. Everything was as normal as could be expected. I was cruising at 2900 rpm. At full throttle I was seeing 3450 rpm. Anyway, 15 minutes into the flight I recorded these: Oil Temp 205, Exhaust Temp 1300, Oil PSI 39, CHT 300. After making a decent landing for not having flown since Sept, I taxied back to my hangar and inspected for oil leaks to which I found none. I could not be happier at this point. I am also off work all this week so I intend to put several hours on her rather quickly. I will keep you all posted. Great to be back in the air again.
Mark Jones (N886MJ) Stevens Point, WI E-mail: flyk...@charter.net Web: www.flykr2s.com
