What can I say about January except that it was a pretty dismal month for flying. Fortunately, I was able to put this month to use in some upgrades for Chrissy.

The first upgrade was to upsize the tires. Pat Cunningham had a set of 850×6.00 tires that he wanted to trade for the 800×6.00’s on my plane. Except for having to replace a torn tube, the swap went well. Granted, they did add 9 lbs to the plane. I made a single flight on these to bring the plane to Springbank where the rest of the upgrades were to be done.

One of the annoying little things that resulted from my landing gear spring upgrade I did last year was that the plane no longer sat as high as it did before. The gear sagged a bit too low, mainly due to a slight mismeasurement. It also sat a bit right wing low. Fortunately, the mounts where the springs bolt to the axle are quite large and it was easy to drill a second set of holes a bit further outboard to fix this issue.

The interesting thing about this fix is that I had come up with an elaborate fix that involved adding Ushaped spacers under the spring and clamps to keep them in place along with a spring compressor to install the works. Glenn Bishell took a quick look at what I was planning and asked me why I just didn’t drill a couple of new holes. It’s funny how the simplest solutions can be so evasive…

I also took this opportunity to clean up the glare shield a bit. I had mounted both the Monroy traffic detector and optical Proptach on the dash along with their associated wiring. The Monroy is now mounted in the panel in an unused instrument hole and the Proptach is mounted in the cabin ceiling.

Finally came the big upgrade. When I was flying the Cessna 180, we had a pair of COM radios in the panel. I found it very convenient to use the pair of radios to monitor two frequencies at a time. Where we flew, 126.7 along with the St. John’s tower frequency were both active and listening to both was quite advisable. Here we have a similar situation where monitoring 126.7, Calgary terminal and the field frequency is a very good idea.

My current Icom A-200 is not capable of monitoring two frequencies at once. However, the new A-210 is, as is the Garmin SL-40. At first, I planned to simply swap in the A-210 in place of the A-200. As I got to thinking about this, it made more sense to just add a new radio and be able to monitor three frequencies instead.

With the addition of a second radio, I began to consider that an audio panel might be in order. I looked at several different models before finding the Garmin GMA-240. This inexpensive, non-TSO’d unit has the ability to handle a couple of NAV and COM radios. In addition, it has a built in 4-place stereo intercom and inputs for both a cell phone and a music source such as a CD player or iPod. I know, I should be more concerned with flying the plane than with phone calls and music. However, after doing four multi-day cross country flights, a little music or an audio book or two would be quite welcome addition.

As of this writing, the installation is still underway and should be finished up in a day or so. I’ll be sure to follow up with a report next month on how things came out.

Before signing off, I’d just like to remind you of the club annual raffle draw coming up next month. You must be a renewed member to buy tickets. Also, the club’s annual dinner is coming up on the 27th of February. Be sure to see Dave Procyshen for more details.

See you all on Thursday!