Friday, June 12, 2009

Why I hate working on airplanes

We're taking a break from the Guess Who quiz today while I grumble about other things. The quiz will continue next week once I get the next group assembled. Meanwhile, on my one day off this week I spent some time piddling with the Baron. A nice flying airplane that I've grown to despise every time I have to work on it. The latest annoyance was a lack of oil pressure indication on the right engine. I traced the problem to air in the line to the gauge, which was remedied by bleeding the line. Not such a hard thing to do, but what a pain:

This shot, taken from the floor looking up behind the instrument panel, shows the back of the engine gauge cluster. The line that I was working on was the blue fitting seen in the center of the photo. What's not shown is the amount of stuff that had to be removed just so it could be seen at all.

This is approximately the position needed for me to take the first photo, as well as accomplish the necessary work to fix the problem. My head, resting on the copilot's floor and/or rudder pedals, is lower than my feet on the wing.

4 comments:

  1. Looking on the bright side: in that position, if you drop anything, it should fall right in your eye and you'll know exactly where it went.

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  2. Actually, that's exactly what happened!

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  3. Hey Captain Vector! This is GD from arrival area (SCT). Just happened on your blog, very cool stuff! Who are you? I'm interested in getting some pics from the cab!!

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