Complete interior re-furbish

[hharney]

Now that I just spent 2 days cleaning the window frame from the door of 2JF, I am ready to move on to other important tasks. These days with the snow falling and wonderful high temps in the 20's, making the 45 mile drive to Larry's hanger has been all but fun. Only because the excitement of again hugging 2JF each day keeps me coming back. OK, Larry and Kathryn's hospitality is a very, very close second. In fact, I must say that Larry and Kathryn are truly wonderful people. They continually want to feed me, make coffee, Larry is over in the hanger helping wrench on the plane and just all around great people. Many thanks to the Bowdish's for their allow me to take on this project in their hanger.

This project is a lot more than I had ever anticipated. It is wonderful and have really enjoyed it, but it's to the point now where I would like to see more progress. We seem to be finally making some progress in the last couple of days. Just little things being totally completed helps in the therapy. Like yesterday we finished the pulse light system. Also, I have always had a problem with the dimmer rheostat for the instrument lights, has anyone else had this issue? It would never function as a true dimmer, just turn it all the way clockwise to reach the end and finally the lights would work at full power. I had bought a new dimmer from Cessna years ago and it worked initially but then would quit except for full on. I have talked with other Skymaster owners and they too have had problems with this. Well while researching for a pulse light system and purchasing the unit from Seaton Enginering Corp. http://seatoneng.com/MaxPulse.htm I found that this company also made a solid state dimmer rheostat that is rated for 12.5 Amps or 350 Watts at 28 VDC. It is called MaxDim http://seatoneng.com/MaxDim.htm I have installed this unit and I will report the performance when all this project finishes enough put the aircraft in the air. The pulse light unit is really a nice compact switch for all the features that it has. The new Stobe power supply is mounted and wired. I will have new wing tip strobes and a tail strobe that flashes alternately with the wing tips. I still have the belly strobe too. Lots of new lighting additions along with interior lights to match the new eyeball vents for each passenger. Photos of those once the interior starts installing. I removed the 8 day wind up clock and opted for an electric, direct replacement. 2JF came off the show room floor with the fuse and power wires for an electric clock but got the 8 day wind up, at least that is what I thought. After removing the 8 day I read on the back "1979" so someone has messed with this before. Well if there was an electric there originally it's back to original now. Now trying to feed the strobe cable from the power supply on the rear firewall to the tail has posed a challenge. There is no access to the boom from the wing aft to the first panel where the autopilot control is. We are working on trying to find the best access, if anyone has done this let me know if there are any tricks to accessing this on the left side of the aircraft. As previous post's have indicated, we have been inspecting the right wing fuel tanks. Yesterday, after draining all the fuel through the sump quick drain valve, we removed the inboard main tank to inspect all fittings and interconnects on that specific tank. It appears that the leak culprit is the sending unit (fuel transmitting unit) gasket. When the tanks are full to the top that point where the sender unit is located is actually lower than the service filler neck. I notice this summer that I had signs of fuel on the underside of the right wing and now that we have this tank out it looks like the only place that the fuel was coming from was the sender gasket. It would trail quite a distance and would only leak when the mains were full. After there was 10 gals burned off it wouldn't leak. We will be cleaning up the tank and checking some of the areas that are really stained but by first inspection after the tank is out it looks like all is ok. We will replace all the cork on that tank because the small amount of fuel that leaked has compromised it's purpose. We also installed the Knots 2 U exterior LED light on the underside of the right wing. 2JF never had an exterior light and with this unit you don't have to even turn on the master switch. It operates on a 9 volt battery and automatically turns off after either 3 minutes or 15 minutes. Just a cool little addition. Well all the new insulation is 90% done and we are just about ready to start the window install next. We need to make sure all interior tasks are completed first so that the new interior can be installed and then we can start to work on the other items, main tires, rear engine mounts, oil filters for both engines, oil lead on front engine, etc., while the interior is being completed. Then once 2JF is deemed airworthy again it's off to the paint shop.

BTW, I finally broke down and decided to remove the ADF and related items. I have a good ADF sense antenna if anyone needs one.