(Press the full screen button on the bottom right of the video for high quality)

Last Friday, we celebrated a major milestone :-)

The engine ran successfully for the first time on the airplane!

The start went very well, which I credit to the ECI Fuel Injection and the P-Mag ignition.

As always there were minor snags we had to debug. First, the alternator wasn’t charging. Turns out there are 2 different wiring schemes for the exact same alternator/plug style and by some very straightforward logic, for the alternator field to power, you have to wire a red power wire to a green one ;-) Obvious, yeah right…
And the second problem was that initially, the engine was only running on the electronic ignition and didn’t ignite on the traditional mag circuit. Turns out that we had reinstalled the mag on the wrong cycle, even though the timing marks were basically correct after we took it down to perfrom the service bulletin on the brushes. Anyway, it’s now all sorted out and we’re totally stoked :-)

So we still got to do some stuff inside the hangar, such as documenting the various control deflections and measuring distances.

Next up is configuring the EFIS, calibrating and validating the fuel tank indications.
Other tests like fuel flow measurements, running the engine for the first time and things like that are also awaiting.

We also hung the airplane to the hangar crane platform for the first time.
As expected, the platform didn’t break :-)
We initially had some lateral stability issues, but a few straps from the steps to the top center now keeps it from tipping sideways.
Thanks a lot to Markus for the awesome engineering.

http://www.flyvans.com/subproj/hangarkran.html for some more information regarding the project.

It’s almost ready to take on the plane once it’s assembled. Only minor rigging and adapting will be required.