Last weeks of the year!

Good afternoon my aeronautics enthusiasts,

It’s been a long time since my last blog but here we are again as always. We have been very busy at the workshop these days and we’ve done lot of practises related with hydraulic and pneumatic. Even we started practises related with electronics and we have been able to study the diodes and Zener diodes in real circuits. It’s kind of complex and as we haven’t done many things, I won’t talk about it in this blog.

Notwithstanding, we will talk about the hydraulic and the pneumatic. Related with hydraulic we managed to power on the hydraulic pump of the Piper Seneca and it is primarily used for the brakes and the retraction of the landing gear. It is a very simple mechanism and very easy to see and understand. The hydraulic pump is in the front of the aircraft and it is powered on with a normal car battery of 12V.

The practise consisted in checking the functioning of the landing gear and see if it retracts correctly. First of all, we managed to put the aircraft on the jacks and lifting it up. Once the landing gear wasn’t touching the ground, we connected a battery to the plane and from the cockpit we tried to retract the landing gear. We ended up finding that the pump wasn’t working properly and the landing gear wasn’t moving. With this test done, we found out that the pump was faulty and needed to be changed for turning back the aircraft on service.

The second practise was related with the pneumatic system of the old Convair Coronado 990V, and more specific with the turbocompressor of the air conditioning. The practise consist in disassembling the turbocompressor and then mount back everything together. For the moment, we only have been able to disassemble it as we haven’t done many practises for the moment.

We found out that disassembling a component can be quite challenging sometimes as there are many components and you need to be sure to assemble everything back together in the same position. It is very important to mark all the components and take some photos to make sure where was everything mounted. I haven’t said it, but for disassembling the component you need to be reading the overhaul manual and following all the necessary steps. You cannot disassemble in the order that you want.

Nevertheless, sometimes it’s quite hard to read the manual and try to understand what it is telling you as it is only text and there aren’t pictures. There is only a big image with all the components marked and sometimes it’s like finding wally to search that the text is telling you. However, there are no special tools for disassemble the turbocompressor, for the moment we only have used some fixed wrenches, a ratcheting wrench with sockets and a flat screwdriver.

Probably next week we will assemble back the turbocompressor, so I will keep you informed during the next blogs. As always, now it is time to talk a little bit about what I’ve doing outside Globalia during these days. I must admit that I haven’t done many things even if we had the holidays in the middle.

Some days I stayed at home as the weather has been very bad during the week. Most of the days were rainy and the other ones were very cold outside. At home we have done some movie marathon and enjoy them with some hot chocolate! We also went visiting my grandmother in Can Pastilla and she prepared us a spectacular fideua. I think that I haven’t eaten one since before the covid and I must admit that I enjoyed it a lot!

We also went to Palma to see the lights and we did some shoppings for Christmas gifts. I will keep the secret of what I bought but I’m very excited to give all the gifts to my familiars soon. Also this year I’m going to Belgium on the 30 of December, so we will spend there the new year and we will come back past the three wise men. It is also my sister birthday on the 6 of January, so we need to celebrate lots of things!

This is all for today’s blog, I hope you enjoyed a lot and see you soon on my next blog!