My new Odyssey PC–680 battery finally arrived a few days ago, and today’s weather forecast was the best for coming week, so I took the day off. I replaced the battery and cleaned all the connections in the power and ground paths between the battery and the starter. The starter cranked much better than it had previously, so I’m happy. I’m not sure yet whether the issue was really a soft battery, or too much resistance in the power or ground paths. I’ll cobble together a way to do a capacity test on the battery I removed, to see whether it is suffering from the same issues as many other RVers have complained about with the recent Odyssey batteries.

The heat shields I needed to protect the SCAT tube for the second heat muff also arrived, so I installed that guy too.

The hardest job of the day was dealing with the aftermath of the big snow storm we had on Saturday. The volunteer airport snow clearing crew has had a very hard winter. They normally do an excellent job, but this time they didn’t clear all the way to the end of the taxiway, so I had a lot of snow to clear before I could go flying. The short flight was a nice reward after all that hard work.