Terry and I drove down to Green Bay, WI for 10 days over Christmas and New Years. Terry grew up in Green Bay, and has five sisters in the area that she is very close to. I kid her that I married her so I would have some place to stay when going to the EAA convention at Oshkosh :). It was good to visit with the herd of sisters, but it was wonderful to get back home on Friday and be sleeping in our own bed.

I did get the full Lambeau Field experience while in Green Bay. We did a Lambeau Field tour, which included a walk out the tunnel where the Packers come onto the field at the start of a game, and a visit to the Packers Hall of Fame. Then lunch and a beer at Curly’s, named after Curly Lambeau, the founder and first coach of the Packers (and also a player on the team). And, on the 28th, I went to the final Packers regular season game. It wasn’t as bad as the Ice Bowl, but it was fairly brisk. Chris C. - tell Joan that I had a beer in her name. She can pay me next time I am in Vancouver :)

The Aero Technologies PCU-5000X propeller governor arrived over the Christmas break, so I now have all the major pieces in place to allow me to start putting the aircraft back together. I went out to the hangar this morning to meet local RV builder Chris H., who dropped off Mike B.’s travelling engine hoist. Thanks Chris and Mike.

At the start of the morning, I had grandiose hopes of getting the engine bolted back onto the engine mount by lunch time, but my actual pace was way too slow to get that far. I picked the engine off the pallet, and then spent way too much time trying to deal with what turned out to be a non-problem. I eventually realized that I had gotten confused between the prop governor mounting pad, and the mounting pad for the vacuum pump (which I am using for a B&C Specialties SD-8 8 amp alternator). I eventually figured out my mistake, and worked on installing the prop governor. I found out that the base of the PCU-5000X comes much closer to the mounting nuts than on my previous MacCauley prop governor. That meant that my sockets wouldn’t fit over the nuts, and I didn’t have a 1/2” crowfoot wrench. In the end I decided it would have been a lot easier if I had simply removed the oil filter, as it greatly hindered the access with my cobbled together makeshift torque wrench/open end wrench combination.

I stopped work at lunch time after finishing torquing the prop governor, and came home to warm up (it was -16 deg C inside the hangar, or +3 deg F). It is supposed to warm up later in the week, and I hope to get another work session in some afternoon.