New Month New Tail Number, Ordered Engine and Propeller

New Tail Number

Less than 6 months ago I talked about reserving tail number N910W, which was exciting because it made more sense than my previously reserved N405JW. However I always had my eye on another registration number and I'm happy to report that I successfully registered the number to my first choice of N10JW!  How did I score such a fine number 10 for RV-10 and JW for umm my initials... Well I set up a 3 year calendar reminder on the previous 'purge' date to be the first one up if it becomes available again.   Well 2016 was a bust, it was renewed before the purge date.  However last month I received the reminder but was in the middle of something before I could check, forgot about it until one night I was doing some reading and frantically checked expecting it to have slipped another year.  Surprisingly it was 'available' so I promptly registered it.  I used the quotes because there's always a few week waiting period wondering if you really get the number of if someone submitted the request before hand and the FAA just hasn't gotten to the request yet.  However two weeks later the registry site now has my information.  Will have to keep up though with my purge date to make sure I don't lose it!

Engine & Propeller

If you read my previous engine and propeller discussion here then you know that I have settled on going with a rebuild vs brand new engine. You also know that I'm going with the 3 Blade Hartzell prop and taking that one step further I now have both the Barrett Precision Engine and propeller on order. With the engine I decided against going with the cold air induction.  I like the system but you'll end up spending en extra $5K or so for the engine and then you need a show planes cowling (Or maybe some extensive fiberglass skills) and then with the show planes cowl a different spinner.  I really like the look of the Vans cowling with the snorkel so I decided to go with the Ram Air modification instead. It's essentially going to do the same thing, either cold air or more air.. to increase manifold pressure.

With the propeller everything is fairly standard.  The engine will be a wide deck so the governor from Vans will work.  If you're doing something different make sure the prop, engine and governor all line up.  Other than that the only off plans thing with the prop is that you use an aluminium spinner from Vans.

Back to these doors/cabin top.  I'm so close to wrapping it all up!!!