Since I built two airplanes it’s kind of hard not to tinker on the Cruise Carbon Trike.  Ever since I had one pin fall out (on the ground) I’ve wanted to secure the pins holding the motor mount to the trike.  Because they are under shear compression I don’t think they’d fall out in flight but I don’t want to take that chance.  So I safety-wired all the pins in place.  The two front pins are covered in a previous blog posting.  The rear pin was a little more problematic to secure via safety wire.  If I attached the safety wire in the same way I did to the front two pins, the wire would rub on the fiberglass body of the trike.  To make sure the wire doesn’t scratch or otherwise damage the body I ran the wire through a plastic wire crimp butt connector and then put heat shrink tubing over that.  I plan to examine the fiber glass closely after the next flight to see if there is any rubbing that could damage the fiberglass.  If so I’m going to cut the safety wire off and try to find a new method to safety the pin in place.

The other thing I’ve done is to add a small tachometer/hour meter to the trike.  It was a simple install that took me 15 minutes total and most of that was figuring out how I wanted to run the wire.  I fished the wire down through the engine’s clamshell and then secured it to the spark plug wire via nylon tie wraps.  I then wrapped the remainder of wire around the throttle cable and then used the supplied adhesive backing to attach it to the throttle.  I only have to turn my hand over and I can see my RPMs.  It will display highest RPM per flight and total hours.

I haven’t gotten to fly it since added the tach.  It will be interesting to see what RPMs I’m hitting.