Back to work

It's been a while since my last post. Went on vacation, got sick and slowly recovered. I can finally resume my work on the Pitts : )

Been working quite a lot these days to replace all the hoses FWF. I checked the logbook and my hoses were all 10+ years old so I decided to change them. The hoses are all steel braided and hose ends are all Aeroquip 816 type or equivalent. I wish I could afford all brand new hose ends and fittings but they're just too expensive so I'm only changing the steel braided hoses and reusing the hose ends.

First had to purge the oil from the engine and start removing hoses. Some hoses were "fire protected" with a fiberglass sleeve attached with lacing and tie-wraps:



I didn't find this very smart for two reasons. First, plastic tie-wraps will quickly melt in case of fire and second, since there is no silicon wrap around it, it doesn't prevents contaminants like oil and fuel to soak the fiberglass and turn it into a fire hazard rather than a fire protection. As you can imagine, I bought proper firesleeve material and will replace the old fire-enhancing sleeves...

For each hose, I carefully remove the hose ends using special bench vise jaws and a wrench:



Then I cut the new hoses using a small metal cutting saw which allows nice clean cuts which makes my job easier later to reinstall the hose end:



After that I reinstall the hose ends using the technique recommended in this EAA video.

Doing this for all hoses is time consuming. I did all the oil hoses already and just started removing fuel hoses. I realized that due to lack of lubrication, fuel hoses get much stiffer over time than oil hoses.

I'm about 50% done now. Will post an update once complete!