After a nice long preheat of the hangar and some time fiddling with the Garmin 496 yoke mount in the V Tail, I started it up and taxied out for some x-wind practice on 26.
Winds were 5-6 knots from 180, so it would be a very nice direct x-wind.
After a good long warm up I took the active and stopped, set full power, and released the brakes.
The nose wheel must have been cocked to one side because she wanted to turn left. I had to touch the brakes twice on the right to get turned back to center and then very soon 70 MPH and then lift-off.
I climbed at 80 and left the gear down -- I was staying in the pattern anyway. Very soon I was 800' AGL and started my turn to x-wind and then downwind. The airplane was still climbing at 100 MPH and 20" of MP so I backed it off to 17". It still wanted to accelerate so I set it at 15". That stabilized the airspeed at 100 MPH at straight and level with the gear down. Not bad.
I tried to keep the pattern close but the southerly wind blew me towards the runway. ON turn to base I was still pretty high. I kept it right at 80 with full flaps.
I touched down just past the numbers and rolled to the second taxi way.
I did a few more stop and goes and had to go around on one since I was too high after turn from base to final. Next one I worked harder at maintaining the crab to stay equal distance from the runway on downwind. Gotta practice the basics.
On the 4th pattern I hit full flaps and then noticed there was no radio noise. checked the panel and all was dark -- no electric power.
I checked the flaps and they were down. I kept flying the airplane and checked CB -- none were up.
I cycled the generator switch and nothing.
I was on base so decided to forgo fishing out the handheld. The other traffic behind had me in sight before I lost comms.
I landed OK and then taxied to the hangar. A few more tries and still no power.
I'll have Kevin take a look and see what's up. Might be the new flap motor?
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