Ok, ok, since you guys insist…
Good news, Spring is coming… in 6 months 
Now don’t get me wrong, I love snow. Loads of it, I really don’t mind. As long as it stays where it belongs, as in the mountains…
Got up quite early this morning in the hopes of getting some more of that avionics yoga time, but I couldn’t even reach my car. The pathway was blocked by the branches of a tree that bent under the heavy load of snow just in front of the main door. It snowed yesterday, it snowed the whole nite, and it is still snowing now…
I therefore cancelled my av-yoga session for today, as not only would I have to spend quite some time clearing my car for the drive, but having to pull the aircraft which is sitting below mine (YLL is on the hanger in the hangar) out in the heavy snow would have been rather challenging…
Time for some domestic chores, and the latest touchups to my interconnects and wiring diagram 
The weather was marginal yesterday but the plane was available so I planned to do some Touch and Go’s on a neigboring airfield but unfortunately the airfield is in very bad shape due to the weather.
They worked on the drainage in the beginning of the year but i have the feeling it didn’t help much.
Today Sinterklaas was supposed to arrive by plane. (Santa Clause before the Dutch took him to the States and then the Americans exported him again to Europe. But we have him as well at Christmas) Because of the condition of the field they just taxied from the hangar to the front of the clubhouse. Normally they would take 2 planes, 1 for Sinterklaas and another for the Zwarte Pieten but the pilot didn’t manage to start the plane I didn’t manage to start last time either.
So in good news, last time wasn’t completely my fault i didn’t menage to start it
Well I walked over to the hangar to get the cub out for a flight and to exercise the engine. Tried to slide the doors open and nothing moved. Looked down, there was 5 cm of solid ice in the rails!! So that was my ‘flying’ for the weekend.
It was 19 C and cloudless sunshine here but I was entertained by lots of photos from my wife’s German family arriving during the day…. Deep snow that looks like my memories of Eastern US snow storms as a kid in the 70s. Glad we were in Germany last month, not now. Good if you’re a skier I guess.
Having finished my other errands, in the afternoon I took a 12 minute flight to the cheapest local Avgas ($5.49/USG or €1.33/liter) and then flew 12 minutes back. Tanks are now full for my next adventure. I did spend 45 minutes BS’ing at the fuel pump with some friends I found there, one has a hangar next to the pump and the other was there for the Saturday EAA gathering with his young daughter, in an RV-8 he’s just acquired. Then once at base again I helped my Marchetti owning hangar neighbor locate the phone that he’d misplaced so he could go home. He’d somehow managed to leave it with the guy down the row who was swinging the gear on his C210. I enjoyed the day regardless of logging only a few minutes flying time, very relaxing, and was home in time to go out to an early dinner with my wife and her Hungarian friend who is visiting.
Here in the slightly west-southwesterly parts of Germany, very little snow has fallen….
…But then, we don’t have the issue of snow-closed airfields and frozen-up hangar doors.
So I took the PA28-180 and made an extended round-robin to the Northern Black Forest to check out some snow.
Nice climb-rate.
Speyer (city and airport) were still in the haze…
But as we approached the Schwarzwald, the air became crystal-clear.
This is the Hornisgrinde, the highest peak of the Nordschwarzwald, at approx 3700 feet.
Baden-Baden.
The Pfälzer Wald has absolutely zero snow.
Landau.
Picked up the data card of the Garmin 1000NXI for Nav data update. If the wx is not to bad I have to ferry the plane tomorrow to Piper Kassel for a Garmin1000 software update. Time limit is 27th Jan next year. But if we have snow in front of the hangar I can‘t get the 1,5 tons out the hangar and later on back into the hangar. In case of I‘ll cancel the flight
finally made it to the field today, more avionics yoga… but prior to that I had to brake the ice off the doors seals to open them… it eventually worked, and I was able to make some progress.
The weather was fantastic all over the country, blue skies, heaps of fresh white snow. Unfortunately for all the guys wanting to fly, my field remained basically closed thanks to a persistent thin layer of fog levitating over the runway.
Building an airfield amidst a depression is no good an idea…
boscomantico wrote:
So I took the PA28-180 and made an extended round-robin to the Northern Black Forest to check out some snow.
Snow looks great. A wanted to friend of mine flew to Munich (by airline) on Friday; was cancelled and he ended up going to Frankfurt and then by train to Nuremburg, and then had to car pool to get to Munich. The airport was closed until Sunday morning, I think; but his flight back to London today has been cancelled. Looks like an awful lot of snow from his photos!
I wanted to finish off my night rating this weekend but it’s been too cloudy / cold / wet in the UK for a few days now.
What I’ve done with my plane this weekend is to discover that the engine needs a major overhaul before it will fly again :-( .
I’ve suspected for a while that the engine was not producing full power. This morning they pulled a cylinder and confirmed that one of the cam lobes has almost completely worn away. I don’t even know how that’s possible. The engine has 1900 hours on it so an overhaul was in the works but I was hoping it wasn’t quite this soon.
Sorry to hear. Of course, chances are the previous owner knew something about it.
AIUI, there are limited ways of checking the camshaft during a prebuy, without pulling cylinders.
