Confidence is growing that I resolved the stray fuel smell problem by tightening up that right vent line fitting. I ran a test card Wednesday night (150+45) and did not smell any fuel during the steep attitudes. As the CG shifts aft, the plane definitely gets more squirrely. It has almost neutral stability in the slip test that the card performs. This might have been due to a less than smooth ride. All the other tests were fine, although stall behaviour is incrementally less polite.

On returning I refueled. This took care of one of the test items. Climb to 3000 feet (from 900 feet), including startup, short taxi, runup and takeoff: .8 gallons. Call it 1. Another data point for the Pilots Operating Handbook. And I think I have the fuel flow adjusted pretty close to correct. It's registers a slight bit more than I actually use, but that's better than the other way around. I need to check this more, but I also need to look closely at the fuel tank levels to make sure they are reasonable.

That flight got me to 33 hours, 7 to go.

We have cloudy weather for the next few days, so I decided to take the plane out of service and get the gear fairings installed. The first part of this is removing the seat pans so I can install nutplates.s
So tonight I took out the seat pans, and inspected the wiring runs. It all looks OK after 30 hours. I also took out the aileron trim and brought it home. I cut an ample notch for clamping pressure and now I should be able to use the aileron trim.