Friday September 12 2014  The DAR comes over to inspect N69102 for it's airworthiness certificate. 

No more then 2 minutes into the inspection he finds a castle nut that has no cotter pin.  DAMN!   I was just working on that this morning and I had the new cotter pin laying right beside the pliers i was going to use to put it in.

I quickly fix that while the DAR goes on about his inspection, spending over an hour looking in holes, going upside down in the cabin to look under the panel, and even popping up under the plane to look at the flap motor mounts.   He's very familiar with the 601 and he's asking me questions about how I did something and commenting on my stainless steel brake lines. It was obvious he'd seen a few of these.

He didn't find any other issues, and we spent another bit of time chatting while he did the paperwork. From start to finish it was about 90 minutes and I was handed all the documents, and operating limitations I would need.  He told me to be careful and pay attention to what the airplane was telling me and to go have a safe first flight!.   

It's a pretty good feeling to know that the only thing keeping me on the ground, was the setting sun.