Apr 18, 2024     Crank Plug - (2 hours)       Category: Engine

Had my friend Kris H come down to the hangar this afternoon at my request to review my firewall forward installation. Kris is an IA and also works for Lycoming. A second set of eyes, especially with some expertise, is always welcome.

While he was there, I asked him how he recommended removing the front crank plug for a constant speed prop. I was planning to go with the punch and slide hammer as others have suggested but Kris said just use something like a cheap socket extension and BFH to turn it concave and it would turn loose.

I had an old 3/8 drive 6" extension that I didn't mind beating up a bit so I gave it a try. Sure enough, 3-4 good whacks with a hammer and the curvature of the plug changed from convex to concave has reversed and it was loose in the hole and easily fished out. Awesome!

  Apr 18, 2024     prop install logistics - (2 hours)       Category: Propeller

So I seem to recall that on most props, the spinner backplate is bolted onto the hub with drilled head bolts to accommodate safety wire. Turns out the Whirlwind is different. Specifically the installation manual indicated that the bolts in question are just AN5-4A bolts with a washer. Instead of safety wire, the manual specifies that they're held secure via lock-tite 262.

Lock-tite makes dozens of different formula, each with a specific purpose. some are high temp, some are oil resistant, some are low grip, etc. etc. etc. I thought I'd pick this particular one up easily, but it turns out that this particular flavor is evidently made of a mix of unobtanium and unicorn horn.

I checked Ace Hardware, Auto Zone, The regional parts distributors, Airparts, industrial supply places, etc. The only place in Wichita that I could find which actually had it on the shelf was Grainger industrial supply, and they wanted $66.00 plus tax for a 1.5 oz bottle!

Spruce has it for $23 for a 10 mg bottle, which by volume is even more expensive. What the heck is this stuff?

Anyway, I called Airparts back and they found that they could get the same 10 ml bottle from Avial for 14 bucks. So for that plus whatever markup they put on it, I can wait a couple of days vs. paying over $70 (including tax) to get a 1.5 oz bottle today for something I only need for 6 bolts.

All that to say that If you're installing a whirlwind prop, buy this stuff ahead of time.

  Apr 17, 2024     Which tailwheel tire? - (2 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

A year or so ago, I bought a Condor 2 fork, lightweight wheel and absolutely bald tire from a guy on VAF. I had slapped it on the plane before moving it to the airport because the 6" tire gives more ground clearance back there ad I was worried about dragging belly antennas when it was being loaded on the truck.

I ordered a new tire which has been on the shelf for a while so while I was working on the rudder and tailwheel steering, it seemed like a good time to deal with that.

I broke down and changed the tire but used the same tube because it was in good shape. I was originally planning to go back to the hard rubber 5" tire that Vans supplies during flight test and maybe go back to this one when I get a bit more comfortable with the airplane. I may still do that, and in fact the smaller Vans tire will fit the same fork, so it would be easy to do.

But out of curiosity, I weighed them both and discovered that the 6" setup is actually 4oz lighter than the solid Vans tire/wheel combo. I didn't take the forks off the plane to weigh them, but I sort of think that the condor 2 is lighter than the vans fork as well. Even if it's not, 4oz is nothing to sneeze at. The lever arm is about 250" back there and combined with the lighter weight old white fairings I'm using, this tailwheel will take almost 1/2 a pound off of the tail of the plane.

I've got a big heavy engine up front, but I've also got a fancy lightweight prop, so I really don't know if I'm going to be tail heavy, nose heavy, or somewhere in between. But I do know that from a W&B perspective, 1/2 lb off the tail has the same net effect as deleting 1.5 lbs of gas on this airplane, so unless I need the weight in the tail to shift the c.g, I think I may just leave it like this for a while and see how I like it. The only downside I can see is that since it's an actual tire with a tube and not just rubber donut, I could get a flat back there.

I think I'll wait and see how the preliminary W&B comes out to make a decision about this.

  Apr 17, 2024     Rigged tailwheel steering - (10 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

Yesterday I attempted to install the steering chains per print and they were rubbing on the bottom rudder fairing at full rudder deflection. Plus they were clipped onto the rudder horn and the tailwheel horn with those spring clip abominations. once you spring them open enough to install there's not a good way to smoosh them back together, so you end up having to run safety wire around them to make sure they stay put.

Plus, when Robert August had his RV6, we noticed during the condition inspection that they were eating their way through the rsoft aluminum of teh rudder horn. No thank you.

I did some research last night and discovered a picture of Vans own RV7 demonstrator that has been modified to use AN42B eye bolts at that location, which saves the rudder horn and also drops the fwd end of the chain about 1/2", which is enough to eliminate the rubbing issue. The phrase "practice what you preach" comes to mind here.

The problem is, those AN42B eyebolts are $13 a pop at spruce, and I need 4 of them. with shipping, probably $70, which seems a bit spendy for this use.

This morning, I ran down to the yard store to see if they had any in their surplus hardware bins and it was my lucky day! I found a whole bin of them that were the wrong length and drilled through the threads but who cares, loose hardware at the yard store is $12 a POUND. I picked up a handful of bolts, some Axle nuts cotter pins and a few other odds and ends. Instead of $70, I walked out with a paper bag full of goodies that only cost me $6 bucks. I love the yard store!

My bench vise is in my garage and the plane is obviously not, so I was unsure how long these actually needed to be. When I got home, I clamped them in the vise and got out the cheap harbor freight tap and die set I had at the house and cut threads down to within about 3/16" of the head. Once I did a trial fit on the plane, I determined that 5/8" was plenty, so I cut them down to that length with my dremmel. Take that Aircraft Spruce :)

I fastened the springs directly to the eye bolts at the tailwheel, and used stainless chain add-a-links rated for 300 lbs at the rudder. On the rudder end I also had to enlarge the hole in the eyebolts slightly to get the threaded end of the link thru it. I don't recall what size drill bit I used, but the increase was pretty insignificant.

So, When it comes time to paint the plane, You can get the rudder off without scratching the heck out of the horns with those spring clips, it doesn't rely on a big wad of safety wire to keep it from falling apart, and it looks about a million times better that the crappy spring link/scratched rudder fairing abomination that Van's has in their drawing but doesn't even follow on their own demo airplanes. Best of all, it was on the cheap



So between yesterday and today all of that monkey motion took a while but the result turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself. The chains have a little bit more slack than I would like, but if I take out another link they will be too tight. This chain has a tendency to stretch in use, so after a few hours I suspect it will have grown enough that I can take out a link at that point and they will be just about perfect.

  Apr 16, 2024     Installed rudder - (7 hours)       Category: Empennage

What we have here is a chicken and egg scenario. The rudder has been ready to install and rig since I got the fiberglass tips finished a couple of weeks ago. I thought it would be a quick project to knock out, but of course it never goes that way.

I had decided to route the wiring for the tail strobe per Vans OP-56 drawing, which has you rivet a wire tie mount to the fwd face of the rudder spar at a hole that already exists in the doubler for the lower heim joint. Unfortunately theres quite a thick material stackup there and the print calls for an LP4-5 rivet there. OP-56 is a generic print for all Vans models, so I guess that makes sense, but guess how many LP4-5 rivets are require for an RV-7?...hob about a big fat zero.

In the picture below, you can see where the mount is riveted through a hole in the doubler. there is a matching hole on the other side of the heim joint that doesn't go all the way through. I questioned this when I was putting the rudder together and Vans tech support told me that doubler is used in lots of different models and those two holes are predrilled for the RV-14. They told me I could match drill teh spar and and rivet them or just ignore them on the RV-7, so I chose to ignore them. Fast fwd a couple of years, and now OP-56 tells me that I can use that same hole for this wire tie mount. Handy! All this is to explain why there's an empty rivet hole on one side of this doubler in the picture, but I digress.

Anyway, right before we left for family vacation and sun n fun I ordered a few rivets from Vans.

Once I had the proper rivet installed I hung the rudder with the appropriate hardware, then routed and secured the wire to the tail strobe. I thought I'd be smart and install the lower rudder cap after that, but it turns out there isn't enough room to put it in place with the rudder installed because the tailwheel spring is in the way. So I pulled the lower two hinge bolts back out and was able to swing the rudder out enough to slip the lower fairing cap on, then secure everything again.

I torqued the fasteners via a Crowfoot and some careful positioning, and then riveted on the upper and lower cap fairings.

Note- I see a lot of people install the lower fairing with nutplates so they can get it off to work on the wiring to the tail light and I can't for the life of me understand why this is a thing. I just shielded the wire with some abrasion sleeve and left enough service loop that I can unscrew it from the rudder and pull it aft enough to unplug the spade connectors, then cut the wire tie at the mount that was installed a coupe of paragraphs up in this entry, then you can pull the wire out fwd and remove the rudder just like any other rudder. eeze peeze.

I've also seen people take all sorts of time and effort to make sure the rudder and V/S upper caps match perfectly by adding micro or body filler to one or the other. While I understand the sentiment, I don't think I'm going to do that. The curvature has an ever so slight mis-match between the two, but aerodynamically its insignificant, and I don't think it's worth the weight penalty of adding filler back there to try to get it show plane perfect.

At this point I also drilled a drain hole at the lowest part of the fairing also water doesn't get trapped in there. It's a 1/4" hole which seems huge, but it's per print taht it's supposed to be that size.

The last think I did was to run the magnetometer interference test again. I had done it when I installed the magnetometer, but there was lots of stuff not installed/functional at that time, including the tail strobe. Now that teh airplane is put together and is functional, it seemed like I should probably put it through its paces.

This test is somewhat lengthy. It suggests you runs pretty much everything through its paces; Box the controls, run the trim, strobes on and off, basically every combination and configuration you can imagine. I'm happy to report that it passed, with a high of only 17% of the interference limit reached in one configuration (Strobe on, elevator full up, trim servo running).

  Apr 11, 2024     panel placards - (10 hours)       Category: Instrument Panel

Todays part of this obviously didn't take 10 hours, but there was plenty of prep work that all added up. Lindsay Hemann was kind enough to help me lay out all my panel labels. She was able to get everything on a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper twice over, which is important because when you send it to have it made into dry transfers they charge $110 per sheet, no matter how much or how little it has on it. Thanks Lindsay!

Anyway, there isn't much to say about the process. I got a couple of them a little crooked, but for the most part they came out really nice. At some point in the future I may scrape these off and try again, either for aesthetics our out of necessity if they wear out, but for now this will work and looks about a million times better than stick on labels. Interestingly enough, they really didn't want to transfer to the satin clear coat on the instrument panel without significant rubbing on the backing paper. By contrast, the stick placards practically jumped off the sheet to latch onto the plastic stick grip

If I were doing this again, I would bite the bullet and do all the placards before installing everything in the panel. It would have been a lot easier to do this with the panel laying flat on the bench and would have been worth the risk of having to change something later.

  Apr 11, 2024     Landing light lenses - (2 hours)       Category: Lighting

My wife and daughter were both working Sun n Fun this year, so we took a few days prior and went to Disney. Fun times, but I was beat when I got home. I'm evidently too old for that much nonstop fun, because I developed a cold the next day as well.

The landing light lenses were fit a few years ago when I was working on the wings and have been on the shelf ever since. That was long enough for the blue painters tape I had protected them with to leave a bit of residue when I peeled it off last week. Today I took them home, got all the goo off with mineral spirits, then gave them a good wash in the kitchen sink with some Dawn to get rid of the mineral spirit residue.

eeze peezee

  Apr 03, 2024     data plate & N number - (1 hour)       Category: Paint / Decals

I got the data plate back from the engraver the other day. Alodined under its footprint and riveted it on the tail under the l/h horizontal stab. I finished off today by installing the required Experimental placard on the aft baggage bulkhead, and the N number. This is just a simple vinyl N number that I ordered from spruce, but at $40 it was a better value than trying to piecemeal this together. It's just temporary until paint, but it's pretty cool to be able to step back and see an actual airplane with an actual N number on it.

  Apr 03, 2024     rudder fairings - (12 hours)       Category: Empennage

Due to acquiring a used empennage with the wings I bought, most of which I replaced, I ended up with the old white fairings and also new gray ones. As I mentioned before, the white ones are lighter, so even though they're a bit thinner and seem a little less robust, thats what I elected to use.

The exception is the upper rudder fairing. The white one was about 1/2" shorter than the gray one and I was going to have to build it up significantly, so I used the new one up top on the rudder.

The bottom fairing has a molded in light cove, but there isn't room inside for the threaded plate that came with the nav light. Vans has you fabricate a mounting base out of 1/8" aluminum, tap threads into it, and pop rivet it externally to the light has something to screw into. Pardon me, but how much more hillbilly can you get?

I played with this for 2 days including research before coming across a solution somebody else had successfully with. Basically, lay up 2 piano hinge eyelets in flox inside the socket, then drill them and tap for #4-40 screws. That worked great and nothing cobbled together on the outside. I weighed it after and the whole thing including the light is still 2 oz lighter than the gray one just by itself. Success!

I'm following the Vans drawing for routing wiring to that tail light, and it requires a CS4-5 pop rivet to secure a wire tie mount to the fwd face of the rudder spar, but there are exactly zero of those in an RV7 kit, so I had to order a few. I won't permanently install the fairings until thats done.

I also took some time to get the gap right between the V/S upper tip and the rudder counterbalance horn. Vans doesn't specify a specific gap for this area, but on the elevators it's 1/8" so thats what I was shooting for here as well. I had the closeout on the aft face of the V/S cap a bit proud, an that opening wasn't quite big enough, so I block sanded it down and once it was right, I repainted it with dupli-color rattle can primer just to protect it from uv for now.

The side profile doesn't quite match. I haven't decided if I'm going to try to fill that with micro, or just let the paint shop deal with it.

  Apr 03, 2024     Rigged flaps - (8 hours)       Category: Wings

I rigged the flaps and configured the stops in the G3X. I don't know if it's because the motor tends to coast a bit after it stops, or if there's a little bit of slop in my POS-12 linkage. At any rate, The flaps tend to over run the target 40 degree setting when extending and the motor keeps running for a second or so after they're fully retracted. I tinkered with this for quite a while and realized that if I ran them down to about 2 degrees and told the G3X that was zero, then ran them down to about 38 degrees and told it that was 40, they would be just about perfect when they stopped. There's a bunch of different ways you can configure this, and I've got mine setup with preset stops at 10-20-30-40 degrees. When you bump the switch they will go to the next detent and stop. multiple bumps and they will go multiple stops-cool! I also set up the airspeed parameters; 20 degrees at 95kts, >20 at 86 kts.

I also ran into a potential rigging issue. The top heim joint on the flap pushrods has a bolt that is supposed to go through with the head outboard. With the flap weldment installed, there isn't room to insert the bolt from that direction because the skin is in the way.

I initially thought I could just stick them in the other way, and thats how I connected everything for rigging, but then I started thinking about it. About 30 years ago, I taxied out in a 182, that randomly started turning right and had a massively stiff ailerons. The root cause was that somebody had put one of the pedal bolts in backward and the aileron cable that was running down the aft face of the firewall was hung up on it.

That could have been a really bad day and in looking at this, I can see how sometime similar could happen. The RV rudder cables are not a tensioned closed loop, so when you're not actively pushing, there's slack in them, and if the nut and bolt threads are sticking out back there, then there's an extremely remote chance that a rudder cable could get hung up on them.

So, it seemed like I had to take half the airplane apart to get them in there, but by removing the flap motor, POS-12 and entire center brace structure, I was able to get the weldment cocked at enough of an angle that I could get the bolts in per print, with the heads out. Once that was done, I put everything back together, re torqued to spec, and ops checked. All good

  Apr 01, 2024     Cleaned the hangar - (6 hours) Category: Workshop

made an attempt to clean out all my construction debris as well as reorganize so I can find stuff easier. Time will tell if I was successful.

  Mar 29, 2024     Permanently installed wingtips - (3 hours)       Category: Wings

I cleaned these up a bit more. Way back in the day, I acquired a set of RV9 FlyLED wingtip boards. They were reshaped to make them fit the RV7 wingtip coves, but the ribbon 4 conductor wire that comes with them was too short, so I made up connections with individual wires, secured against vibration with zip ties to a base glued down with E6000.

I also used a bit of E6000 on the VOR antenna to keep it from vibrating and cutting into the inside of the wingtip.

  Mar 24, 2024     wingtip prep - (2 hours)       Category: Wings

Theres a lot of cross pollination with fiberglass work, or at least the way I do it. If I have a job that requires just a dab of epoxy, I'll set it aside until I've got a bigger project and then do it all at once. In this case, most of the detail of what I'm about to describe is contained in the empennage fairing log entry from 3-23-24.

Basically, the wingtip trailing edges stick out aft of the ailerons about 1/4". This seems to be a common issue with RV's because I've seen a bunch of them with exactly the same thing, including my hangar neighbor's RV6. I've also seen both the issue and the solution detailed in other build logs. If you don't want to live with it that way, the fix is just to trim that area back to match the ailerons after everything is on and rigged.

My concern with this is that there isn't much holding the trailing edge together back there, just about 3/8" of flox. I'm not comfortable shaving half of that contact area away just for aesthetic reasons.

My solution was to add more flox and a few plies of glass in that acute angle. I'm not doing any trimming just yet because Vans says that if a heavy wing shows up in flight test one reason may be the trailing edge of the aileron isn't quite right and may need to be adjusted to be flatter or thicker. Seems to me that if I have to do that it might slightly change where the aileron trailing edge resides relative to the wingtip trailing edge. After flight test, once I'm sure the ailerons are in their final configuration, If I choose to correct this I can easily do it or have the paint shop do it with just a long sanding block without having to remove anything from the airplane.

While I was doing that, I also used the dregs of my epoxy flox mix to repair the aft outboard corner of the r/h wingtip. These tips were part of the used wings that I bought when I originally started this project and at some point, somebody had smacked that corner into something and broken the gel coat off down into the fiberglass weave in an area about the size of a dime.

Today, I sanded that all back down flush starting with some 60 grit, finishing it off with 220, and hit it with a quick coat of rattle can primer. Most of this will get cut off if I go back and trim the trailing edges even with the aileron trailing edges, so I'm not going to worry about 100% getting all the sanding marks out to a "prepped for paint" finish sanding it until then.

  Mar 24, 2024     riveted on h/s tips - (.5 hour)       Category: Empennage

Just had a couple of hours in the hangar today, so I knocked out the simple task of riveting the fiberglass tips on the horizontal stab.

I questioned the build instructions here, because they don't call for any kind of doubler, just pull rivets right through the fiberglass. When I asked date question on VAF, I got the usual variety of opinions, but Scott McDaniels, who is a DAR and retired from Vans Prototype shop a couple of years ago responded that all the prototypes are built per print there and it's not a mistake, so I went with that and just riveted them on so that the bulb of the pulled end is pulled right up against nothing but fiberglass.

In spite of my best efforts, the gap between the tip fairing and the elevator counterweight ended up the tiniest bit asymmetrical. It's not much, maybe 1/16" or so, and it's only noticeable if you sight straight down between the two with the elevators neutral, so it's not worth fixing, but it's a little annoying. On the plus side, from every other angle they two fairings blend symmetrically and look very nice.

It's pretty exciting to see stuff like tis all coming together.

  Mar 23, 2024     Installed/rigged elevators - (16 hours)       Category: Empennage

16 hours for this? what the heck?!? But yeah, including troubleshooting, research and a side project for my hangar neighbor.

This week I tried to arrange my workflow so I'd always have something to do while waiting for epoxy to dry. So there was lots of stuff done in little chunks over several days, which is never the most efficient way for me to do something.

Anyway, I got the elevator tip/counterweight fairings done early in the week and kept coming back to this as the same time I was working on the rest of the fairings.

I started by permanently installing the trim servo in the l/h elevator. The wiring coming off of that is only a few inches long, so the builder is faced with a choice here;

Option 1 is to install a connector here from ships wiring. That has a couple of downsides. in order to remove/install the elevator, you would have to remove the servo which is not ideal for paint shop considerations. Plus in order to do that, you'd have to leave enough service loop in the wiring to actually get the servo out so you could reach the plug to disconnect it. This means you've got extra wire just flopping around in the elevator, crammed up in there with moving parts and adding weight in an elevator that's already close to being too tail heavy because of the servo and linkage in there, even with a full sized counterweight up front.

Option 2

Splice onto the servo wiring, extend the bundle under the empennage intersection fairing and add connector there, so that when you remove the elevator you don't have to remove the servo.

Ordinarily, I'm loath to splice a wire and then just add a connector a couple of feet away, but in this case it makes sense, especially since I know this has to come back apart right after phase one for paint, so I went with option 2.

I spliced a length of 5 conductor trim wire onto the servo by means of d-sub pins covered in heat shrink. Environmental butt splices would have been my first choice back here but even though raychem says that their red ones are good down to 26 gauge wire, I've never had good luck getting them to crimp tight enough. there just isn't enough conductor for them to squeeze down on unless you fold it back on itself. plus they're pretty bulky and heavy for this application.

Also, by using d-subs back here if the servo ever goes bad, I have the option of feeding the wire back into the elevator far enough that I can get the servo out and un-pin it back there without taking the elevator off, I have a lot of faith in d-sub pins when it comes to crimping stuff on wire this tiny and consider this is a "semi-permanent" splice.

I covered my new wire with snakeskin chafe protection, fed it out of the elevator and taped it out of the way while I was installing and rigging the elevators.

I had previously adjusted the elevator heim joints and had everything rigged properly in the garage. The r/h elevator was still dead nuts on. It swung freely and when you let go it flopped nose down as expected. The l/h one, even though all the rig pins went in and it swung okay, seemed a little stiff. I could easily move it with light fingertip pressure, but once I stopped, it stopped. It didn't continue on to its nose down position as I would have expected. I added a couple of washers under the nut on the inboard lead counterweight attach screw to ensure the mass balance is indeed nose heavy and also did some experimenting with removing different rig pins which revealed that the inboard heim joint needed another 1/2 turn to get it truly in line so that the elevator moves through it's whole range. i.e. light fingertip pressure to get it going, almost no friction, and a natural tendency to swing nose down.

note- in the final configuration, they are supposed to be statically balanced. i.e. when not attached to anything, including each other, they should hang level, not nose heavy or tail heavy. However, a bit of nose heavy isn't really going to hurt anything other than aerodynamic efficiency. In fact the build manual tells you to leave them a bit nose heavy until paint because paint will add weight aft of the balance point, then achieve static balance by drilling holes in the lead to balance them afterward. What you want to avoid at all costs is having them tail heavy, which can lead to aerodynamic flutter and catastrophic structural failure in flight. This is the reason for the big lead counterweights in the first place.

Anyway, the l/h one was good, then it wasn't. I can surmise that the reason for this was when I did SB-00036 REV 3, it has you add a doubler to the aft face of the aft h/s spar and replace the steel hinge parts with new ones that are dimensioned with the holes relocated the thickness of the doubler, which without looking it up, I seem to remember being .060". Vans machining precision is good, but it's easy to see how something could have gotten off by a teeny amount with changing all that out. Especially when you consider that the 1/2 turn adjustment that was required to bring it all back in line equated to a difference of only about .020". Certainly not enough to precisely identify with the naked eye when sighting down a row of 3/16" holes.

Later during rigging, I noted that the required washer stackup at the center bearing changed as well by the thickness of I believe one washer. I took pictures and included them below for future reference, but what I ended up with in addition to the big washer next to the bearing was two regular washers on the left and a regular washer and thin washer on the right

Once I was sure everything was set correctly, I pulled the elevators back off, torqued down the heim joint jamb nuts to 80 "/lbs with a crows foot, and reinstalled with appropriate hardware.

I noted that with the AN3-7A bolts called out, there was barely 1 thread showing past the lock nut. While this is the minimum allowable for a fiber lock nut, it seemed kind of odd, so I investigated more closely. Normally, an AN bolt is supposed to have the non threaded shank just barely protruding through whatever you're bolting up, and you take upon that space with washer. In this case, The -7 bolt was just about 1 thread too short.

No problem. I'll replace with a -8 bolt....Wait, why can't I find any AN3-8A bolts in my stash? I check online and don't see any at Spruce either.

The next day, I swing by work and mention that Spruce doesn't have these and when Airparts opens I'm going to give them a call and see if they have them. Out of curiosity we look in the crib which has every piece of hardware in the universe. Turns out we stock up to -7A, then skip to -10A, just like Spruce. Shop Manager/IA is now curious as well. He gets into the company internal parts tracking system. Turns out that out of all of Cessna/Beechcraft/Hawker/Textron Aviation, the only place AN3-8A bolts are used is in a now defunct Hawker product that was designed back when the Brits owned Hawker. The listed supplier is Textron Specialty Fasteners. There is a lead time and they cost about $20 a pop.

Second IA is hanging out so he starts looking online out of curiosity and discovers the almost complete non-existence of AN3-8A bolts. At this point, including me there are now 5 A&P's in the room, 2 of them IA's, and none of us realized that we've evidently never seen or used that particular bolt for anything.

So, the options are to either to go up to a AN3-10A and start stacking up washers, or do what Vans obviously intended and what 12,000 other RV builders have evidently done, and just use the hardware called out on the print.

Armed with this knowledge, I went back to the AN3-7A that's called out. I did use a thin washer here just to give myself an extra thread through the lock nut.

With that resolved, I rigged everything up and confirmed elevator travel with a digital inclinometer. The average numbers I got from taking repeated readings at different points span wise was 27 up and 25 down. This falls within spec.

I then returned to the trim installation. I installed a d-sub connector on the aft deck to join the ships side wiring to the trim servo. Followed up by routing/securing so that there was a good service loop on both sides as well as free wire to allow for elevator movement while still insuring that there was zero chance for anything to come loose and get tangled in the flight control rigging. A jammed flight control is my own personal phobia and I've taken great care on this airplane top make sure there isn't even a remote possibility of something coming loose and getting tangled up.

In order to do this, I needed to add a couple of wire tie mounts. The adhesive backing on these is just 3M double stick tape and while it sticks great, sooner of later it always fails, so I typically scrape that stuff off and glue them on with E6000 or something. In this case, the front one is glued on with RTV, with a healthy smear front and back to give the bundle some chafe protection against the spar. The aft one that you can see on the aft deck just in front of the aft h/s spar is somewhat critical in that if it comes loose, the wire bundle would be free enough back there that elevator movement could cause it to rub on stuff. With that in mind, I installed it to the aft deck with a pop rivet. It ain't going anywhere and now I have full elevator range of motion with no chance of anything rubbing, a nice gentle radius for the wire bundle to flex through.

With that done, I wanted to ops check the trim, and while it worked as expected with the hat switch, I couldn't remember how to get the indicator to show up on the G3X. I spent the next hour on VAF and the Garmin manual trying to figure it out before I almost accidentally stumbled on the correct field to touch to get into the calibration menu and set that up. In the end, all is well.

Since everything is effectively done back there, I decided to install the empennage intersection faring. I was just finishing that up when my hangar neighbor Ron Hart popped in looking for some help weighing his RV6A. He had just finished installing a full Dynon panel and needed a new W&B to wrap up his condition inspection.

I don't know that I've done a full weight and balance since A&P school, but it was a fun side project that took about 90 minutes or so and refreshed my memory about how that actually gets done, plus I got to hang out and talk airplanes with a new friend. Met his wife and also the A&P who's signing off his Condition inspection, who invited me to use his aircraft jacks when it comes time to get my plane back up in the air to align the gear leg farings, Bonus!

  Mar 23, 2024     and even more empennage fairings - (20 hours)       Category: Empennage

Fiberglass requires a different kind of workday structure. You have to be willing to spend hours and hours prepping, masking, applying, and waiting for the stuff to dry, only to sand 90% of it off and then go back with round 2 and 3 to fill in mistakes, low spots, whatever.

So tis week has had a lot of that. In the down time waiting for stuff to cure I occupied myself with various small tasks like working on instrument panel placard templates, dimpling holes in the empennage, rigging elevators, stuff like that.

I'll do a different entry for those things, but thats why you may notice 2 or 3 different entries all on the same date. There really wasn't much value in posting something that just says "sanded for two hours today"

In some of the pictures below, the fiberglass is obviously not finished to a showroom quality paint job. The intent here is to have it structurally sound and aerodynamically smooth, with scratches and pinholes taken care of and a coat of cheap primer applied to protect it from u.v. and other random environmental stuff while I'm in flight test. Thats why you'll see obvious tape edge lines in the primer on the elevator counterbalance tips, for example.

Anyway, over the past week in the fiberglass efforts I finished the empennage tips. You may recall from a previous entry that I had used foam plugs as part of the process. On the h/s tips, once I disolved the foam out I had to fillet some flox into the back side to give the structural bond some depth. By the time I did the v/s tip, I had realized that I could cut that fillet space into the foam plug and just fill it in from the front as part of the initial layup. This eliminates a step and saves quite a bit of time so I'm detailing it here in case anyone stumbles across this in the future.

I also finished the empennage intersection fairing to an airworthy state. What I mean by that is that finished adding back in the 1/2"-3/4" that I had mistakenly cut to short along the front edge (don't cut to the scribe line!), sanded it all smooth, and applied a coat of hi build primer to protect it from u.v. It's fitting pretty well and I'll fly it that way and then let the painter do his thing to make it perfect.

While in fiberglass mode, I also attacked something that's been bothering me for a while. I've seen lots of flying RV's where the trailing edge of the wingtip extends about 1/4" or so aft of the trailing edge of the aileron. Fine from an aerodynamic standpoint, but I just find it annoying that you work so hard on something and it visually just doesn't line up.

The obvious fix for this is to fly it, make sure you don't have to squash an aileron to account for a heavy wing, and then once the ailerons are 100% for sure where they're supposed to be, mark the tips with a straight edge and trim them to match the rest of the wing trailing edge.

The problem with this plan is that where the top and bottom of the wingtips meet at the trailing edge, it's a very acute angle. Vans has dealt with this by building up a structural fillet in there thats presumably flox or something, which is only about 3/8" front to back. If you cut off a bit of the trailing edge, you're going to cut into that structural bond, reduce it's footprint to the top and bottom surface, etc.

I thought about is for a while, and debated whether to just live with it as so many others have, but ultimately decided it was probably worth the effort to at least give myself the option of fixing it before paint without having to take a bunch of stuff apart.

Not a lot of pictures of the process, but I removed the wingtips, which were just clecoed on, cleaned out the trailing edge joint plus scuffed it up to give new epoxy something to adhere to. Because ether angle is so acute, access is limited and there were lots of sandpaper on a ruler/scotchbrite on a coat hangar wire in a drill motor/acetone rag on a stick type operations.

Once prep was done, I stood them up vertically with the trailing edge down, taped off the open inboard end, and poured the trailing edge full of a layer of epoxy/flox about 1/2" deep. I then topped it off with a ply or two of strategically placed 8oz cloth which adds ears that bond to the inner upper and lower tip surfaces in areas where I was able to reach with more conventional prep methods, so I'm 100% confident that if the bond between new epoxy and 17 year old wingtips ever breaks loose down in the pointy tip, the whole thing is bonded in at least a couple of places over a wider surface area and is physically too big to slide inboard and interfere with the ailerons.

This now gives me the option of cutting down these trailing edges to match the ailerons while still having lots of structural element in the trailing edge.

I have found that a big part of fiberglass efficiency is planning your work flow into a logical sequence. One of my wingtips had been banged into something before I bough it and had a chunk broken off the corner, so I did the inside of that one first, then the next day I cleaned up the broken corner, drilled a couple of #30 holed through it into the new epoxy on the inside, then when I was applying flox to the inside of the second wingtip, I was able to use the dregs from that batch to build back up the damaged area on the outside of this tip with a flox mixture that penetrated all the way through into the new stuff thats as laid up the day before.

  Mar 16, 2024     continued empennage fairings - (10 hours)       Category: Empennage

Pulled the HS tips off and sanded them more of less flat with a 1/4 sheet vibrating sander with 60 grit. Then trial fit everything back together with clecoes and measured to make sure I was in the ballpark of the specified 1/8" gap between teh elevator counterweight horns and the h/s tips.

Once I was happy with everything, I sanded the hardened flox to about 1/32-1/16 below the surface and them filled it back in with a skim coat of micro epoxy. Tip- Flox is harder than nails. If you try to hand sand that stuff it will take all day. since in this case I just needed it to be slightly concave, but not really precise, I sanded it down with a small flapper disk on a dremmel tool.

It seems like I could combine a coupe of steps here, so when I did teh V/S tip I did it a bit differently. I formed teh plug with a built in chamfer for flox so that if everything when were it was supposed to with no voids I wont need second step of additional plies on the inside once I melt the foam out.

Because of the shape of the foam plug, I was able to lay bead of flox about 3/8" deep recessed from the face. I them imbedded 4-5 plied of scrap glass I the flox on the face of the foam plus, taking care to ensure it was imbedded in the fillets/beads at the perimeter. The glass was literally just what I had laying in my scrap box and varied from 4oz to 10 oz. Because of the way I'm making this, they are just flat plies so literally anything would have worked here.

After that, I skimmed in a top layer of micro and set it aside to dry along with the h/s tips.

The elevator balance weight closeouts appeared that they were going o work, So I went ahead and riveted the tips to the elevators. The holes for this are pre drilled in the elevator skins and you just have to match drill the fiberglass. which I has already done, but I discovered that the two aft rivets are so close together taht after you get they first one in, teh tail prevents you from getting tiger opposite one inserted far enough to pull it.

Fortunately teh CS4 rivets that are called out have a huge grip range. I reasoned that they were actually longer than needed for the grip thats required in this application, and a bit of testing and experimentation proved that to be true. I was able to know the mandrel out of one shorten it about 1/16" on the 3M wheel, then reinstall the mandrel. That made it short enough to mostly seat in the hole. As I pulled it, I was able to seat it before it swelled enough to lock in the hole.

Once that was assured, I did a top coat of epoxy micro on those as well and will come back and sand this all at once. I spent some Tim after working on the rudder caps. The top cap is fitting pretty ell, but it's about 1/4" too short on the trailing edge. I know it would fly fine that way, but it's right at eye level when you walk around the airplane and it's just not aesthetically pleasing.

I think my choices are going to be building this up and making it longer, or maybe just going with the gray gelcoat tips in this one area because I know that it's a bit longer. Will think on this on Monday.

  Mar 13, 2024     empennage tip fairings - (11 hours)       Category: Empennage

I had the old but never used white fairings from the old empennage I got with my wings back in the day. These are 2007 vintage white gel coat instead of the gray ones that Vans currently ships, although they are the same part number.

They're quite a bit thinner layups than the gray ones, so a little less robust, but I weighed them on my postal scale this morning and discovered that cumulatively, they are a bit more than 7 oz lighter than the comparable ship set of gray ones. Save half a pound of the tail of the airplane? heck yeah! Thats the c.g. equivalent of deleting about 120 inch lbs off the aft c.g.

So after that revelation, I fit and started closing out the V.S. tips. I cut foam plugs, recessed them about .25" into the tips and filled in the recess with a couple of layers of fiberglass for a base and then slathered in an epoxy/flox mixture thickened with cabosil to make it peanut butter consistency. I protected the v.s. with waxed packing tape so I can get this apart again for finishing. Tomorrow I'll pop this out, and sand the plug flush. I'll then dissolve the foam with acetone and add a couple plies to the inside to make sure it stays put. One thing that would ruin your day real quick is if this came loose and jammed the elevators.

I then moved on to the the elevator tips. Task one was something I've been meaning to get to for a while, which was to install the trim motor in the left elevator. This seemed like a good day to knock this out so that the trim tab wasn't flopping around while I was manipulating the elevator while working on the fiberglass tip. No surprises here, other than it seemed like at full extension the pushrod might rub on the slot where it passes through the skin, so I lengthened the slot about 1/2" with a chainsaw file. There's a big doubler on the back side of this area so as long as you don't get into a rivet edge distance problem you have some liberty in this area.

The number 24 wires coming off the servo are too small to use most "normal" splices here, so I used high density d-sub pins covered in heat shrink and covered the wire in abrasion sleeve (snakeskin) These pins are only semi-permanent in that you can shave the heat shrink off of them and get it all apart again if the servo ever needs to be replaced, but the plan is to run the other end of that wire into the tailcone where it will connect to a normal d-sub connector. If the elevator ever needs to come off you can unplug it under the empennage fairing rather than having to remove the trim motor and fiddle with it down there.

One that was done, I started working on the tips. I trimmed and match drilled the white tip fairings then just eyeballed what made sense for closing out the forward end.

I shaved down the lead counterweights so that they were recessed all around what I envisioned the tip profile to be by about 1/16" on the front face and a bit more around the inner radius of the fiberglass. I did all this shaping with a coarse file and checked often to make sure I wasn't removing too much lead and that they were still nose heavy.

Once I was happy with everything, I prepped the inner face of the fiberglass tip by coarse sanding it to give the epoxy something to bite into, then mixed up some thick epoxy/flox and slathered a generous coat onto the sides of the lead counterweight and installed the fiberglass onto it so I have a thick buildup between the two.

I had already cut a couple of layers of cloth slightly larger than the face of the counterweight, so now I installed these as a wet layup and tucked the edges into the previously buttered edge gap with a popsicle stick and then finished off by covering the whole thing with more flox/epoxy.

The idea is that the entire tip including counterweight is now all bonded together. Once it dries, I can sand it down to final shape and have lots of thickness left due to my previous shaping of the counterweight.

once this is sanded to more or less final shape I may decide to cover the whole thing with another ply on the outside just for added insurance, but I don't see how it can go anywhere. If something cracks loose at some point in the far distant future it still can't go anywhere due to the squeeze out aft of counterweight.

It was a long day in the shop, yet somehow I neglected to take many pictures of the process. Hopefully this description might help somebody in the future.

  Mar 12, 2024     Empennage intersection fairings continued- & permanently installed VS & HS - (16 hours)       Category: Empennage

Over the last couple of days I've continued to plug away at this. Once I had the upper empennage faring fitting pretty well I moved on to the lower closeouts.

The way vans suggests you do these is to trim them to a 1/4" gap, then fill the gap with a piece of weatherstrip then tap the holes in the longerons and attach them with #6 screws. Way back during the initial empennage fit in the garage, I had blindly followed this process. When I trial fit them a few days ago I didn't like the way the weatherstrip fit and I certainly didn't like the way it looked. Just clunky. Because of the taildragger stance you can see it from anywhere in front of the airplane.

I went back to the print to refresh my memory and confirmed that there's a note which says you can skip the weatherstrip if you keep the gap to 1/32-1/16". I remade the closeouts out of scrap and spent quite a bit of time trimming the mating edge to conform to the lower skin of the H/S and they came out much better. I've got the bare minimum allowable gap here. At some point after flight test, I may lay bead of B2 in here to fill in the slight gap. That should be worth .01 knots of drag :)

I also elected to only tap two locations common to the aft inspection panel. I don't see why these should ever have to come off again, so I primed both mating faces and attached them with CS4 pop rivets. Quite a few people on VAF have done the same thing and have many years in service with no regrets.

On the aft lower corner of the upper fairing, you are supposed to drill out a rivet common to the fwd face of the aft double bulkhead and longeron and once again tap for a #6 machine screw. A thought on this; Standard practice says you don't cut fine threads in aluminum. because it's such a soft metal it's too easy to pull them out. I don't know why vans suggests this other than that it keeps the hardware callout simple.

I looked at this for a bit and after some careful measuring, determined that I had room to install a single leg nut plate through the skin just aft of the end of the longeron. I taped them in place and installed the rudder to make sure there was going to be room in there and that nothing would rub before I committed to drilling the holes.

The skin back there is only .025, but you have just (barely) enough thickness to countersink it for oops rivets to attach the nut plate without knife edging it, as you can see in the magnified picture of my test piece below.

This took longer than it should have, but I'm happy with how it turned out. The closeout strips are riveted on, there are only two tapped screws (at the top of the inspection panel) and the aft ends of the upper are secured where they won't be flopping around.

I installed nutplates for the upper empennage fairing, then permanently attached the vertical and horizontal with properly torqued hardware. Note- Looking at the forward H/S attach points with a mirror, it seemed like the bolts were a little long. I ended up adding a second washer to ensure The nut wasn't bottoming out on the shoulder of the bolt prior to achieving the correct torque.

I wrapped up the day by spending about about 4 hours today looking for the elevator and H/S fiberglass tips. I tossed the hangar twice, then drove home and looked all over the garage and basement, then back to the hangar in case I missed them. Gave up and cleaned the shop for a bit before coming home for the day, gave the garage one more look see and finally found them in a Tupperware tub that had gotten shoved behind a dog crate sometime in the last 2 years.

fitting of these will start tomorrow.

  Mar 04, 2024     worked on empennage fairing - (4 hours)       Category: Empennage

After laying this up a day or two ago I popped it off the airplane and laced into it with a sanding block. 4 hours later, teh leading edge is looking pretty good.

The sharpie line in the first picture represents the minimum trim line this is where I should have trimmed this to in the first place before I cut off too much.

In the second and third pictures, I laid out some reference lines to get the general shape symmetrical. You have a lot of leeway on the actual shape up here, but if it's not the same on both sides it would be really noticeable. I just used the two rolls of tape you can see in the background to make the radiuses.

It's not done yet, but as you can see in picture for, its coming together nicely.

  Mar 02, 2024     fairing work - (12 hours)       Category: Empennage

When I originally started fitting the empennage fairing I made the rookie mistake of trimming it to the scribe lines and it was about 3/16" too short on the leading edge. Everybody says that these fit horribly anyway, so when I ordered the intersection fairings from fairings etc I ordered their aftermarket empennage fairing as well.

Unfortunately, the fit on it isn't great either. It has significant gaps around both the vertical and the tailcone that I think can only be alleviated by splitting it down the middle and bringing the two halves closer together.

Since I'm going to have to do some fiberglass work anyway, I went back to the OEM fairing which is quite a bit smaller with tighter radiuses which I think look better, although this is just a personal preference.

I sanded a fillet to the leading edge and laid up an extension of fiberglass and flox. Once this dries, I'll pop it off the fuselage, sand it smooth and trim it to get back the 3/16 or so that I erroneously cut off. It's actually fitting pretty well everywhere else,

To finish this, I think I'll add a bit more of a wrap around where it meets the leading edge of the h/s and I may need a little filler to tighten up the gap around the fwd section of the vertical, but otherwise I think this is going to fit pretty well

  Mar 02, 2024     roll servo rigged - (4 hours)       Category: Controls

The Garmin g3x manual calls has instructions that are important for this operation.
The heim jones on the pushrod must have .375 minimum thread engagement
The servo arm should be 90 degrees to the pushrod when the ailerons are centered
For best performance the angular travel of the arm should be maximized to the extent possible while still ensuring the ailerons hit their mechanical stops before the servo arm hits the over center stops integral to the face of the servo.

Taking these considerations in order; The pushrod doesn't have witness holes to indicate minimum thread engagement, so I measured them. The threaded portion is .75, so what this is saying is that they need to be 1/2 way screwed in at a minimum after their final adjustment.

I set them up to utilize the center hole of the lever arm as a starting point and with everything rigged I have exactly 1/2" thread engagement, or effectively twice the required minimum. With the jam nuts taking up another 1/8", theres no way that this can unscrew itself enough to become disengaged so this meets the standard aircraft convention for pushrods.

When run through the entire range of motion, the system is hitting the aileron hard stops before the servo lever touches the over center bracket with about 1/4" to spare. I believe I've got margin on both the over center bracket and pushrod thread engagement to move this to the outer servo lever hole for maximum travel per the Garmin instruction if the roll reaction is to twitchy, but this is set up sort of middle of the road right now and I'm going to try it out this way first.

  Feb 27, 2024     Aileron system review. - (8 hours) Category: Controls

I've spend the last couple of days tweaking with the aileron system.

I thought I had the aileron system pretty well rung out, but while I was under the right wing manipulating this back and forth, I noticed an ever so slight rubbing sound at full left aileron deflection. It sounded like a wire rubbing so I started with a visual inspection of the wire bundle where it went into the roll servo, but that was well secured and out of the way.

It took a while to chase this down, but eventually I discovered that at full deflection, the outboard right aileron hinge was just ever so slightly rubbing against a rivet tail on the aileron bracket. I changed teh washer stackup to move the aileron inboard the width of 1 washer, which is about .060 and that cleared the rubbing. I may give this another look later and see if I want to move both ailerons inboard another .060. That will leave me with about a 3/16 gap between the ailerons and flaps, while the plans call for .25.

That doesn't seem like enough to negatively affect anything and I sure don't want there to be any possibility whatsoever of the ailerons rubbing on anything. An alternative may be to make sure the offending rivet tail is set correctly and not sitting proud. I'll revisit this later.

  Feb 23, 2024     Installed and rigged ailerons - (9 hours)       Category: Controls

This was one of "those" days. Nothing bad happened, but nonetheless I felt like I was swimming upstream all day long.

I installed the H/S yesterday with bolts just snugged down but not torqued. When I got to the hangar this morning with the idea that I would install the vertical the same way and then start working on fitting the empennage fairings.

All of my flight controls are wrapped in blankets and stacked up in the hangar and the ailerons were on top of the vertical stab, so for no other reason than that I decided to mount and rig the ailerons first. I expected that its would take a couple of hours and then I would get on to the empennage.

Well first of all, I originally rigged these in the garage when I first mounted the wings. The bellcrank to aileron pushrods were the ones I inherited with the wing kit, and they had the rivet tails squashed over. I had rigged everything with them, but then I ordered and fabricated new ones.

Now I carefully measured the old ones, then took the helm joints off them to transfer over to the new ones. I then started hanging the left aileron, and realized that the piece of tape on the wing where I had sketched out the correct washer stackup had disappeared sometime in the last year and a half.

I was playing with this when my hangar neighbor Ron Hart came over and he helped me for a while. Eventually we got it figured out. After that one, I thought to check my build log online, and sure enough, I had captured that data in an entry with pictures, specifically so it would be easier to put this back together.

Based on that, it only took a few minutes to hang the next one.

I thought that I had the new pushrods the exact same length as the olds ones, but something wasn't right. When I pinned them with the stick straight and one aileron neutral, the other one was up about 1/4" at the trailing edge. Not cool.

I took the pushrods out again and decided to start from ground zero. I knew that the stick to bell crank pushrods hadn't changed, so I reasoned that if I fixed the bell crank in the proper neutral position with the rigging fixture I could then adjust teh smaller aileron pushrod correctly.

In trying to install the tooling fixture and small pushrod in the bell crank, I managed to drop the bolt. When it hit, I knew it was in trouble, because instead of the think that a bolt makes when it falls to its final home, this made more of a looney tunes sound o something bouncing around like. a plinko ball that going to end up who knows where.

I stuck my arm up to the shoulder in the wing feeling around in the various bays and didn't feel it, so out came the flashlight and mirror. No joy. Then the the camera on my phone from every conceivable angle. Where the heck is that thing??? I thought maybe it had fallen out of the wing after all and looked all around the floor, I even looked in my shirt pockets. I spent, no joke, over an hour looking for that freaking thing.

After all that, I finally discovered that it had bounced one bay over, ricocheted off of who knows what, and fallen down into the pitot mast. I was able to retrieve it with a magnet.

Once that was sorted, it was pretty easy to zero out the ailerons and then reinstall all the associated bushings, washers etc.

As far as control travel, I have the per print hard stops but somebody on VAF has pointed out that a 1" delrin washer/bushing over the aluminum bushing on the pushrod bracket attach at the aileron will land a little softer the it hits the stop. I had previously sorted these, and I installed them now as part of this rigging process.

What happens is that when the aileron goes up, this bushing hits the bearing support bracket slightly before the other leg of the aileron hinge bracket hits the hard stop riveted on the side of the same bearing support.

The hard stops are installed so that they will limit control travel very close to the max allowable throws (up 30* down 17*). while the delrin block pulls that back more toward the lower end of the range. After this was all together, I checked throws with a digital inclinometer and got an average of 26.6* up and about 15.5* down.

Torqued everything that I touched today as unless something unexpected comes up these won't need to come apart again.

Attis point, the only thing left on the aileron system is securing the pushrod bolt thru the bottom of the left stick (I was short one specialty washer and have ordered more from vans) and teh final length adjustment of the roll servo pushrod.

It's good to have all this done, but it sure seem slick it shouldn't have taken a full day to get it accomplished!

  Feb 21, 2024     Fuel sender wiring - (12 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Over the last couple of days I cleaned up some wiring including routing and securing the fuel sender wires and the wire bundles where they route laterally in front of the spar in close proximity to the fuel lines.

The capacitance fuel senders require power ground and sense wires, which are all in a shielded twisted triple, but in this instance the braided shield isn't utilized. The wire is routed through a standard outboard passthrough grommet in the fwd 1/2 of the spar box, then go outboard in front of the spar web.

I glued a strip of caterpillar grommet on the sharp skin edge, sleeved the wire in snakeskin abrasion protection, and of course it also has the braided sleeve under the insulation, so it's quite well protected from abrasion.

Where it makes the bend around the skin edge, it's held in place by a dab of RTV, then a couple of wire tie mounts glued to the skin with E6000. Even if the E6000 give out at some point in the future, it cant really flop around into anything important because in true belt and suspenders fashion, I also stood it off if the fuel vent line with a couple of adel clamps.

In the cabin, the wire runs that run laterally in front of the spars are segregated from the fuel lines by adel clamps. Per print and industry standard, the wire run are above the fuel lines, but when they get to the sides of the cockpit area you are forced to transition them lower because thats where the spar grommet is located.

This caused me some difficulty because I've got a lot of wires in these bundles plus pitot and AOA lines, all of which have to fit under kick panels but still have to be separated from the fuel lines.

I played with this for a while and tried a few different solutions before deciding that none of them were as bulletproof as just using adel clamps carefully positioned to firmly securing everything so that there was no chance of chafing against a fuel line or the kick panels that will eventually cover all this up.

You can't really tell in the pictures, but where the wire bundles cross over the fuel lines there is about 1/2" separation. This is the bare minimum for wires and fluid lines. It would have been a lot easier if vans had designed this differently, but at this point I've got this area rock solid with zero chance of anything getting together that shouldn't.

  Feb 20, 2024     tightened all fuel fittings - (3 hours)       Category: Fuel System

Some of the fuel line fittings were just finger tight as I positioned and finalized routings and wiring and so forth, so after I finish the fuel vent tank to fuselage plumbing I went back and put a wrench on every fitting to confirm that they were all tight. as I checked each one, I put a stripe of torque putty at that location to signify that it was tightened.

  Feb 15, 2024     Finished up fuel tank install - (5 hours)       Category: Fuel System

I safetied the fwd inboard fuel tank supports.

The bolts go into a nut plate that comes off the inboard tank rib. The shank of the bolt rests in a horizontal slot in the steel bracket coming off the fuselage. This bolt doesn't get torqued, just snugged down so that the washer will no longer turn.

The idea is that during a crash if the wing gets bent back, this structure will pull apart and not yank the end rib out of the fuel tank. But because if the way it's put together, it needs more safety than what's just provided by it sitting in a nut plate not properly torqued down.

The assembly print have you safety wire the head of the bolt, but really don't call out a specific dimension on where to drill the Hole for the safety wire to run through. I just followed standard industry convention with edge distance and so forth and ended up with a number 40 hole about 3/8" from the edge of that tab, which is gobs.

After that was done, I bent up a trial fuel vent line out of scrap to get the bends and leg lengths right.

Note that the assembly print calls for the fuel vent fittings at the wing root to be pointed forward and reflects a vent line routing up over the forward tank attach bracket because of that.

In my case, the brothers I bought the wings from had oriented those fittings down. If I followed the suggested routing, my fabricated lines would immediately have to do a u turn back up, then fwd to clear coming over the top off that bracket structure. Thats seems like a lot of additional bends and unplanned low spots for water collection and whatnot.

It's just a vent line, so as long as it doesn't get plugged or chaffed somewhere there isn't much that can go wrong here, but I spent quite a bit of time investigating this to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious.

Depending on whether you have aerobatic flop tube pickups or not, there are multiple suggested routings for both the fuel intake and vent lines. After reviewing what other folks have done, I elected to go under the forward tank attach bracket with a much simpler run than what would have been required to go over the top or through the bracket lightening hole.

It's her to tell in the pictures below, but there's about 1/2"-1" clearance between the vent line and anything else in there.

  Feb 14, 2024     nav lights etc. - (30 hours)       Category: Wings

Lots of stuff in the airplane factory over the last few days, but most of it was just small stuff.

Installed the aileron pushrods in the wings, but I'm short one specialty washer that goes in the stackup connecting them to the stick quadrant, so I had to order more from vans and will come back to that.

Pinned and connected the roll servo

Wired the VOR antenna in the r/h wingtip

Finished wiring the landing strobe and nav lights in the wingtips.

Other minor things that I'm sure I'm forgetting.

  Feb 08, 2024     landing lights - (8 hours)       Category: Lighting

Way back when I first started this project with purchased wings, I built landing light mounts and prepped them for the FlyLED setup. This week, I got that stuff off the shelf and actually got it installed.

With this setup, the wire attachment at the actual fixtures is kind of tight. Also the lights are too big to fit in through a lightening hole from behind. You pretty much have to feed them in through the leading edge cutout, then maneuver the mounting brackets in through the same hole, then mount the brackets, then attach the light boards to the brackets.

All that said to explain why I installed long leads from the light unit and put a plug in at the outboard wing rib.The leads have black snakeskin wire sleeve over them for some abrasion resistance and are secured so that they won't chafe as they snake through there. It's quite common to use molex connectors for stuff like this, but I was hoping for something a bit more moisture resistant so I've gone with Deutch wedge loc environmental connectors. While note truly waterproof, they have rubber gaskets at both the back shell and the mating surfaces. I left enough service loop at the wingtip that if they turn out to not be robust enough for this application I can replace them on down the road.

One set of wires has to come out of the face of the unit, so it goes up over the top of the bracket before it travels aft. I secured it with a blob of clear E1000 where it goes over the bracket so that vibration won't cut through.

The grounds for this are terminated locally at the outboard wing root via a -3 bolt through a tooling hole. After bond brushing this area I alodined it with a bonderite stick. On the L/H side the ground wire from the pitot heater terminates at the same bolt.

You never know what future upgrades may be available, but just in case, I upped the gauge of all these wires. Landing lights are 16 gauge for a 3 amp draw power side, taxi lights are a 18 gauge for a 1 amp draw per side. They come together in the floor under the pax seat so that 16 gauge wire is actually pulling 6 amps for about 6 feet, which is well below its capacity.

I tightened up all the wire routing under the floor as well, sir everything is permanently routed and secured in taht area unless something comes up that I haven't thought about

  Feb 07, 2024     Installed OAT probe - (4 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Installed and pulled the wiring for the OAT probe. Per instructions it needs to go in free air, out of direct sunlight, and out of the exhaust or prop slipstream. This sure looks like the same probe that goes on the G1000 Cessna and they violate that all sorts of ways by sticking it on top of the cabin. Then again, they can get away with putting comm antennas only about 18" apart up there as well, even though Garmin says they need to be 4' apart. It must be nice to have a legion of electrical engineers available when you're laying out an installation like that.

Anyway, I installed this probe under the left wing, aft of the fuel tank near the inboard inspection panel which should satisfy all these requirements. The wiring consisted of a shielded twisted was then pulled via wing conduit into the cabin where it jointed up with an already existing wire bundle run through the center tunnel and up the aft face of the firewall to a cannon plug listed in my interconnect drawing as Aux Connector 1.

I had to pull up the boost pump pallet from the tunnel so I could secure this wiring with the bundles that already ran under there, so that took a while. Not hard, just takes time.

I pulled the free end up out through the avionics access holes that Kris Holt had helped me get the covers un-stuck from a few days ago. Because I have that access, I was able to pin the wiring by standing next to the airplane, rather than having to lay under the panel, awesome!

Ops check indicated within a few degrees of what my apple phone was calling current OAT, as well as CHT and EGT so I believe this is good to go.

  Feb 02, 2024     Un-stuck fwd access panels - (4 hours) Category: Fuselage

Kris Holt popped by the hangar today. Kris is an IA/A&P and a field service engineer for Lycoming who I got to know when I did some pt 141 prog checks for him, and then took him over midstream to finish up his PPL training when his first instructor left for the airlines.

I Gare him the nickel tour of the project and we did a good bit of hangar flying, but honestly, not much else.

While he was available, I did have him help me get these panels off.

Basically, these fwd inspection panels allow for easy access into the area fwd of the sub-panel so you don't have to stand on your head to get to the avionics. Vans now makes an optional kit for these, and I had installed them back then.

Per instructions, you are supposed to make gaskets out of pro seal, then screw the covers on with a layer of kitchen Saran Wrap to act as a mold release.

I did that, let it set for like 3 days, then took it all apart and life was good until it wasn't. I put those panels back on and when I tried to get them off again they were absolutely stuck solid. I was using a SEM kit of B2 so I have no idea why, but evidently my pro seal wasn't completely set up and they had gotten solidly glued down.

Anyway, I got underneath they panel while Kris heated them up with a heat gun and we finally got them unstuck. This is somewhat important because unless you grow another elbow and a wrist that bends the other way, thats really the best decent access to things like the CO sniffer and the avionics forrest of tabs. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if we couldn't have gotten them up, but this sure makes life easier.

  Feb 01, 2024     finished pulling wing wiring - (7 hours)       Category: Wings

Got sidetracked with a small problem this morning. I powered up the avionics to ops check something and was greeted with a sea of red X's. Audio panel, Comm 2, all engine monitoring, all off line. Took a while to think through, but finally I realized the only thing I had been monkeying with thaw as even remotely related was when I pulled the roll servo wire bindle into the wing. That component is also on the CAN bus.

I realized I still had the ends of the CAN Bus wires shorting against each other where I had pulled that bundle and it was grounding outer CAN buss and rocking it' world.

I spread all those pins apart and cycled the avionics and that problem magically went away. I find it interesting that a problem with the CAN buss can wipe out that much stuff and thought that it might be worth mentioning here for future troubleshooting for myself or others who might come across this entry.

I pulled the camera wire from the r/h wing into the cabin. This was a huge hassle because I went in the wrong order. The video cable is tiny, but it has a plug on the end thats a bit bigger. My bundle of pulled wires had gotten big enough taht I couldn't get that plug through the bends between the wing conduit and the fuselage sides.

I screwed around with this for over an hour before I bit the bullet and pulled the VOR coax out of conduit so I could get the video cable pulled, then reinstalled the VOR coax.

I installed the camera on the inboard underwing panel with the idea that if the location looked good I might move it to an adjacent area of the wing and if it didn't I could just replace the panel and not have an extra hole in the bottom of the wing. The location looks like it will work nicely, but the wire connector is in the cabin and any time I move it I'll have to pull wire from the wing which would be kind of a hassle, so at least for now I'mm going to leave it there.

Moved on to the left wing and installed the OAT probe under the wing in approximately teh same location, but with no plans to relocate it I went through the skin just near enough the inbd access as to be convenient for attachment and wiring. I was able to pull the wiring into the cabin without issue.

I didn't get a picture of it installed, because Kris Holt showed up at the hangar to see the project. Kris is an A&P/IA that I just taught to fly. He's currently a field service rep for Lycoming, so I was looking forward to any insight he might have as to my engine installation. He offered to come back and give me a thorough once over when I was done, and while neither of us are expecting him to find anything, I'm going to take him up on it. I'm certainly not perfect and really believe that the more sets of eyes you get on something like this the better.

  Jan 31, 2024     Pulled wing wiring - (4 hours)       Category: Wings

I pulled all the wiring from the fuselage today. I'm all the maneuvering over the last couple of years, the strings I had planned to leave in the wing conduits for today got removed for whatever reason. So the first order of business today was to run a stiff wire through from the wingtip, then use that to pull a string back through. I then used that string to pull wires.

The hardest part of this operation is getting wiring started in the conduit from the fuselage side, because while you can see down in the wing root joint, it isn't big enough to get your hand down in there. None of the pass through grommets in the fuselage align with the conduit, so everything has a kind of S curve as it goes through that area.

I found that once I got wiring in the wing root area, I could reach in through the inboard inspection panel and get my fingertips on the end of the wire to get it started in the conduit. Once it was started, it was cake.

I debated with myself for a while about whether to run the archer antenna coax separate from everything else, but ultimately decided that I could move it later if this simplest solution results in some sort of interference.

At this point, while some stuff branches off mid span (autopilot bundle and pitot heat) and some stuff runs all the way to the tip, it all runs together through the corrugated conduit that was installed during wing construction,

Tomorrow I need to start terminating stuff to where it connects, and I also still need to pull the wires that terminate basically at the inboard inspection panel. which is the OAT probe on the left and the taxi camera on the right

I'll include a couple of pix just because, but they aren't very exciting. just wires hanging out of the wingtips at this point

  Jan 29, 2024     Pitot tube installed - (8 hours)       Category: Wings

After a cold few days we've gotten another warm spell! The highs this week are in the high 50's mid 60's so I've been spending afternoons at the hangar.

I got back to the pitot installation yesterday, but with people dropping by the hangar and having to drive up to B&C specialty for some black # 12 wire so that I can have a properly color coded ground wire, it's taken a couple of days to knock this out.

Note- the chart in 43.13 indicated to me that based on my estimated wire length I was going to be okay using 14 gauge wire for the pitot heater. But that was just an estimate. I didn't know exactly where I was going to ground it, and the ground leg will adds to the overall length, so I went with the nuclear option and bumped up to a #12 wire. I'll be the first to admit that's probably overkill, but that heater pulls more amps than just about anything else on the whole plane, and it gives me flexibility on how I wire it.

Anyway, I pulled the pitot and aoa lines and the pitot heater power wire from the cabin to where they terminate in the wings, and did a mock up of the aluminum lines coming off the pitot tube to see if I might need to trim anything off. As shipped, the aluminum lines off the pitot tube are pretty long and you can cut several inches off of them before you get to the minimum length that Garmin recommends before transitioning to nylon. I don't remember the specific numbers off hand, but they're in the manual.

I ended up cutting 2" off the lines to make them terminate in the middle of the wing bay, flared them and added fittings on the bench. All of that stuff will fit up through the pitot mast so you don't have to try to work on that stuff up inside the wing.

I made the electrical connections via knife splices covered in heat shrink. The way Garmin does this, if you're using this pitot tube in a 24 volt system you wire the hearing elements in series, and for a 12v system you wire them in parallel. This means you have 2 wires that look to be approx 18 gauge coming into one connector from the heater, connecting to one wire on the ship side (times 2)

There are several ways to accomplish this, but you can see in one of the pictures below that I used blue knife splices. Blues are typically used for 14-16 gauge wire, but the two smaller wires coming off the pitot nicely and it also surprisingly fit the 12 gauge wire coming from the ship side.

I was planning to ground this locally, but it was getting pretty crowded in that bay, so I ended up running it out the wing tip where I'll ground it to a common ground with the landing lights.



The way Garmin does this, if you're using this pitot tube in a 24 volt system you wire the hearing elements in series, and for a 12v system you wire them in parallel

  Jan 03, 2024     Pitot mast - (4 hours)       Category: Wings

Christmas break/family vacay is over, So I headed down to the hangar this afternoon to spend some quality time with the project.

I had held off on installing the pitot mast and pitot tube because of the possibility of hitting it and bending something while the wings were off the airplane, but a loooong time ago I had match drilled the mast to the internal wing structure and skin. It was a simple matter to cleo it into place. Before I riveted it on, I did some simulations of the plumbing with scrap tubing to make sure I could fit everything in there with appropriate bends etc.

The mast is riveted to the adjacent rib with two LP-3 rivets, and up through the skin with MK-319-BS rivets. The 3 rivets that are common to the spar flange are solid driven rivets because I didn't want to unnecessarily upsize the holes in the spar flange to 7/64" to accommodate the MK rivets. It took a bit of maneuvering to get my tungsten bucking bar in there but overall wasn't too challenging.

I had previously pulled the nylon pitot and aoa lines from the wing root and was planning to get the plumbing done today as well, but that didn't happen. I prepped the fittings that will transition between the aluminum tubes from the pitot tube to the nylon lines, and also marked the minimum length for the aluminum lines coming off the heated pitot (8" per Garmin) in case I need to trim them down. The way it comes, the longer tube is pitot and the shorter one is AOA, but I also wrote on them with sharpie just in case I cut them off and so they don't get crossed up during installation. Before going any further, decided to take a break for a cup of coffee.

At the line shack, I bumped into another airport tenant named Wayne who has a C150, and we were looking at an RV8 at the gas pumps when the owner showed up. It turned out to be a guy I knew back in the day at Cessna (Fred Leeper) who had popped in from his backyard strip a few mile away to fuel up. While we were talking, another old Cessna acquaintance showed up (Brian Van Dyke). Brian jumped ship years ago and is now flying a Lear for Koch out of ICT. I hadn't seen either one of those guys for probably 10-15 years and it was nice to catch up.

Brian hangars his Bonanza across the runway in Gary Drummond's hangar. Gary is another old acquaintance from Cessna Flight Test who has an RV8 on the field. I'm not sure how many Rv's are actually based down at K50, but it has to be at least 1/2 dozen. Really cool.

I asked Fred who he used for the AW inspection for his RV8 and he told me that he didn't use a DAR, but instead just went with the Wichita FSDO. The inspector he got was Rick Stevens. Fred told me that it was a straightforward process so I'll likely just do the same thing.

While we were catching up, Greg Thomas, one of the owners of the airport, rolled up with a reporter from the Wichita Business Journal who was doing a story on airport revitalization and general aviation. She wanted a couple of pictures of Fred's RV8 and ended up taking a couple of pictures of my hangar/airplane factory as well.

By the time all that was said and done, I was out of time, so that's how a 30 minute project turned into 4 hours.

I hadn't considered it before the move, but when I was in the garage, I could work uninterrupted all day long. Now that I'm at the airport, it seems like pretty much every day I'm meeting somebody new or bumping into old friends. It's not the most efficient way to build an airplane, but I'm really enjoying it, especially when I bump into somebody I used to work with but haven't seen for years.

  Dec 23, 2023     SB-00036 rev3 - (6 hours)       Category: Empennage

The Empennage has been done and on the shelf for a while now, and in that time, a new service bulletin was issued for the horizontal stab that addresses potential cracking of the aft spar at the outboard elevator hinge points.

This SB requires continual inspections for cracks and if you find them depending on severity you can install a doubler front and back or you may have to replace the spar.

If there are no cracks, you can eliminate the need for annual inspection, by preemptively installing the external doublers from the SB kit but in this case (no existing cracks) you don't need to add the internal ones.

The instructions call for drilling a 7/16" hole in the end rib, drilling the existing hinges and some skin rivets off, inspecting/sucking debris through the 7/16 hole, and reinstalling doublers and new steel hinge angles with Cherry rivets.

I know I don't have any cracks since this h/s has never been in service, so I elected to skip the 7/16 hole as well as the cherry max fix.

I drilled out enough skin rivets that I could get a tungsten bucking bar in there and after appropriate cleanup and deburring, shot the new parts on with conventional rivets, which is an alternate method of compliance. This h/s is brand new and unpainted, so it just made sense to me to do it this way and once I figured out how many rivets I needed to drill out it was probably just as fast and trying to built a ship in a bottle through a 7/16 hole and then mess around with lubricating Cherries and hoping I could get them to pull right with a hand puller.

This all went well, just a bit time consuming. The only thing I have left to do is ream out the center holes to take a hinge bolt. It's hard to get a picture but I sighted through the holes an they all line up. In one of the pictures below you can see that I shined a flashlight back toward the camera from the other end and you can sort of get the idea

  Dec 22, 2023     continued working on wings - (6 hours)       Category: Wings

I made a drift pin out of a hardware store bolt for teh aft spar bolt. This holes were reamed out vert precisely and I don't want to botch them up by trying to align everything by just cranking a bolt in there.

Access to the fwd side of that point is extremely limited, so I stared the bolts by maneuvering them in place with a pair of needle nose pliers. Not much else to say about that. 3 washers, a castle nut and a cotter pin per print. done with that step.

After that, I put the nuts on the NAS close tolerance bolts and torqued everything to spec, including the two AN bolts per side that go into nutplates on the spar web that Vans has a service letter about people missing.

Kriya swung by the hangar after work to see what I've been doing since I've moved everything down there, which was fun :)

I also pulled pitot and AOA lines from the fuselage through the left wing to the general vicinity of where the pitot mast will live, which took a while. I'll get back to that at a later date.

  Dec 21, 2023     Installed wings - (3 hours)       Category: Wings

My brother-in-law Nate came over to the hangar this afternoon to help reinstall the wings. He had helped with the initial install way back in the garage when I set the angle of incidence and rigged the flight controls.

It went well with no surprises. I sprayed down the mating faces and bolt holes with LPS-2, slid the left wing home, aligned with a couple of drift pins and tapped in the -7 bolts with a rubber mallet far enough to make sure that everything was aligned, then drove them home with some light taps from a rivet gun with a nylon tipped set. once they were all seated with nuts just on finger tight, we moved to the other side and repeated the process.

fyi- I'd frozen the hardware ahead of time and had it on ice packs in the hangar until moments before installation. We used to do this with gear trunnion bearings on the jets, but in this case I don't really think that it made any difference. they were still pretty tight.

Anyway, I'm going back to the hangar tomorrow and plan to get nuts on and torqued for these, as well as get the bolts through the aft spar. My hopes to finish up the permanent wing attach tasks and maybe even get the empennage on, so we'll see how that goes...

  Dec 19, 2023     Moved the airplane factory - (30 hours)       Category: Workshop

I've spent the last couple of weeks just moving stuff from the garage to the hangar, one jeep load at a time. Bought some shelves and some plastic bins for the big parts and tried to organize stuff where I could actually find it again.

I've had my Craftsman roll around toolbox since I started working at Cessna in 1996, but with all the air tools etc. I've had to break out for this project I had bough another cheap harbor freight box just for airplane specific stuff. At this point both of these were brimming over. I've been on the lookout for a bigger box for the hangar so I could consolidate all my airplane stuff and move my Craftsman back to the house.

Behold- the one toolbox to rule them all. A giant Kobalt box with about a zillion drawers and a built in stereo. Thanks facebook marketplace! I rented a trailer to get this and took the opportunity to move my air compressor, drill press tables and band saw same day.

let the airplane assembly begin.

  Dec 06, 2023     Moving day!!! - (10 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I'm counting this as 10 hours because I took a lot of time researching and scheming the best way to go about moving the fuselage the 10 miles or so to the hangar.

I know a lot of people have hired a roll on wrecker to do this, but was extremely uneasy with the idea of relinquishing control of my very expensive baby to somebody else. I explored the idea of using a car hauler trailer but soon discovered that for all the low ones with a dovetail, the inner fenders were only about 82" wide. My main gear to the outside of the axle nuts is 86".

I thought about loading it backward, but there was a pretty good chance that I might have to either crawl into the tailcone to remove a comm antenna or risk dragging it as I went up the ramps. I'd have to build a center ramp for the tail wheel as well as cover the heavy ribs on the main ramps with plywood because they're a ladder style made from spaced out angle iron for cars and skid steers and stuff. If I loaded it forward I'd have to devise some method of getting the mains past the fender wells. Compounding all these issues is the fact that without the wings and empennage on it's extremely nose heavy. Overall, I decided that there was just too much stuff to try to modify to make it work.

Keith Rea recommended Happy Hooker towing here in Wichita, so ultimately I choked back my inner control freak and gave them a call. They were very accommodating and it turns out they've moved quite a few airplanes.

The Driver, Durawn, was super cool and had it loaded up and secured in 20 minutes or so. He was able to drop the tilt bed within just a couple of inches of the garage door which was awesome because then we didn't have to worry about it running away down my sloped driveway. He pulled it up with the winch while I steered from the back with a tow bar. Even with that giant truck we only had about 8" or so of extra width outside of each main.

He had it offloaded at the hangar is about 10 minutes. Honestly, the thing that took the longest in the whole process was me doing a 16 point turn in the garage prior to him arriving in order to get it pointed in the right direction for rolling it up on the truck.

This move has been the single most stressful part of the whole project. I had visions of it falling off the truck or tipping over on its nose or something. This was made worse by the fact that Van's went into chapter 11 bankruptcy a couple days ago. Selfishly, I had the lingering thought that if I had some kind of oopsie it wouldn't just be a matter of rework, it might be months before I could hope to get replacement parts. I feel bad for having that concern because in the bigger picture, the entire community is on edge and VAF is full of people who are potentially losing thousands of dollars in deposits or even full payments for kits that haven't shipped yet.

Anyway, it all went smoothly with no problems at all. Now it's pretty much just a matter of putting all the big chunks together, pulling wires for the lights, final fiberglass on the tips, etc. etc. etc. Actually, now that I think about it, the list is pretty long, but it's all very exciting because each step is a finish step, not something that lead to the next in a never-ending series of baby steps. Yay!

  Dec 02, 2023     aileron tube boots - (1 hour)       Category: Fuselage

Hey, Thanksgiving happened! Had a good time here in Wichita with the in-laws, then drove down to Branson to visit family there.

A while back I bough an aileron pushrod boot kit from somebody on vaf. It's been setting on the shelf for a while yesterday I installed the flanges that go in the lightening holes in the fuselage. It took about 20 minutes to put these I'm going to hold off on the rest off the kit so it won't be in the way when I'm putting the wings back on.

I don't have much at all left to do before moving to the hangar, but we got 8" of snow here while we were gone and in Kansas they spray brine all over the roads prior to a snow forecast to anti-ice them. No way was I attempting to move the fuselage in that mess.

I've got a line on a rental trailer that's wide enough for the main gear to fit between the fenders and thankfully it rained a couple of days ago to wash that salty crap off the roads, so hopefully next week I can get the fuselage moved, although I have to say the idea of that is making me a bit nervous.

  Nov 19, 2023     Windscreen fairing done! - (20 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I spent a few more days finishing this up. Simple duplicolor rattle can hi-build primer to identify defects that you wouldn't otherwise see. Then a bit of glazing putty for a few pinholes that escaped the epoxy top coats. Wet sand, repeat.

I finally got this to a good contour and surface quality, so last night as soon as I could get some help tp position this without making a mess, I went ahead and permanently attache dit via the sikaflex process.

Yesterday was the perfect window for tis because it was 60% humidity and 65 degrees, with forecast for 3 days of rain starting last night. As you may recall, humidity is what causes sika to cure, so once you get it applied, the more humid the better.

Larry Larson mentioned in his Kitplane articles that he almost glued his canopy shut with this stuff. I've been been using clecoes in 4 strategically placed holes to position this consistently, during fabrication, so it seemed to me that there wasn't much benefit to trying to glue this on with the slider canopy closed.

I masked and prep sanded the faring with 60 grit, and masked and scuffed the windscreen and aluminum fwd skin with red scotch bright. Then prepped everything with sika aktivator and primer per the allowable time windows.

I only applied Sika 295UV to the airplane side, and then smeared it out to what I though was a thickness that would allow full coverage but not be so thick that it would cause problems with smooshing the fairing down more or less flush.

Sika recommends a certain gap to allow for expansion, so when I taped off the airplane to do my initial wet layups for this faring I had intentionally bridged the gap at the windshield base to leave a little gap there that I could fill up later with sika. Now I laid a thicker bead in there.

I estimate the thickness of sika that I ended with to be probably .25" at the intersecting line of the windscreen to fwd fuselage going, transitioning to maybe .010 at the edges.

I finished it off with a fillet all around to seal the edges, but due to some reshaping after removing the edge mask, I ended up with several areas that had to be corrected and trued up after it dried, so this morning I went back and accomplished that with nothing more than patience and my fingernails.

As we know, the 295UV won't stick well anywhere that primer isn't first applied, so I was able to get everything without drams, but it does soften that cheap rattle can primer, so I've got several spots on the fairing itself that should probably be hit with some scotch bright or wet sanded with 400 grit and touched dup to make it pretty, but ultimately, the stuff will all have to be done by the paint shop anyway, So I may just leave it for now.

Once everything is set up good and hard I'll have to go back and fill in the cleco holes, but for the most part this is done and I'm really, really, glad this is done.

  Nov 14, 2023     wheel pant fiberglass shims. - (3 hours)       Category: Landing Gear

Over the last week or so I've been working on the windshield fairing. Since that process requires lots of downtime waiting for epoxy to dry, I was looking for something else occupy myself with at the same time and decided to come back to the gear pants.

The way Van's has you do this is to match drill the pants to the attach brackets, then fill up the gaps with epoxy so when you tighten the screws down you don't end up with the pant craters around the attach points from cinching the screws down.

This sound good in theory, but its not exactly easy to get epoxy in that gap when the pants are installed. Honestly, I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure out a method for this on my own. Fortunately, I ran across a solution on somebody else's build log.

I covered the mounting brackets with packing tape and turtle wax for a mold release, making sure to cover the brake caliper and anything else I didn't want epoxy on. I then installed the wheel pants. I snugged down the axle bolt, but only installed the screws into the mounting brackets on the inboard side enough to hold the pants into position, but not so far that they started to close the gap and deform the wheel pants. I coated the nut plate threads and screws in boelube so as to make sure and not get them epoxied in place.

I had previously drilled extra holes around the screw holes so I could inject epoxy/flox into teh gap through the holes.

I mixed my epoxy/flox slurry as thick as I dared and injected it through the extra holes via a big livestock vaccination syringes from my local Atwood's farm supply.

Once that had dried, I took everything apart and ground down the extra epoxy that had oozed out past the flange edges.

I'm happy with how one side turned out, the other side not so much and will eventually redo it.

In fitting these, I also noticed that the aft tip of the right wheel pant seems to be sitting about 1/2 inch lower that the left. I don't know if this is just because the garage floor isn't exactly level or if I made a mistake somewhere when I was originally drilling the pants to the brackets. I also don't know if thats enough delta to even be noticeable either visually or aerodynamically on those teardrop shaped pressure recovery pants. I suspect the answer is no in both cases, but I'n going to ask around,. I'll also check this again when I get the wheels off the ground to fit the gear leg fairings the difference may disappear at that point.

I had pre

  Nov 14, 2023     windshield fairing continued - (20 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Over the last few days I've continued to plug away at the windscreen fairing. I've also been working on the wheel pants. More on that in a separate entry.

For the fairing- I mentioned in my last log entry that Keith Rea told me that his started about .10" thick aft the aft edge and he leaned on it and cracked it, necessitating a couple of more plies to fix it prior to paint.

Based on that input, as well as the fact that I had a lump where the side skirts nested at the aft lower corners, I decided to make mine a bit thicker. First, I applied a skim coat of micro everywhere. In order to get a better transition from the sides to the lumps at the aft corners, the micro was squeegeed into shape with a rigid piece of aluminum, rather that my typical flexible bondo squeegee.

In order to get the fwd radius right, I used a couple of different radius sanding blocks. The smaller radius in the center was accomplished by means of a sanding block simply made by wrapping a piece of 60 grit paper around stack of 3 rolls of 3m blue painters tape still in the cellophane wrapper. Specifically, this was about a 5" radius.

This transitions to a shallower radius where the windshield base starts to wrap around the fuselage sides was accomplished by using the curved back side of a hard rubber sanding block that I happened to have. I don't know the exact radius, but looking around the shop for something that might work, I happened on it and it seemed about right. I'd guess that its probably about a 10" radius.

I then applied another 2 layers of 7.5 oz Eglass, and another skim coat of extremely runny micro, just to give me something to sand without getting down into the glass.

One that had dried, and the edged were trimmed and sanded down to final size, I once again block sanded everything to get the fairing into its 100% final shape.

I then applied two coats of neat epoxy. Once that dries, I'll block sand one more time, then hopefully I'll be ready to slap a couple of coats of hi build primer on this and call it done.

  Nov 08, 2023     Windscreen fairing - (20 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I started this a few days ago, but when you work with fiberglass there is a lot of down time where you're waiting for epoxy to dry so you can sand most of it off and start over :)

Nothing new here, I laid out trim lines on yellow frog tape, covered everything with mylar packing tape and gave it a healthy dose of turtle wax as mold release insurance.

I then laid up multiple plies of 8.5 oz cloth taking care to include extra plies around the hoop. This area takes some abuse with the canopy sliding under it as well as potentially people grabbing that area to climb in and out. Vans print suggests you should shoot for a .080" thickness in this area and an overhang between 1/4"-1/2". I ended up with about .10" thickness and split the difference on the overhand and went with 3/8".

I gave this a skim coat of micro, then pulled it off the plane and rough cut to size with an abrasive disc in my dotco. after that, I crept up on the final dimension with 60 grit on a long sanding block.

I've got a few low spots in the fwd radius and I wasn't happy with the way the aft corners looked. They have to stick out a bit back there in order for the side skirts to nest under them when closed, and the lump that induces looked funny.

I added another skim coat of micro today and will attempt to get this to a more aesthetically pleasing shape tomorrow.

The part that goes from the aft corners fwd around the windshield base is only about .070" I originally reasoned that since the sika is holding the windshield on there's nothing structural about this it just needed to be thick enough to not have the paint crack over time, but I'm now rethinking.

Keith Rea told me today that his aft hoop was originally about .10" thick and he cracked it getting in and out during phase 1. He had to add a couple more plies before it went to paint. Based on that, and the fact that I'm trying to reshape this a bit, I think once I get a final shape I'm happy with I'll go with a minimum of one more ply over the whole thing. That will beef it up a bit and also encapsulate the micro layer.

To be continued!

  Oct 25, 2023     Stowed battery charger pigtail - (1 hour)       Category: Engine

I want to be able to plug in external power while doing software updates or a battery tender without un-cowling the plane. My EarthX specific charger/power supply came with alligator clips for the battery, but it also came with a fused pigtail that has ring terminals on the battery side and a capped connector on the other.

I had previously installed this pigtail so I could tinker with the electronics without running the battery down, so I made that installation semi permanent by securing the plug via adel clamp to an engine mount tube where I can hopefully access it through the oil filler door.

I know some people are okay with zip ties for this kind of thing, but I'm not one of those people. I'll use zip ties in not critical applications or where something more robust won't work because of access or weight or whatever, and I have a ton of them on my plane . In fact, I used one to secure the service loop on this pigtail. But, firewall forward nothing beats white adel clamps for security and long life. If you want to secure something in a high temp environment and never have to worry about it again, use a white or blue adel clamp.

At this point, I've lost track of how many of these things I've used firewall forward, but there are a bunch.

  Oct 25, 2023     More heat shields - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

Based on feedback on VAF I decided to try and make a couple of these in a more robust style and material. It's not wasted effort, because somebody also suggested I needed to install these on the l/h side to protect the fuel line and red cube area. I pulled up the RV14 plans and sure enough, on that plane they have a couple their standard aluminum heat shields on the exhaust tubes in that area.

So, I made a trip to my local Metal Supermarket for some stainless. The only alloy they had in stock in thin 24 gauge was 301 soft, so thats what I ended up with. While I was there, I had then shear it into some 3x3" and 3x3.5" chunks, as well as a couple of 1/2" wide strips to make the attach straps.

Today I fabricated these with two mounting straps on the wings rather than one in the middle. That was Dan Hortons suggestion. He also supplied quite a bit of data that indicated that teh finish held by aluminum over time would make it a better surface to reflect radiant heat away from the protected components, and that fiberfrax would be an added layer of defense.

With that in mind, I coated the inside surface of the stainless with aluminum speed tape for it's surface reflectivity properties, and then added a layer of 1/16" fiberfrax to the outside and encapsulated it with a layer of speed tape on that side as well.

I had already bagged and taped up my roll of fiberfrax when it occurred to me that it might be beneficial on the bare aluminum shields I had fabricated a few days ago. I had a piece about an inch wide left over and still available so I removed the aluminum shield under the engine and added a 1" wide strip down the center angle, which is the part closest to the throttle cable.

As it stands now, I have a simple aluminum shield with one mounting tab on the r/h side by the data plate, a similar one with a partial fiberfrax layer by the throttle cable, and two new and improved steel ones on the l/h side with two mounting tabs, a shiny aluminum layer on the reflective side, and a full fiberfrax blanket on the outer surface. It will be really interesting to see how these perform over time.

On a side note, I was deburring the stainless steel stock on a 3M abrasive wheel when the material caught and yanked out of my hand. I got a cut and a bruise on the side of my finger out of the deal. I know how sharp stainless can be. I should have been wearing leather gloves when working with it and/or holding it with pliers while against the grinding wheel. I've been working around machinery my whole life, stuff like this my whole life, you'd think I'd know better that that by now.

  Oct 24, 2023     Bled brakes - (3 hours) Category: Landing Gear

Serviced brakes with 5606 from the bottom up using a borrowed pressure pot. Basically the garden sprayer method. I replaced the cap on the Vans reservoir with a barbed brass fitting and a clear vinyl tube to a 16 oz water bottle. I started out with a very light pressure and slow flow to gently push the air bubbles in front of the fluid back up to the reservoir.

Lots of bubbles at first and I thought I got all the air out of the lines because I couldn't see any more bubbles in the translucent lines, and the clear vinyl line to the catch can, but the pedals were still soft.

I did both sides a second time, but this time I pumped the pressure up and shoved it through there at a rate that filled up the 16 oz bottle in about a minute. The higher velocity carried a bunch more bubbles out that were presumably hiding in the master cylinders and the pedals firmed up nicely.

I removed the barb fitting from the reservoir which was full to the brim at this point and pulled the level down to approx 1/4" below full per the instructions from matco then installed the vented cap.

I spilled a bit of fluid on the floor so after securing everything I rolled the plane forward and put oil dry on the floor, which I'll clean up tomorrow. I also washed off the tires where they had some fluid on them with soapy water.

I didn't take any pictures because there isn't really anything complicated about bleeding the brakes, just takes some time, especially if your doing it by yourself, and its a bit messy.

  Oct 21, 2023     Engine install wrap-up - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

Holy cow. I thought this day would never come, but as of yesterday, I think I'm essentially done with the engine system installations. The job that put it over the top? The 30 second job of drilling the weep hole at the lowest point of the snorkel, so that if rain water gets in there while I'm parked outside, it has a place to drip out so I don't hydrolock the engine.

I'm calling it 12 hours for this entry, but really I only spend a few minutes on this yesterday. The significant time was hours and hours that were accumulated a few minutes at a time over the last several months that just weren't significant enough on their own to warrant individual log entries. Things like adding a wire tie here or there, or re-clocking an adel clamp, looking on the internet to see how other repo;le have done something.

This time also includes a healthy bit of looking with a flashlight an mirror just to make sure that I haven't done something stupid and that stuff is in an airworthy condition.

At some point I'm going for ask for additional eyes on this because their are a ton of different complicated systems running every which way and it's easy to overlook stuff if you're too close to it by being the one who put it together. There are also a couple of details to be done when closer to first engine start, but I'm essentially ready to cowl it up until it gets to the airport.

  Oct 20, 2023     windscreen install continued/cowl brake line cleanup - (4 hours)       Category: Fuselage

It's been about 60 hours since I applied the sika, so I figured it was dry enough to come back and finish it. So, this morning I pulled the spacers out of the windshield frame. Per my test from a few days ago, installing them over dry primer was no problem at all, they slid right out with a little tug from a pair of needle nose pliers.

I the taped off the area again on both front and back, and reactivated the existing sika glue and primer with aktivator.

Interesting side note- This sika aktivator is $25 for a 1/2 pint bottle, and it smells like it's nothing more than denatured alcohol. I have no idea if you could use alcohol for this and save yourself 25 bucks, but I think I might experiment a bit with leftovers after this air all done.

At any rate, once I had all the appropriate areas smeared with aktivator, I waited the prescribed 10 minutes for it to flash off, then applied a generous bead of new sika.

My experience trying to use popsicle sticks at that base led me to just create the fillet on the forward side with my finger and many changes of rubber gloves. On the back side, I smoothed everything out with a bondo squeegee.

Tip- when I originally ordered my supplies for installing the canopy skirt, the 10 oz tubes of sika were back ordered, so I got enough 3.5 oz tubes to do that job. I had one left over and it's MUCH easier to get one of those up on the fwd side of the windscreen than a huge caulking gun

After that, I was looking around for something else to do, and decided to address an issue I noticed a while back.

I'm putting the lower cowl on by myself, and if you do it that way you cant help bumping it on the gear legs a bit as you get it in/out of position. It had cut through the fusion tape holding teh brake lines in that area as well as cause quite a few scratches in the upper gear leg powder coat.

I started looking at this to see what was actually hitting and came to the conclusion that it was the bottom end and/or rivet tail for the vertical cowl/firewall piano hinge. I think I could have eliminated this if I'd terminated that hinge probably 1 loop higher up.

I cleaned up the scratched area with scotch bright and alcohol, then touched it up just with a bit of white rustoleum applied with a model brush. To keep it from happening again, I applied a dab of clear E-6000 adhesive to the bottom edge of the piano hinge and the nearest rivet tail. That stuff dries to an RTV like rubbery consistency, and I think that it will cushion any sharp edges.

Also, the Vans plans calls for attaching the brake lines to the gear legs with nothing more complicated than electrical tape. I find this to be an extremely hillbilly design, but electrical tape is indeed pretty tough at least when it's new, so I reapplied fusion tape where it had been damaged, then applied a couple of wraps of electrical tape over it at each location.

  Oct 19, 2023     misc stuff - (6 hours)       Category: Propeller

Installed oil cooler Scat today. Fun fact, in the UK they call band clamps "Jubilee clamps". I happened on these surplus at the yard store about a year ago and bought them for I think probably $0.50 each. I'm gonna guess that they're surplus Hawker stock

I also got a discrepancy resolved thats been bothering me for a while. The RV14 plans and the Vans turntable view both show an extra brace between the starter and the alternator. That brace didn't come with my B&C alternator, so I threw it out there on VAF to see if it was really necessary. Somebody else on VAF was questioning the same thing and volunteered to run it to ground.

He ended up calling Vans, Lycoming, plane power and B&C. Long story short, plane power supplies it with their alternator as additional support against vibration etc. B&C says their alternator is balanced right and doesn't need it.

While I was looking up in that general area I went ahead and drilled the #19 weep hole in the low spot of the snorkel per print.

I also drilled, countersunk and installed the fwd cowl baffle strips, and just some general cleanup around the plane and shop. finished off by tidying up the sika edges around teh windscreen in preparation for filling in the gaps where teh spacers were and doing the final fillets tomorrow

  Oct 18, 2023     Exhaust heat shields/throttle cable fire sleeve - (5 hours)       Category: Engine

This took a bit of trial and error.

The issue is that where the throttle cable mounts to the oil sump, is only about 3/4" above an exhaust cross tube. I'm concerned about what the heat might do the guts of that cable over time. With that in mind, I split a piece of fire sleeve longways, sealed the raw edges and ends with RTV and then wrapped it over the throttle cable. I affixed it with several pieces of safety wire then sealed it up with a bead of RTV down the split and a dab on the end where oil might spill on it during a filter change. I couldn't really seal up the front end because it's butted up against the mounting bracket under the oil sump. I'm not concerned by this because I'm not shooting for fireproof here, just heat resistant.

I then fabricated a heat shield from aluminum scrap to go under it on the pipe itself.

If you look at the pix below, The angled plate of the shield is .020 2024-t3 scrap and the strap that's riveted to it with the band clamp under it is .032. The strap is offset because when installed, the shield spans an expansion join in the exhaust.

I goofed and made the first one too small, so I made a second longer one. The dimensions that worked ended up being 3" by 3.75". There isn't much room under there and I reasoned that it was probably better to have the shield relatively close to the pipe and a bigger air gap above it than the other way around, so the angles in the attach strap are such that the shield is about 3/16" above the surface of the pipe as installed.

Since I had the shorter one already made I put it on the exhaust pipe in front o the heater scat in the engine data plate area. That scat is already secured about 1" inboard of the exhaust so I don't think it's necessary to have it there, but I already had it, so I put it on.

That exhaust obviously gets really hot, but I think aluminum will hold up okay in the lower location because it's further downstream of the engine. The upper one is pretty close to the exhaust valve where the flow is the hottest so I'm not so sure about it.

I threw it out there on VAF for opinions and in any case will definitely keep an eye on it, but I may just get rid of that one entirely or make a new one for that location out of stainless steel if I can scrounge some up in an appropriate thickness.

Both of these are secured via stainless steel mil-spec band clamps. I would consider using hardware store band clamps for cabin ducts or something trivial like that, but in this environment, I'm going mil-spec.

Turned out nice.

  Oct 18, 2023     Prop Cable - (2 hours)       Category: Propeller

I refereed back to the RV14 plans for the hardware stackup at he prop governor, but this instructions are based on the hartzell governor. The bolt was too short, so I had to go a bit longer. The next longer drilled shank bolt I had was 2 sizes longer so I added a thick and thing washer under the head to get everything to line up.

The RV14 instructions have you install this bolt with the head inboard, but with the Jihistroj governor there's interference with the face of the governor and the only way to get it to fit that way would be to take the arm off the governor and put a bolt in, then re-install the governor.

I could have done that, but it seem like that bolt orientation is just a bad idea. If some how the nut cam off, the bolt could back out enough to get hung up against the face of the governor at stick the pitch at some random RPM setting. In this instance I'd rather have a failure mode where the bolt just falls out and the governor spring does its thing and goes to flat pitch.

Where the cable goes through the aft baffle, the hole is 1/2" so that the cable end can fit through it. The RV14 plans call for a -8 snap bushing to go in that hole, but that leaves a pretty big gap between the snap bushing and the 1/4" cable diameter. I split the -8 bushing and snapped it into place, then split and installed a -6 inside that one.

I then used a handy piece of scrap weed eater string th help keep the cable centered in the remaining gap and squirted it full of RTV. Once the RTV dried, I the pulled the weed eater string out. eezee peezee.

I butterflied a couple of adel clamps together where the cable crosses the engine mount tube to prevent rubbing there, while ensuring a bit of slack to account for the engine wiggling around.

At this point, I'm calling this task done.

  Oct 17, 2023     Heater Scat & Mag blast tubes - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

Swung by Airparts and picked up some scat tube and band clamps.

Once I got home, I mocked up the scat routing with leftover hose from the cabin vent installation because it's the same 2" diameter. I then ran a bead of RTV down the length of the scat sections to keep the exterior thread from unraveling. For future reference, my scat sections ended up being about 16" and 40"

While I was waiting for the RTV to dry, I moved ahead to installing the magneto blast tubes. Nothing special here. Took about an hour of playing with it to figure out the best routing with the least interference with other stuff. Had to move a couple of adel clamps, but no big deal.

Back to the scat tubes. Conventional wisdom says that with this type of heat muff, you typically get better heat transfer if your cold air in is further downstream on the exhaust with the air out to the cabin port upstream closer to the exhaust valve. In my case the position of the muff, all the stuff around it and the scat routing I'm using made it work out a lot neater to go the other way, so we'll see how that works out.

I built a band clamp out of .020 aluminum shim stock that you can see in the pictures below. It's secured to a high temp chemical resistant Adel clamp at the intake pipe for cylinder 3. Other that that, the entire scat run is just stuck with red RTV anywhere it might chafe. By careful positioning, it's secured where it shouldn't rub anywhere, and has about an inch minimum of clearance in every direction where it threads through the engine mount.

The only potential interference I have anywhere is where it touches the end of the dogleg brace coming off the alternator. Once the alternator is on and tensioned I can put a dab of RTV on there if it's rubbing. Alternately, I think Vans has a metal elbow that will fit the heater muff. I might get a couple of those which would allow me to shorten up both these scat tubes a bit and clock the fwd one differently to get it away from that alternator bracket entirely.

  Oct 16, 2023     Glued in Windscreen - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Jeez this is a messy job. But nothing really new about this process. as far as masking and prep I basically just followed the steps in Larry Larson's kit planes articles again

I slid the canopy closed and positioned the windscreen so the aft edge was flush with they leading edge of the canopy. In order to do this, I used pieces of split hose spacers and small aluminum tabs & clecoes. Oops! When I riveted on the forward skin, I forgot that I was using two existing holes for these tabs and accidentally riveted them, so in order use the center two tabs/clecos I had to drill out those two rivets.

Once I was happy with how it was laying, I marked the location of the spacers on the fwd edge of the canopy, because any marks on the windshield bow would be lost during the Sika prep process.

I took it all apart again and I scuffed all the mating surfaces with red scotchbright, then followed the application steps for activator and primer. Note- I wanted to prime the entire roll bar at once, but was unsure if the vinyl tube spacers would stick to the primer one it flashed off, so I did a test piece and using scrap and it was no problem at all, so I did the entire roll bar.

Since I was working by myself, I figured that trying to lay down a bead of sika and then drop the windscreen down on it would lead to a big mess. Instead, I positioned the plexiglass dry, briefly slid the canopy closed and positioned the hose spacers per the marks I had previously made on the canopy leading edge.

I then clamped everything in place and applied the Sika glue. Since I now had a bunch of spring clamps holding it in position at the roll bar, I was able to remove a few clecoes at a time without it shifting significantly and raise up the fwd edge enough to lay a bead in there little bit at a time. I worked my way around the whole lower edge that way, then squirted a bead into the aft edge, skipping the area where the hose spacers and spring clamps were holding it.

On the inside base at the fwd edge of the glare shield, I had envisioned smoothing a nice radius with a popsicle stick, but the ergonomics of that just didn't work out well for me, so after a couple of false starts, I just used my gloved finger. I got a pretty good result, but also got some smears and drizzles of sika where I don't want them. fortunately, one that stuff dries you can peel it off anywhere there isn't a primer base for it to stick to.

I'll give this a few days to get good and hard, then come back and fill in the areas where the spacers are, finish the fillets etc. and then clean up.

One other thing I might mention; The top center didn't really need any spacers, but I didn't want he plexiglass to be in direct contact with the roll bar. It just seems like thats probably one of the higher stress areas because of repetitively cinching down the canopy latch. Seemed like maybe a minimal space there might be desirable to give the joint a bit of ability to flex, so I used a piece of weed eater string as a spacer there for that purpose.

  Oct 12, 2023     canopy handle - (5 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Just to circle back to something I mentioned in my last log entry; After looking at this again, I determined that the reason the canopy is hard to open from outside is a result of two things.

When I fabricated the delrin blocks that the aft canopy frame pins nest into, I took a great deal of care to make that a very precise fit, on the assumption that the holes would wear a bit and loosen up over time. Also, when I'm lifting and tugging at the canopy lifting tab I installed on the aft l/h corner, it's pulling the canopy back and up as intended, but it's also shifting sideways a tiny bit and that motion is binding up the pins in the blocks.

I'm able to open the canopy by alternately pulling the. aft corners up and aft, but who wants to walk back and forth around their airplane 2 or 3 times just to get he canopy open, at least for a few hundred sequences until presumably everything loosens up?

So, after thinking all that through, I went to Lowes this morning and bought a brushed nickel cabinet pull that seemed like would suit the lines of the airplane.

You cant see the canopy frame from outside the canopy due to the sikaflex process, so step one of the installation was to center pilot holes from the inside. I started with #40 and gradually worked up to #21, but in spite of careful measuring and use of drill blocks, they were slightly misaligned and I needed to upside them to #10, which is a pretty sloppy fit for the #8 screw the handle takes. More on this in a bit.

I didn't want any stress on the plexiglass at all, so on the outside I upsized the holed in the plexiglass to .310 with a flat end reamer I had handy. This size is still small enough to be covered entirely by the footprint of the handle ends, but big enough to leave room for a bushing sleeve in there.

I went to my favorite aviation supply house (Ace Hardware), and changed out the cheap cabinet hardware for some stainless screws and washers. The length I needed was about 1 3/8" and the closest Ace had was 1.5". Once I got them home, I carefully shortened them on my bench disc sander a bit at a time until they were the appropriate length.

I fabricated bushings out of a scrap piece of aluminum tube that were long enough so that when the screws are tightened down from inside, the bushings bottom out on the steel frame approximately .020" before the handle feet touch the plexiglass.

I bent a couple of stainless fender washers via my bench vise to make them into saddle washers that conform to the round tube shape of the canopy frame, the better to center the screws in the slightly oversized holes.

Once everything was ready and a trial fit had shown that it all fit properly, I prepped the holes with sika activator and primer via q-tip then inserted the screws, slipped the bushings over the screws and seated them down in the .310 holes in the plexiglass. I then filled in the gap between the o.d. of the bushing and the i.d. of the hole with sikaflex, installed the handle and screwed everything down tight.

The sika primer is only on the inside of the holes, so once this is all dry, one of two things will happen; Chances are high that a bit of sika got inside those tiny bushings during assembly and if it is holding tight enough that I can't get those screws out. I'll call it good enough for government work and move on. However, If I can get the screws out I'll remove the saddle washers and screws, then fill the holes in the tube with epoxy flox and reinstall the screws with smaller washers.

Lots of work for a simple handle. If I had it to do over again, I could have saved myself a lot of work by just laying this out before I installed the canopy on the frame.

  Oct 11, 2023     Canopy skirt - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

With the super tracks mod, The canopy slides far enough aft that I could have installed the internal canopy braces without removing the canopy. The inside of the skirts had already been painted white in that area with a simple application of dupli-color rattle can white with that in mind. Unfortunately, you could see the sika squeeze out and a couple of areas where there was sika primer showing through the lightening holes along that lower edge.

I decided I didn't want to spend every flight looking at those globs through the lightening holes, so last night I pulled the canopy, flipped it over on a well padded shop bench, and cut/sanded off the globs.

Sika says that their stuff can be painted, and it's almost impossible to get the dried primer off without using aggressive "mechanical means" so I wasn't concerned about getting it all removed, just sanded to a cosmetically appealing profile so I could apply touchup paint.

I was afraid to use acetone that close to the plexiglass so after sanding the surface smooth, I wiped everything down with denatured alcohol. Either residue from that, or perhaps something in the sika primer, didn't agree with my rattle can krylon, because both sides popped up with worm tracks in several places.

I thought that maybe I just hadn't cleaned the surface well enough, so once it dried, I removed the crackled paint with a combination of sanding and scrubbing with scotchbright. then again scrubbed everything with alcohol. Darned if the same thing didn't happen again!

On round 3, I started with a light coat of duplicolor primer to seal the sika primer then top coated with krylon rattle can semi-gloss white and it finally came out nice.

The fiberglass skirt is so stiff I didn't see how it could have shifted so I decided to just go ahead and rivet on the canopy braces with this upside down and off the airplane. I first riveted the braces to the frame, then back drilled through the braces to the skirt for the lower rivets. I then countersunk and installed the rivets with a squeezer.

Prior to installing the skirt braces, the skirt fit was so good along the sides that I couldn't slide a piece of paper in the gap. The gap across the aft fuselage deck had started out the same, but after bonding it together last week I ended up with a gap back there of about 1/16". I attribute this to my applying the sika too thickly back there and not really having a way to pull it down and force more squeezout the way the clecoes did along both sides.

In retrospect, I think if I had wrapped a ratchet strap around the fuselage back there and cinched it down, I could have gotten this tighter in that area.

At any rate, I was gratified to see that once I had the skirt braces riveted on and the canopy re-installed, the fit hadn't changed a bit. The gap along the back isn't a big deal, it's symmetrical side to side so it looks like it should be there, and it's just about a perfect width for a piece of light weatherstripping/anti-chafe which will create a better draft seal that a tighter (but not airtight) fit of fiberglass laying against fuselage skin.

If you look at the pictures below, you can see that the upper rivet line still has copper clecos installed. I'm on the fence about whether to install rivets in this holes or just fill them in with epoxy. The Sika will hold that skirt on for eternity, but on the other hand, it's not like it's a lot of work to countersink and install some pop rivets. I can't really see a downside to it other than potentially teh paint popping off the rivet heads years on down the road.

I'm going to sleep on it and make a decision on that in a day or two.

The only other thing I'm thinking about is whether to add a pull handle in the aft center of the canopy. I added a pull tab on the right rear corner when I was putting this all together, but it turns out that when you pull on it, it pulls the canopy sideways and binds it up a bit. It's pretty hard to get the canopy open by pulling just on that one corner and I think it would be cake if I could pull and lift from the aft center.

I've looked at this on VAF and several guys have installed a chrome cabinet pull back there and it turned out really nicely. If I can figure out how to do this without running the risk of cracking the canopy I think I might go that route.

  Oct 10, 2023     EGT probes and wiring - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

I started this by reviewing the RV14 turntable pictures on Van's website to see if how they clocked these probes made sense for my configuration. I then reviewed the Vetterman documentation which states that ideally, EGT probes should be between 2"-2.5" from the exhaust flange.

I used a 2" section cut from a wire tie to mark around the circumference of the exhaust tubes. This measurement was taken from the lower face of the exhaust flange, which is 1/8" thick, so the reference marks measured 2 1/8" below the mating surface of the cyl exhaust port and the exhaust flange. Once I had determined how to clock them, I drilled a #30 hole this location.

Probes were mounted per the included instructions, including trimming the excess ends off the band clamps and seating the probes by alternately tightening the screw and tapping adjacent to the base of the probe with a wooden dowel rod and a light hammer.

The probes come with #4 ring terminals installed, so I crimped #4 rings on the ship side wires and connected them with the included hardware (stainless screws nuts and lock washers), then covered each pair of connections with the provided insulating sleeve.

I've never been a fan of this ring terminal/screw arrangement. It just seems prone to the connectors loosing up due to vibration. If I have a problem with this in the future I may cut these off and replace them with spade or knife connectors, or splurge on those fancy yellow connectors that Cessna uses. For now, since the rings are what came pre-installed on the probes, thats what I went with.

I had previously routed the CHT wiring behind the exhaust & intake tubes for a nice neat installation. It worked well to just add the EGT wiring to this bundle on the pilot side. On the co-pilot side, the clocking of the EGT probe for cyl #1 seemed like it made more sense to route the wiring on the outboard side of the pipes, below the valve covers. Plus, a while after doing the original routing I discovered that lots of people route the scat tube for cabin heat behind the pipes. That seems to make a lot of sense, so for those reasons I decided to undo that bundle and move all the sensor leads outboard.

People have sometimes reported fluctuating sensor readings if the sensor leads are routed in the same bundle as spark plug wires. In my case, the P-mag Spark plug wires aren't shielded, so this seems like it might be a consideration. Based on that, I routed all the leads adjacent to teh spark plug leads, but separated by means of standoffs and separate adel clamps.

After all this was wrapped up, I powered up the MFD and all sensors were indicating approximately ambient temperature, so everything appears to ops check good.

It feels good to check off another item on my punch list!

  Oct 08, 2023     ignition/spark plug leads - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

Before getting back into this, I spent quite a bit of time looking for examples of what other folks had done that I could shamelessly copy, but I really didn't find much that was applicable to my specific configuration. So, I'm going to try to be somewhat detailed in this entry with the hope being that it might help somebody else in the future.

A while back, I started this install, thinking I'd knock it out in a couple of hours. Turns out, like so much systems stuff on this airplane, there's a huge difference between a simple R&R job vs. figuring out from scratch what that install should look like.

Starting at the lower plugs, I had previously secured the wires aft to the engine mount, and then it got complicated quickly. Basically, there's a lot of stuff in a small area and I need to route the leads in such a way that they don't have any potential to chafe against other stuff, but they still have to be slack enough to account for engine movement.

These leads came with the P-mags, and while not as ridiculously long as some slick harnesses, it seemed like some of them were exactly the wrong length; Too long for the most efficient routing, too short for a more circuitous tidy installation. So, after tinkering with this for way too long, I shelved it and moved on to something else. At this point, it was time to dig in and figure this out.

My list of considerations for this is as follows:
1. routed to account for engine movement, but prevent chaffing
2. not in the way for ongoing maintenance
3. leads separated from each other (per E-mag to prevent potential inductive mis-firing)
4. neat and tidy

I don't like installing adel clamps (does anyone?) but they are undoubtedly the best solution in about 90% of the cases where you need to clamp something like this. However, one issue in this case was the requirement from P-mag that the wires not be run together for more that 6" of their length or run the risk of inductive coupling and misfires or other havoc.

They are all going to be in close proximity where they come off the P-mag so I'm already eating into that tolerance. Therefore I decided that it probably wasn't the best idea to run multiple leads through one adel clamp.

I ended up going to the car world for a solution and ordered some billet plug separators from amazon. Nothing special about them really, I think you can get them from multiple sources. Couple of cautions if you go this route; you can get them in either plastic or billet aluminum, so make sure you know what you're getting. Also, there really isn't any cushion or chafe protection on these, so take that into consideration. They were a little loose on the P-mag harness which has a wire diameter of about .310 , so I was worried about vibration causing the edges to cut into the insulation. To guard against this, I applied a wrap of fusion tape wherever a lead went through one of these, both to snug them up enough to eliminate relative movement in the support area and to add an additional layer of protection against any chafing.

These are basically just two halves that screw together with a flush Allen screw with 10-32 threads. They are drilled in such a way that the threaded portion goes all the way through, but the tip of the screw is flush on the back side. I went to Ace and got some 3/4" long screws, so that when you screw these together over a set or wires, you end up with enough threads sticking out the back that it becomes a stud that you can get a lock nut on.

I also took some scrap .040 and .032 aluminum to the shop at work and sheared then bent some simple 90 degree L shaped brackets.

Once I got back home, I determined a routing for the leads basically through trial and error, then figured out how to secure them with a combination of brackets, separators and adel clamps.

One thing I was trying to do was to keep leads from running under the oil filter so I didn't have to deal with that at every filter change, but I ended up with two under there any way. There really wasn't any other way to do it with the wire lengths as supplied and I suppose two is still better than four.

It's hard to get a picture in the mass of stuff criss crossing the back of the engine, so in case it's not clear in the pictures below, here's basically what I've got going on:

On the top of the engine, I tried my best to avoid piggy backing off the adel clamps that are butterflied together mid-span on the pushrod tubes to support the fuel injector lines. This was an important consideration for me because on some of the Lycoming engines there is a recurring AD to inspect for cracks/fuel leaks at the brazed fittings at the ends of those lines. Based on that, it just doesn't seem like a good idea to be hanging extra stuff on there. Cessna does exactly that in 3 separate locations on some of their IO360 installations, but I think I'd just rather not do that.

At any rate, what I ended up with was a second set of adel clamps coming off the pushrod tubes then an L shaped standoff, then either a billet fitting or an adel clamp, depending on what was needed.

In my case, the nylon closeout that allows the upper plug wires to go through the aft baffle wall needed to be modified. I don't remember whether these came with the engine or with the baffle kit, but at any rate, the holes in them were only about .25, so I reamed them out to .310 for the fatter P-mag harness

Between hard points, I just installed a zip tie every 6" or so utilizing a short chunk of vinyl tubing I had laying around. Emag says you can use left over manifold pressure hose for this purpose, which feels like it's probably silicone, but I didn't really have much of that left over and I had plenty of vinyl, which is supposed to be good up to 200 degrees or so. I'll keep an eye on it and if it starts to deteriorate I'll do something else here.

Where the leads go under the oil filter they have a free span of about 10-12". where they go over that area, I secured them with a billet standoff and an L bracket to a stud on the vacuum pad.

Regarding what mag fires which plug, there are a couple ways to go here. Lot's of people have one mag fire top and the other fire bottom plugs. However, there is a standard convention here which is to have each mag fire top on one side and bottom on the other.

The reason for the top/bottom arrangement is that historically, the lower plugs were the most prone to fouling, so it made sense to not have all your eggs in one basket so that if the mag that was firing all the top plugs tanked, you had to limp home on all lower spark plugs.

With a high energy ignition firing fine wire iridium plugs, I really don't think this applies to my installation, but I also don't see any benefit to bucking industry convention in this instance, so the Left P-mag fires top left / bottom right plugs, while the Right P-mag fires the top right / bottom left plugs.

About the only other thing I have to say about this is that the P-mags are a wasted spark system, with towers 1&2 firing as a set and 3&4 firing as a set. This means that you get to choose either of two different tower locations for each plug as long as you stay within the appropriate pair. This comes in handy when you're figuring out how to route everything, as does the fact that P-mags couldn't care less how they're clocked on the engine.

When I replace this harness in a few years I'll consider custom wires of a length specific to a different routing that has everything going over the top, but for now I think this will work well and is certainly much neater that a bunch that I;'ve seen with wires running every which way.

  Oct 05, 2023     baffles - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

Riveted on the baffle rubbers this morning. This process started with them clecoed on and a trial fit of the upper cowling. I marked some conflict areas around the inlet openings and behind the spinner circle, removed the cowling and then trimmed. I didn't want to end up trimming off too much, so this was a process of trim a little bit, puttee cowl back on and check again, rinse & repeat.

I've got to have the lower cowl on to make sure the upper is correctly positioned vertically. Because I've got several things to work on up front I'm not going to put it on right now, but this was looking pretty good at this point, so I went ahead and riveted on all the rubbers.

Once the baffle rubber was riveted on, I went ahead and reinstalled the prop governor bracket and loosely reinstalled the prop cable. I'll need to be able to move the prop knob in order to verify travels before I lock this down, and I'm going to give it another couple of days for the sika to harden on the canopy skirt before I open up the copy and get access to the panel.

I went to the shop at work and used the brake and shear there to make some angle clips and standoffs that I plan to use for securing the spark plug wires and then once I was back home, spent the rest of the day tinkering with different routings for those.

  Oct 04, 2023     baffle rubbers - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

The RV14 baffle rubbers that came with the kit don't really fit now that I've trimmed and otherwise modified the baffles, so I ordered some generic rubber baffle material from Spruce a while back.

I'm a big believer in CAD (cardboard aided design) so I had previously made and trial fit paper patterns out of a Costco frozen pizza box.

That stuff had just been on deck waiting for a day when I had a few extra hours. Today, after Roy and I installed the canopy skirt, I got back to this. Todays efforts really didn't take very long since all the heavy lifting had already beed done with making patterns etc.

Basically, I just cut these out like making a shirt from one of those paper patterns- did I mention I took Home Ec way back in high school?

Got this all clecoed together and It's looking like everything is fitting well.

  Oct 04, 2023     finished canopy skirt - (12 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I've been working on this off and on for several days now. Yesterday I final sanded the canopy skirt including a couple of coats of high build primer that then got sanded down to fill in some scratches and pinholes. I also painted the inside white where it's behind the canopy braces because this area is very visible but it would be a real pain to paint after everything is assembled.

This morning I prepped everything for sika, But that process is pretty time sensitive so I didn't really take any before pictures.

Roy Aycock came over at lunch to help with this. He got here just as I was waiting for the primer to flash off, and he offered up a second set of hands to smear on the sika after the recommended 30 minute wait, then maneuver the skirt into place and help with creating fillets at the transition between skirt and plexiglass.

The skirt will need to set for a couple of days while the sika dries, but after that I'll pull the cloches out and fill the holes either with chicken rivets or just epoxy them over. I haven't decided which yet.

  Oct 03, 2023     fuselage vertical closeouts - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I'm planning to get the canopy skirt glued on in the next day or two, and once that happens, I won't be able to open teh canopy for a couple of days while the sika dries, so it seemed like a good Tim ego wrap up a couple of things in the cabin while I could still get in there.

To that end, I match drills the inside of the canopy horizontal rails for the lower skirt braces, then I finished the brace angles. I don't remember the part numbers of these things, but they are the long strips with all the lightening holes in them that go right above the canopy roller tracks and tie the lower portion of the skirts into the canopy frame and make the skirts more rigid.

I was able to do this sitting inside the airplane with the canopy closed, but I forgot to get any pictures.

I then final deburred and primed the braces, and will paint them white to match the frame.

I also final installed the F-704K vertical cap strips.

NOTE- for anybody who might be reading this; Way back when, I followed the example of other folks by beefing up the armrests. Specifically, I added another piece under the lower horizontal flange so that they hopefully wouldn't bend if people use them to lever themselves up out of the cockpit.

This now caused me an issue, because the extra flange was in the way of one of the rivet holes common to the vertical cap strip and the F-704 C&D center section vertical members. Fortunately, I was able to get in there with a wedge shape and pull at an angle and got the rivets to set without issue. However, I could have saved myself the hassle if I'd just tapered that extra piece to give myself a bit more room

  Sep 28, 2023     cowling oil door - (3 hours) Category: Fuselage

I wanted to finish out the are around the oil door to make it truly a flush fit. I had previously filled in most of the gap and sanded it more or less flush, but still had some finish work to do.

I had some epoxy mixed up for a different task so I used a bit of excess to mix up a slurry of micro then troweled it into the gap around the edge of the oil door. The next day after it got good and hard I sanded it down more or less flush.

As is, the border around the door is about 1/32" higher than the surrounding cowl, which is something I think I'll let the painter deal with.

I though for a bit during prep about the best way to get a consistent gap around the edges of the door and ultimately it occurred to me that rather than screwing around with trying to epoxy ups to tape lines or whatever, there was an easier way- I made the door a bit overside with respect to the flange underneath, and once the surrounding surface was final sized for basically a zero gap, I took the door to my bench sander and 3M grinding wheel and took off about 1/32" all the way around.as verified with scrap of .032" used as a no go gauge in the gap.

I feel like this came out really nice.

  Sep 27, 2023     continued canopy skirt - (30 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Well here we are two weeks since the last entry. I started sanding to previously laid up fiberglass skirt and just wasn't happy with the shape at all. I had a hump on one side aft that was the result of a slightly proud canopy frame in that area, combined with the edge of the .030 vinyl that I was using to bridge the gap between fuselage and canopy.

Sigh, after spending a few hours sanding this down to see if I could live with it, I just bit the bullet, scrapped it, and started over.

The new and improved plan had me looking for something thinner that the previously sourced .030 vinyl to cover up the gap between the canopy and the fuselage so that I could build up wet plies in place without excessive sagging.

Thought that perhaps poster board or craft paper might work so I went to Michaels craft store and discovered, wonder of wonders, they have mylar sheets like engineering prints used to come on in the 1960's. They're with the poster boards and are listed as "plastic posterboard" I picked up two sheets in case I needed extra, but one sheet was enough. to do the entire canopy skirt area with a bit left over.

It's only about .010" thick, and a bit more floppy than the vinyl I tried first, but by stretching packing tape tight and working it down wit a squeegee to get the air bubbles out I ended up with a nice flat surface to work with that seems to have minimum variations.

Once that was all prepped, I laid up I think 4 layers of 7.5 oz glass, they a skim coat of flox, then a 5th layer, then a layer a peel ply. The next day I sanded to a rough shape, then laid up another 3 layers of cloth, then a skim coat of micro, then two coats of neat epoxy.

The goal was to end up with a surface thick enough that I could get a final surface finish without getting into any of the plies to a significant degree.

As we all know, this kind of layup gets opaque when you sand it, so threw was a certain order of operations that made sense at this point. After, it was good and hard, I transferred all my edge cut lines that were visible on the tape underneath, then popped the layup off the plane and trimmed the edges.

This was done by cutting to just outside the lines with my 90* die grinder using the same abrasive cutoff disk that vans sent to cut the canopy. I final sized it by sanding up to the line with a sanding block and some 80 grit.

I took several iterations to get this just right, trying it back on the airplane after each. The most critical area for me was where the lower fwd edges joggle up to match the canopy rails. There can't be any overlap here of the skirts to the canopy decks or they will rub and bind up as you open the canopy, but if you cut too much away, you'll have a big ugly gap there thats going to be difficult to seal up. So in that area you have to take away just enough, but not too much, if that makes any sense at all.

I wasn't happy with the fit between the doghouse area and the plastic plug thats supposed to side on the aft canopy rail and close up the air gaps back there. Since I'm doing this out of fiberglass and can make it any shape I want, I scrapped the aluminum doghouse form I had used and after appropriately protecting with tape and turtlewax for mold release, I filled the gaps with a slurry of flox.

I had also prepped the area around the oil filler door on the upper cowl, so before my leftover epoxy started to set, I did a layer around the door to bring it up close to flush. Later on I finished that out with a skim coat of micro. Waste not want not, but more on that in a separate entry.

Once the skirt was cut to size and the doghouse area was fitting the way I wanted, I drilled through into the holes that already existed in the canopy frame side rails while I could still see them.

I then clecoed the skirt in place, made sure everything was still taped up good so that I wouldn't scratch it, and sanded everything to final shape with a couple of sanding blocks with 80 grit.

At this point I've got everything just about perfect I think, although it's hard to tell until you gt some primer on it, because the sanding marks tend to hide low spots etc.

I have to accompany my wife on a multi-day work trip at this point, so when I get back I'll hit this all with a finer grit finishing paper and then some high build primer to finish it off. Boy I hope I'm about done with this.

  Sep 14, 2023     canopy skirt - (5 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Since I had wrapped up all the prep work yesterday, today was just hammer down fiberglass layups.

I used 7.5 oz glass and US composites 3:1 epoxy. I know that some people are in love with the West Systems products, but you'll also find several folks who have had problems with it. I've used US Composites epoxy quite a few times on boat projects. It seems to hold up well and I've never had a problem with it blushing or failing to get hard as nails. A while back I posed the question on VAF to see if anybody had ever used it on their RV project. Several people had and said that they've had no problems over time, so I decided to stick with what I know.

The 3:1 product has about a 20 minute pot life, and a set time of 3-4 hours, depending on temperature. In case anybody is reading this for tips, pot life is the amount of time you have to work with it after mixing before it starts to set. Set time is the amount of time you have to add another layer on top and still have it chemically bond with the previous layer.

The way I mix this is with calibrated pumps that screw into the jugs similar to how bathroom liquid soap pumper works 3 pumps of epoxy, 1 pump of catalyst fills a red solo cup about 1/2 way. Stir it with a popsicle stick for about 20 seconds it's ready to go. Thats also about the amount I can work with in 20 minutes so it works out well.

I pre-cut all the fiberglass into strips of 7"x 42" for the sides and 7"x 24" (approx.) that wrap from the back corners up around the turtle deck.

For the first ply, I wetted out the glass on 3 mil plastic strips to apply them more easily. Just stick them in place, squish them down thru the plastic with a squeegee, then peel the plastic off. Ezee Pezee. For subsequent plies, I just stuck the dry glass onto the sticky layer that was already there and wetted it out in place with a 2" paint brush from the Dollar Store. I took care to jostle this around so that they seams were staggered to ensure a stronger finished product. At the end of each layer I threw away the brush and grabbed a new one due to the previously mentioned pot life.

I might also mention that in for the dog house around the canopy slider track I had just taped the metal dog house from Vans kit in place and taped over it as part of my prep. Larry Larson said in his Kit Planes article that doing it this way would result in the finished hole being too big. In his case, he used that component at a mold to form a smaller doghouse mold out of a soda can.

I see his point, but in my case a trial fit showed that the white plastic piece that slides on the track and is supposed to nest in the doghouse when the canopy is closed is actually already too big to fit in the Vans doghouse. It would need to be sanded down significantly. I think using the existing dog house as a mold and having the hole larger by the thickness of that original piece will result in less sanding shaping on the plastic block, but will still result in a tight fit.

At any rate, I covered the doghouse area with several plies cut on the bias to encourage them to conform to the curves of that part. Each layer in that area overlaps or underlaps the end of the pieces that wrap up the fuselage sides.

I applied 4 layers of 7.5 oz glass this way. After the 4th layer, I covered the layup with peel ply and squeegee'd it out.

Tomorrow I'll remove the peel ply. If I have any high spots I'll sand them down as much as I dare. Then I'll fill any low spots with a thin flox mix, cover that with a 5th layer of cloth, and then more peel ply and squeegee it into something approximating its final shape.

  Sep 13, 2023     More canopy skirt prep - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Sometime it seems like stuff that looks so simple ends up taking forever. I spent the day prepping for canopy skirts, which is a continuation of what I was doing yesterday.

I needed to devise some way to bridge the gap between the airframe and the canopy on both side rails and aft by the turtle deck.

First I tried to just bridge the gaps with packing tape, but I really wasn't happy with the results. Basically, the gap is too big for packing tape to remain taunt and not sag. I know guys have solved this by smoothing out the sags with modeling clay and whatnot, but that seems iffy at best. I thought about this for a while and decided to see if I cold find something semi rigid to bridge the gap.

I ended up down at the Yard Store, and was able to score a roll of .030" vinyl. I thought it might be a little bit thicker than ideal, but the it occurred to me that since I'm bonding this on with sika, it might be nice to have an extra .030" under there for expansion of the Sika.

Cut the vinyl to fit, taped it in place, and then covered the entire area with 2 layers of mylar packing tape. I made sure my masking job was up to par and then waxed everything with 2 coats of turtle wax for a mold release.

I had an 0600 check in at work this morning, and by this time it was after 6:00 pm and I was getting pretty tired, so I elected to wrap it up for tonight. I'll start applying fiberglass plies tomorrow.

  Sep 12, 2023     prep for canopy skirts - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I started this task by going back and reviewing Larry Larson's excellent Kit Plane magazine articles, as well as several build logs on VAF. By the time I had a plan together it was time to pick up RJ and run him across town to work, so I stopped on the way back at Lowes and picked up some frog tape and other supplies. The frog tape is so that my sharpie lines are more easily visible. The whole area will be covered with mylar packing tape and mold release before wet layup.

When I got back in the shop this afternoon, I taped and masked a large portion of the fuselage, then after quite a bit of careful measuring, layer out sharpie lines in the final shape of the canopy skirt.

The plan is to bridge the empty gaps with plastic sheet and mylar tape, then layup 5 plies of 8oz fiberglass oversized. Once it cures, I'll transfer the existing sharpie lines directly through the layup, pop it off the airplane, trim and finish sand, then permanently bond it back on with Sikaflex.

  Sep 12, 2023     sealed baffles - (2 hours)       Category: Fuselage

This is hardly worth an entry of it's own, but I just wanted to capture the finished product re how I closed out around the prop governor.

At this point, I believe the baffles are complete other than cutting and installing the rubber seals. I'd like to just drive ahead and knock this out so that I can scratch this off my punch list, but as I mentioned in another entry, the daily temp dropped about 20 degrees ver the weekend, which is the signal that fall is right around the corner, so I'm putting this in the parking lot for a few days to work on the canopy skirt, then windshield installation.

When working with plexiglass, the hotter ambient temp the better to minimize the chances of cracking something, so I want to get the windshield in while we still have some 80 degree days in the forecast.

  Sep 11, 2023     oil door - (2 hours)       Category: Fuselage

I needed a tiny bit of epoxy to glue in the striker plate that the latches engage with on this, so I sat it aside for a bit until I needed to mix up epoxy for smoothen else. last week I fiberglassed in the upper cowl cooling ramps. so I took care of teh striker plate as well.

Today I finished riveting the hinge to the door and installed the hinge pin. It has a nice smooth latch operation and fits flush with the surrounding surface. The next time I'm in fiberglass mode I'll fill in the recess on the exterior cowl that surrounds the door for an overall flush fit. Should work out nicely.

I wanted flush rivets in this, and while .032 is technically okay for countersinking a -3 rivet, it's just barely. I went with NAS oops rivets which just have a -2 head and require a much smaller countersink. Since they don't have as much strength under a tension load due to the small head I went overkill with 7 rivets on 1/2" spacing. Came out nice.

  Sep 08, 2023     More cowl work- upper cooling ramps - (32 hours)       Category: Fuselage

The upper cooling ramps on the RV7 are designed with an aft prop governor in mind, but I'm installing an IO390 which has a fwd governor.

The baffles kit I have for the RV14 describe a method of cutting out a stair-step shaped hole in the l/h baffle to relieve interference with the governor and then backing it up with a piece of close cell foam.

Nothing wrong with that I suppose, but it seemed prone to eventual air leakage around decaying foam etc. I'm having to do some modifications to the baffles anyway, so it seems like I could likely do better.

I worked on this with lots of mock ups and trial and error over several days. Based on what somebody else on VAF has had success with, I elected to cut out a bigger concave scallop and then back fill it with fiberglass. I then fabricated an additional baffle piece that will allow for installation of rubber baffle material over the top of the governor to match.

I used blind rivets to affix the new baffles pieces around the governor so that they're easy to drill out if I need to remove the governor and then installed an extension on the upper edge of the inner r/h baffle where I needed to change the shape to better match the inlet ramp there. The gap between the baffle pieces and the base of the prop governor is about 3/16" so it will require drilling out some pop rivets to take this apart if I need to remove the governor, but I went with this tight clearance because it allowed my to just fill that gap with RTV instead of messing around with baffle rubber there.

If I had this to do over, I don't think I'd use the RV14 baffle kit for this particular installation. They went together nicely and fit the engine like a glove, but they required trimming and adjustment in odd places in order to make them fit the cowling. Trimming is no big deal except when there were pre-punched holes in exactly the wrong place, but I don't like having to add flanges and whatnot. It would have been nice to have the RV7 IO360 baffles that I could have just trimmed down to size without having to add anything.

As part of this same process, I also started fitting the fwd baffle rubbers and have the lowers fitting pretty good. They are acceptable as is and should be just about perfect once the engine sags a bit.

I'd like to just press on and hammer out these baffles, but the temp dropped from the 90's to the 70's over the weekend, which seems like a sign that fall is right around the corner. Based on that, I'm going to hold up on this and shift over to canopy skirts and then install the windshield and windshield fairing while I still have a few hot days to keep the plexiglass happy.

  Aug 31, 2023     oil door - (4 hours)       Category: Fuselage

As I mentioned previously, the fiberglass oil door provided in the kit is too thick to sit flush in the recess cast into the factory cowl. I can think of several ways to fix this, but ultimately the simplest seemed like it would be to just make a thinner door out of aluminum.

I cut a new door out of .032 from my scrap pile, hand formed it to the correct contour, and match drill to the hidden hinge I had previously bought from somebody on VAF.

Once I was sure it was going to work, I made a paper template for the cutout shape needed for the Harrell latches I ordered from Wicks, and then spend an hour or so trimming and filing them to shape.

I built a strike plate to go on the latch side, and will bond it on the next time I mix up a batch of epoxy. I'll also need to fill in the gaps around the edge of the door with some micro for a nice flush fit

  Aug 29, 2023     started cowl oil door - (2 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Cut the oil door to shape, cut out the hole in the cowl, trial fit door. I don't think the recess in the cowl in quite deep enough for this door to sit flush. I'm going to play with this tomorrow and make sure I understand what's happening here, but I suspect I'm going to have to figure out how to make the flange deeper or maybe just make a thinner door out of aluminum.

  Aug 28, 2023     reshaped l/h cowl inlet - (4 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Much shaping and sanding of flox and micro to get to a better fit between the upper and lower cowl halves at the left hand outer corner.

I believe this is basically in its final shape onto outside, and the part you cant see inside has good smooth transitions per Vans print. It still needs some pinholes filled but thats about it for this area.

  Aug 25, 2023     Cowl work - (24 hours)       Category: Engine

bunch of hours strung out over 3 weeks. I had to go to Missouri to help dad with some financial stuff and ended up getting covid while I was there. Resulted in me being trapped at the lake house for an extra week. Covid is a bummer, but there are worse places to be trapped :)

Anyway, I've been chugging along on the baffle/cowl setup as time allows, and I think I've just about got this thing licked. I filled in behind the cowl inlets per the rv14 plans, then did the uppers to match. Lot's of sanding/grinding to get the shape right.

I think the baffle rubbers will fit correctly now, but when all everything is in its final position, the l/h outboard corner has a bit of an underbite due to that area not being molded 100% correctly on the upper cowl. I've tried a ton of wiggling and finessing to correct this and considered building up the back side of the lower corner in order to give enough meat there to sand it down to match.

Ultimately, I determined that the issue was due to the upper outboard corner trailing aft about 1/16" between the spinner ring and the outboard edge. The only "correct" way to fix this that I can see is to build that area up.

I started by taping off and then sanding off the gel-coat in that area, then waxed, taped etc and installed the cowl halves in their final position.

I then applied a layer of epoxy/flox with peel ply, waited for it to get tacky, then followed up with a slathered on layer of epoxy/micro. after it was solid but not hard, I made sure I could remove the aluminum spacer pictured below. I also sliced off some high spots with a x-acto knife.

Once this is hard I've got a ton of shaping/sanding ahead of me. I hope I'm talented enough to get the shape right on the first try, because I really don't want to go through this process again.

  Aug 10, 2023     Engine air dehydrator- aka "the device" - (12 hours)       Category: Tools

My engine has been out of the sealed bag for several months now, and with the hot summer days I'm seeing some pretty high humidity in the shop. Since I had to drain the preservative oil out of at least part of the heads when I installed the exhaust and since I've also got quite a bit of travel this fall, I'm not going to have the first engine start as soon as I'd hoped.

Therefore, I thought it might be a good idea to get some kind of control over how much humidity is inside ether engine. I wish I could take credit for this contraption, but the reality is that I shamelessly ripped off this idea from somebody on VAF.

I threw this together prior to going with Holly on her house hunting trip, but the humidity sensor wasn't delivered by amazon until after I was already gone on that trip so I didn't have any way to measure what it was actually doing. Once I got back I reworked it to it's current configuration.

I logged 12 hours for this job because of the research and time it took to shop for the parts. But once I had a plan together, it really only took about an hour to assemble "the device". For those who are interested, here's a more or less complete parts list. Almost everything came from Amazon with the exception of a couple of scotch bright pads I already had in the shop and the clean containers, which are just food canisters from the dollar store.

4 lb jug of desiccant (I used about 1/2) $25.99
3/16" brass hose barbs (5) $15.99
Aquarium pump $4.48
Aquarium hose.filter/union kit $6.99
food canisters (dollar store) $12.00 (approx)
Digital thermometer/hydrometer $10.97
Rubber plug from the ace hardware $3.00 (approx)

3d printed oil filler cap from somebody on VAF who did a proof run and was giving them away.

I also installed dehydrator plugs at the same time, but I don't thing that you would really need to as long as youre running "the device". It's more of a belt and suspenders approach.

I'll pretty this up at some point for hangar use, but just to explain what you're looking at here; all components are just duct taped to a piece of pink foam that I had laying around.

The aquarium pump usually just pulls ambient air in through a hole in the case. I covered that hole with shoe goo sealant and installed a barbed fitting through the case so that it would have to suck air through that barb.

The lower canister is plumbed with a hose barb near the bottom to an aquarium air stone, then a couple of layers of scotch bright pads that I has laying around, then a layer of desiccant, then another layer of scotch bright, then another air stone to a hose barb near the top. The only thing the scotch bright does is keep the desiccant beads from sloshing around in there.
the upper canister is just plumbed with two hose barbs on opposite sides for a simple in/out arrangement.

So what happens is that a rubber plug is center drilled and plumbed with an aquarium hose. This plug goes in the oil breather tube. Crankcase air is sucked from the breather through the gauge chamber, into the pump, out through the desiccant chamber then back into the engine through a barbed fitting in the cap on the dipstick hole.

Once the switch was flipped, humidity went from 47% down to 10% as measured on a $10 temp/humidity gauge that is just laying in the top chamber. Elapsed time was just a few minutes.

I originally got fancy and had this on a timer so that it was only running for a few hours a couple f times a day, but in between running sessions the gauge was creeping up to about 15%-20% humidity, so I ditched the timer and just have it on 24/7 at this point.

I'm guessing that the fluctuation is likely because of air leaks around the lids on the el' cheapo dollar store food canisters, but anyway, aquarium pumps are designed to run all the time anyway, so all good for now.

This was a fun little side project and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

  Aug 09, 2023     rework baffle ramp inner sides - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

In a previous entry, I mentioned how the baffle ramps were pretty far off from aligning with the cowl inlets. There is a process in the RV14 baffle plans for building up the lower edge of the cowl inlets for better alignment. There really isn't any guidance on what to do if the vertical fences in by the spinner don't line up.

The RV7 baffle instructions have you match drill all the pieces of the baffle to match the cowl, but I'm using the rv14 baffles which are pre-drilled on the assumption is that they will just fit there. Turns out that in this combo (rv14 baffles to the RV7 cowl), that doesn't necessarily hold true.

The "before" pictures below show that the pre-drilled ramps result in the inboard vertical pieces being too far outboard. The need to be pulled inboard maybe 3/8" on order to allow the rubber baffle material to lay the right way in the air stream.

The options here are to rebuild the cowl inlets, or to rework the baffles. Seems like in this instance, reworking the baffles is the lesser of two evils, so after some careful measurements, the fwd baffles came off, a bunch of rivets got drilled out, and they were adjusted for an appropriate fit.

I ended up moving both sides inboard such that I left about 1/2" clearance between the baffle plates and the flywheel, which should be plenty since the baffles move with the engine. The distance was not symmetrical on both sides, so careful measuring is in order.

Due to the way the baffle rivet flanges are oriented, I was able to just redrill new holes on the port side, but on the starboard I ended up fabricating an angle gusset to tie the vertical face into the ramp.

Everything was dimpled/countersunk appropriately, painted to match, and riveted per standard shop practices, then reinstalled.

Have to leave on a trip tomorrow, so I'm going to work on my engine dehydrator a bit and then come back to this when I return next week.

  Jul 27, 2023     cowl/baffle interface. - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

had a couple of errands today so I ended up in the shop for about 6 hours chopped up in chunks. worked on the engine dehydrator a bit since I now have a humidity sensor to plumb in. More on that tomorrow.

Other than that, I installed the cowl, measured, took it back off, rinse, repeat. the inlet openings don't fit to the baffle ramps well at all, and I'm also going to have to narrow the inbd ramp sidewalls, as they are both about 3/8" too far outboard.

There is a process in the rv14 plans for building up a flox dam where things are lining up and then sanding a new inlet profile. Even though these look really bad to me, once I rolled the conical radius corner pieces, they are pretty much within the dimensions taht are in the example photo in the plans, so I guess thats not awful.

  Jul 26, 2023     spark plug wires - (3 hours)       Category: Engine

You wouldnt think something so simple would take so long, but here we are, living' the dream.

The challenge is that P-mag says you can't let these run together for more than 5" without the risk of inductive cross firing. combine that with the fact that these are pre-made to a fixed length and I stupidly eliminated about 1/2 my routing options by installing almost everything else on the back of the engine before I got around to these, and it took a while to devise a plan.

Anyway, these are 80% done, but it would have been a lot easier if I had done them earlier in the process. I'm going to have to relocated some sensor wires and stuff like that where they go through they engine mount but thats a problem for tomorrow.

Todays big challenge overcome is that Vans print is based on shielded magneto wires that can be run together, and they call for running both l/h lower plug wires and also the alternate intake air cable housing all through one adel clamp off the lower valve cover of cylinder 4.

I originally assembled it that way because its within the allowable 5" per P-mag, but the more I stared at it, the more eI hated it. I can see so much stuff that could potentially cause trouble on down the road with a claptrap arrangement like that.

Eventually, I ended up separating them via some zipties and sections of tubing. I also used the same arrangement off the oil return line of cylinder 4 that I did on cylinder 2. This gets that potentially abrasive cable housing out of the same clamp as a spark plug wire.

It looks much neater than what I had originally. Although I could fly it this way without problems, I'm going to buy some actual wire loom fittings from Jegs or someplace.

  Jul 26, 2023     Alt inlet air - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

Completed the installation of the alt intake air this morning. It's pretty straightforward. Just follow the instructions. There are a couple of noteworthy things though;

This is intended to be emergency use only and is not typically pilot resettable without pulling off the top cowl. Picture 3 shows why; I suppose there might be a cable routing where this would work, but in my case, what happens is that theres enough slop in the cable that if you try to push it back closed it doesn't quite rotate all the way and the the locking tab at the top doesn't nest properly.

Also, the plans call for a -12 adel clamp around the cylinder #2 oil return line B nut as a mounting point for the cable housing. It worked much better to go with a smaller clamp on the line right below the B nut, but I suspect that this would depend on the exact location you installed the door and the pivot point.

  Jul 25, 2023     Crankcase breather, sniffle valve, fuel pump drain - (9 hours)       Category: Engine

First thing I did today was install the heater muff on the exhaust for cylinder #1. I have no idea if the clocking of the outlets are right or not, but I just wanted to make sure it would fit.

I then installed the lower cowl to see if the tailpipes need to be moved. Turns out that with this pipe/cowl combo, if you have an inch of gap above the pipes, you have about 1 3/8" below. I've also got them pointed in toward each other a bit and the result is that there's gobs of room all the way around.

Once that was resolved, I trimmed and permanently installed the breather tube to the firewall. I trimmed the bottom parallel to the l/h pipe and terminated it about 1/2" above the pipe. This is all per print, so not a lot to say about it.

I also added a whistle hole about 6" up from the bottom. Vans has no provision for this, but lots of guys install them and it was actually a Cessna AD to add one back in the day. I realize that this vs. a Cessna installation hanging out in the breeze is totally different, but it's cheap insurance.

Next I fabricated the final end pipe for the engine driven fuel pump bypass line and installed it. This took a while because I wanted to make sure it looked decent while not being overly complicated. I suppose I could have just stuck the end of the hose out in the breeze with an adel clamp or two, but this looks a bit more polished.

Finally, I fabricated and installed the sniffle valve drain line. This took some doing. The RV14 plan is auto Frankenstein together a couple of pieces of aluminum pipe with a couple of pieces of fuel line to account for flexing, with one end clamped to an exhaust pipe and the other end adel clamped to the firewall flange. The RV7 solution is a bit basic as well.

I felt like it was kind of chopped up and I really didn't want to have to fabricate a stainless hangar arrangement for the exhaust pipe, so I played around with this for a while and determined that a simple way to accomplish this is with a hose junction right off the sniffle valve to a piece of scrap 3/8" fuel line that sweeps aft between the exhaust pipes.

The aft end is supported by a couple of adel clamps to the lateral exhaust hanger so there is some flex in the assembly via the hose length up front, but the entire this should move with the engine,

So, if we're keeping score, all this stuff goes out through the cowling shovel right now. The tube on the left is the fuel pump bypass drain and is maid from a piece of scrap fuel vent line. The one in the middle is the sniffle valve drain and is made from a piece of scrap fuel line.

FYI- I gave the end of the sniffle valve line a small flare and safety wired the hose clamps holding it together. I don't want that thing coming apart up under there where I wouldn't be able to see it without having the cowl off.

I'm of two minds about ho this ended up; On the one hand, it's a simple and clean installation, but on the other, the more stuff you have in the cowl exhaust, the more it messes up the exit air back there, which leads to drag. I suspect it might be aerodynamically cleaner to have that stuff exit via stubby pipe out the bottom of the firewall lip outside of the shovel area.

I'll ponder this a while. I can change it any time up until paint so it' snot a big deal to fly it this way for a bit.

  Jul 24, 2023     Exhaust hangers - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

I left last Tuesday to go house hunting with Holly. She's got her permanent duty assignment as a Regional Sales Associate (junior sales person) for Citations and is going to be moving to Florida. She can live pretty much anywhere in the state that has good airline service, so we hit up several areas.

Seems like at this point she's settled on Tampa which will be nice since it's not as expensive as further south and also has a service center both there and in nearby Orlando for her to lean into for satellite officing as she gets her feet under her.

Im really happy for her- It's a far cry from my first gig with Textron as a 2nd shift mechanic on the experimental flight line :)

Anyway- Just got back into the shop today and suffered through a 100 degree afternoon. yikes!

I spent several hours working on the exhaust hangers. I tried several different mounting solutions in an effort to insure the geometry was such that the tailpipes won't flop around and that the hangers won't be in the way of something else.

Ultimately what I ended up with was the upper ends attached to the 3rd sump bolt out from engine centerline. This is pretty much a straight shot longitudinally, with a downward angle as they run aft that matches the supplied stainless ears that go under the sump bolts.

Vetterman supplies two tubes that are about an inch longer than the others and by using one long and one short I ended up with something that looks reasonable for the primary hangers and has about 3/8" center gap which is bridged by a fuel hose and a couple of hose clamps to allow for the inevitable vibration and wiggling. There isn't really any guidance about how much gap there should be, but it seems to me that if you go bigger than 1/2" or so that there is quite a potential for it to get too floppy, so I'm calling it good with 3/8". I cute hose so that I had about an inch of overlap on each end and marked slip marks in sharpie at each end on the steel tube so that I can see if the hose slips over time.

Note- I also cleaned up the tubes with an acetone rag before assembly because theres a note on the instructions that says teh tube has to be clean or the hose will for sure slip on it.

I'm going to keep an eye one this and if they don't stay put I may take it back apart and scuff upon the tube ends with scotchbright or maybe try to bead them slightly with a flaring tool, but it look tight for now.

For the lateral hanger I has to cut the ends off of the tubes and I left a 1/4" gap between the ends for the hose to bridge. Otherwise the process was the same.

The way this is all oriented right now, The tailpipes have about an inch airspace at the firewall lower lip. rough measurement indicated that there will be about the same gap between the pipes and the cowl shovel on the bottom side and quite a bit more than that on the sides.

It seems obvious to me that they further away from the belly I can keep the tailpipes, the better, but I really don't know how much space I need from the cowling back there. Is 1" enough? I've got a post out on VAF to ask the question.

I also asked for feedback re how tight should the bolts be that hold the ears together at the slip joints. The instructions say something like "not too tight" to allow some flex for expansion. But how tight is that? I don't feel like I should leave it so loose that the bolt can rotate in the hole, but I don't want it tight enough that it will break teh ear over time either.

  Jul 17, 2023     exhaust - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

I've put this off until now because the engine is still full of preservative oil, but I'm at the point where this domino needs to fall.

I pulled the exhaust port covers and lower plugs to drain the oil out of the exhaust ports and then installed the exhaust.

Let me just say; The Vetterman exhaust is worth every penny- That thing just fits. no problems at all.

The instructions say that you can use anti-seize on the studs and call for a torque of 180-200 in/lbs. This is on the low side of Lycoming's standard value but I went with 180 as a starting point. If I see leaks during flight test I'll up the torque to 200. I also applied a nickel anti-seize.
I want to make sure that I got these flanges flat on the crush gaskets, so I torqued the nuts down sequentially while holding up on the aft end of the pipe so it would draw down symmetrically. 75, 100, 150, 180 in/lbs.

I still have to work on the aft hangars, but it feels good to see a big change like having exhaust hanging there.

FYI- people have questioned how you get access to torque all of these because some of the nuts have tight access. All of them are accessible with a socket and straight extensions with the exception of the aft stud on cylinder 1. With that one I had to use a wobble extension, but no big deal.

  Jul 17, 2023     Center cabin vertical closeouts - (3 hours)       Category: Fuselage

This has been on my list of little tasks for a while now, so while I was waiting for the alt air base epoxy to set, I match drilled prepped and painted the closeouts that cover up the vertical spar box members.

I prepped and painted them, but my last can of "good" primer is pretty old and it's throwing drops in the work piece. Once it dried I cut/smoothed the runs out, then covered it with a second coat of good old duplicolor gray. It's a bit lighter than my sherwin Williams gray, but since I'm eventually installing interior side panels I just need something that won't show bare aluminum through the edges of teh side panels and this will fit the bill.

  Jul 17, 2023     Alt air - (2 hours)       Category: Engine

Installed the alternate air door in the snorkel. Note- If you cut the hole for this per the print dimension, it's in the wrong place. Instead of 3 1/2" from the lower lip of the filter box it should be approx 3 1/2" from the upper fwd edge. If you get it too far aft, the edge of the assembly would be hanging off in space behind the radius at the aft corner of the snorkel and you wouldn't be able to rivet it in a later step.

Anyway, I basically centered it on the flat spot which seemed pretty intuitive. Once I mocked it up it looked like that would work nicely so thats what I went with.

Cut the hole with the tried and true method of drilling a bunch of holes, connecting the dots with a dremmel cutoff wheel, and then trueing it up with a flapper disc.

Ground the sharp corners and de-burred the base flange, installed the required nut plate, and epoxy/floxed in place per print.

  Jul 14, 2023     More snorkel and baffle work - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

The flox from yesterday filled up the upper lip nicely, but the fit is pretty tight in a couple of places and I didn't get full coverage through the width of the overlap. The instructions say that this is fine as long as you have a continuous bead to make the joint air tight, but I felt like I could do better.I started the day by flipping the snorkel upside down and drizzling some neat epoxy in the lower flange of the air filter flange where it overlaps the snorkel. I worked it into the crack via a razor blade and got good penetration everywhere that was questionable.

More waiting for epoxy to dry, so I finished up the RTV work on the aft baffles, then installed and safety wired the dipstick tube. I then went back and tidied up the sensor and P-mag wire bundles. I also knocked out a couple of other things. At this point, My list of small fill in tasks is dwindling pretty quickly

  Jul 14, 2023     Snorkel & Baffles - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

I started fitting the snorkel this morning, Pretty straightforward, but before I got trim crazy I wanted to make sure it didn't hit the cowling anywhere, so I pinned it in place and tried to fit up the lower cowl.

Had some running with the aft edge of the cowl openings and the fwd lip of the baffle ramps on both sides, so there were several iterations of cowl on/off and trimming to get about 1/4" clearance up there with the cowl installed.

I have no idea if 1/4" is enough. The RV7 instructions are really sketchy about this. It's on my list to research, but for now, I've confirmed that the cowl and snorkel are going to play nice with each other.

Once that was done, I went about fitting the snorkel per the RV14 instructions. They have you attach the air filter frame with snorkel inserted into it, then clamp the lower flange to the fuel metering unit.

Then instructions have you draw a circle 1" larger than the hole on the aft face of the snorkel flange, then center it on the fuel controller. I accomplishes this by measuring 1" out from the edge of the hole in multiple places and just connecting the dots.

I was goin crazy trying to get this thing centered using this reference lines and just could not make it work out of the longest time.

Finally, I discovered that the hole in the snorkel wasn't round. It's got a slight oval shape of 2 7/16" in one direction and 2 1/2" in the other. Therefore, my reference circle was oval as well and this is what was throwing me off.

I pondered this for a while and decided that Vans elaborate measurement system was maybe a bit overly complicated for my needs.

The throat of the Avstar fuel controller is only 2 13/32". So if it's perfectly centered, the hole in the snorkel is 1/32" to 3/32" bigger than the hole in the controller depending on where you measure it. i.e. I've got a little room to fudge it if need be without closing anything off.

With this in mind, I focused on just shifting things so that the flange on the snorkel was flush with the avatar unit and it wasn't rubbing on the starter or oil return line for cylinder 2.

Once I got it sitting pretty, I dusted off my amazon special endoscope, which refused to link with my phone...shoot, no what?

I discovered that when I removed my iPhone SE from it's protective case, it was small enough to fit all the way into the snorkel, so after a few attempts I was able to get a movie of me slithering it down into the snorkel and having a look-see in person. I made several adjustments, with a new phone session each time. Eventually, I got everything within my parameters.

Once I was happy with the fit, I traced the outline of the fuel controller flange on the aft side of the snorkel flange & drilled then clecoed the snorkel to the air filter flange, which fixed the relative fitment of everything.

After all that, it was pretty simple to lay out the hole pattern and trim the snorkel flange to size using Van's supplied template. The fiberglass it quite thick on that flange, so I cut it with the same cutoff wheel I used for the canopy in my dremmel saw-max.

I Installed everything again just to make sure, then glued the snorkel and filter flange together with a epoxy/flox mixture per van's instructions.

Nothing more to do with the snorkel until the epoxy dries, so I spent the rest of the day sealing up all the nooks and crannies on the aft baffles with RTV.

  Jul 12, 2023     Oil Cooler butterfly rework - (8 hours)       Category: Engine

Well drat. I discovered this morning that at it's uppermost limit of travel, the lever arm on the side of the butterfly hits the cowling. I tinkered with this thing most of the day trying to figure out how to make it work.

After much head scratching, I just rigged it so that instead of 90 degrees of movement to go from full open to full closed, it has about 45 degrees of movement and travels from full open to about 45 degrees closed.

This rigging was just a simple fix for my clearance issues, but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea that if the cable jambs up or something, it isn't likely that I could find myself in a situation where I'm stuck with all the cooling air shut off to the oil cooler.

The whole idea here is to choke down the air to the oil cooler and potentially help get the oil temps up during winter operations, but I question how much you really need to choke it down. 45 degrees should head it in the right direction.

If I fly for a bit and find that I don't use this feature, I may just remove it entirely.

I don't like that the control cable for this is just held on with a brass pitch bolt. Also, the lever arm to shaft isn't splined, just held in position with a tension bolt.

Because I'm a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I put a couple of joggles in the cable and applied lock-tire to the set screw. Even if the screw comes loose the cable can't really come off. I also cross drilled the lever to the shaft with a #50 bit and ran a double wrap of safety wire through it.

I hope this feature is worth all the trouble. I've put a ton of effort into this, but at this point I've got is as bulletproof as possible.

  Jul 11, 2023     Worked on baffles - (20 hours)       Category: Engine

Worked about 20 hours over a several of days on this. Baffles are installed, but I will still have to install baffle seals and I will also need to modify the forward end where they interface with the holes in the cowling.

Cutting threads in the baffle tension rods hard beed the hardest part of this so far. My Chinese tap and die set wasn't up to the task so I had to swing by Ace and replace it. That stainless is hard!

There were a couple of places that there was potential interference with the worm clamps to the oil return lines. I pulled off the offending clamps trimmed the excess off the ends and rechecked them to eliminate any potential rubbing. I also sleeved all 4 tension rods for a belt and suspenders approach.

Also, it's been stinking hot here this week. Over 90 in the shop by early afternoon.

  Jul 10, 2023     baffles - (24 hours)       Category: Engine

I want to install a butterfly valve to control airflow to the oil cooler, but the one that I bought way back when from airflow systems has the mounting ears in a really goofy location for what I want to do. Specifically, one of the ears was going to be hanging out into empty space, or I was going to have to move the whole thing in and down about an inch.

In an effort to take advantage of every molecule of cooling air, I wanted to optimize the location, so I cut the flange off, fabricated another so that I could orient the mounting hardware better, and took it over to a friends house for him to tig weld it together.

It came out really nice.

I also discovered that a couple of the worm clamps on the oil return lines were clocked so that they were in the way of teh baffles and/or eventually the baffle tie wires so I spent some time adjusting those. Wish I had known about this before I had all the systems on the engine as it's pretty cramped to get in there with everything installed.

Attis point, the baffles are coming together nicely.

  Jun 30, 2023     baffles - (18 hours)       Category: Engine

Started working on the baffles this week. I'm going with RV14 baffles which are pretty much plug n play for the 14, but at least in my case will need to be cut down to fit under my RV7 cowling.

I did the paperclip trick and determined that the perimeter all needs to be trimmed down about 3/8".

Also need to patch the honking big 5" hole in the r/h aft baffle thats used to duct cooling air to the r/h firewall mounted oil cooler on the RV14.

Once everything was more or less trimmed to size, I painted all the individual pieces white with dupli-color engine block paint. The next day I applied teh strips of RTV that are called out in the instructions.

were out of town for a week over the 4th so that will be it for a while

  Jun 28, 2023     Misc - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

While I was waiting for paint to dry own the baffles, I went back and reinstalled all the avionics, cabin fresh air vents, windshield brace, defrost fans, etc. Other than labeling the panel and installing an interior, pretty much the only big thing left in the cabin is to install the vertical close-out covers over the central spar box vertical members.

  Jun 18, 2023     Wretched Cowling pt V - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Installed horizontal sky bolts down both sides. In my case, a spacing of 3" worked well and will hopefully make the whole thing a bit more robust, but in combination with the reduced spacing along the firewall it means that I'm coming up one fastener short. I'll need to order another one from skybolt to finish this up for a total of 37.

Due to backdrilling/locating from the outside first, there wasn't any drama with hole location. I did notice that the side gap shifted slightly as I cinched everything up. The port side got a bit tighter and the starboard side opened up a bit. Aft toward the firewall, we're talking maybe a 64th" so I suspect just loosening and shifting the cowl might be enough to take care of it, but both sides symmetrically open up as they move fwd.

When I had this trial fit, I had a nice symmetrical gap of about 1/32" all around, other than it was maybe closer to a 16th as it wrapped around the cowl cheeks on both sides. Now it appears to be about 1/16" on the fwd sides transitioning to almost 1/8" on the cheeks.

I've got to remove/install this several more times as I work on the piano hinges on the vertical firewall seam and the screws that go across the bottom. If these gaps remain consistent I will have to close this up a bit with fiberglass. I'll save that for when I'm in fiberglass mode working on canopy skirts.

Downloading pictures for this entry also shows in glaring detail how I managed to get off a rivet head and cut it with a squeezer on the port side when I was riveting the flanges on. I'll have to drill that out and replace as well.

One more work session to wrap up details, then I'll call this done for now and come back to it after I get another fastener.

  Jun 15, 2023     Wretched cowl IV - (10 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Clamped the lower cowl in place with sheet metal clamp sand a ton of painters tape. Then back drilled through the piano hinge halves from the inside with a 90 degree dotco.

Once I had the lower in place with piano hinges on the aft side and clecos into the prop fixture on the front, I spent a couple of hours opening up the horizontal seam to a consistent gap on both sides. I started by running a metal double sided nail file in the seam, then finished up with a piece of adhesive sandpaper stuck to a piece of .020 aluminum. This resulted in a gap of about 1/16" overall. I still need to trim back where the lower butts up to the firewall flange, but it's good enough to get the fasteners in.

Once that was done and I was confident it wasn't going to wiggle around, I spent quite a bit of time laying out the pattern for the horizontal line of sky bolt fasteners on both sides. I ended up with a 3" spacing which seems like it will work out nicely, but required that I trim 1/2" off the Flanges.

Skybolt says that you should elevate the flanges .20-.25 so that you cant see through the seam, but that would end up with the rivet line only having about .25 e.d. on the fiberglass cowling, which doesn't seem like much. I fudged this another 1/8" and ended up with an overlap of about 1/8" and a e.d. on the rivet line of about 3/8"

I trimmed and laid out the holes in the flanges and used them to back drill the cowlings from the outside. This was an easy way to do it, but if you go this route you have to take utmost care to use a drill stop and make sure you know what's back there, because it would be really easy to hit something vital like a valve cover.

anyway, got everything trimmed, fit etc. will drill the grommet holes in the upper cowl tomorrow, cleco everything together, do any final edge adjustments and hopefully wrap up this part.

I know I'll need a bunch of fit/finish work to make this pretty, but I'll be happy to just have it functional and ready to go for now.

  Jun 14, 2023     Wretched cowl III - (7 hours)       Category: Fuselage

located holes in aft upper cowl for sky bolts per intersecting straight line method. Got clecos in every other hole, then stepped them up to full size incrementally, checking often with a mirror and flashlight to attempt to keep them centered in the sky bolt flange openings.

The skybolt receptacles are free to slide back and forth maybe a 16th" so you have a little wiggle room if they aren't perfectly centered. I did have one that was going to be a little iffy along the longitudinal axis so I used a floating skybolt at that location which allows the same movement along that axis.

Many iterations of off/on/off with the upper cowl to get to this point, but everything fits quite nicely.

Two things that have helped with this whole process; The rental fixture from FlyBoys that gives you lots of places to drill/cleco too at the nose bowl and my self leveling laser.

I splurged on the laser when I was truing up the fuselage and have found several other uses for it as well. In one of the pictures below, you can see how I'm using it to make sure that cowl is dead nuts level.

Note the horizontal beam intersects the cowl cheeks at the same place on both sides, and the vertical beam hits the end of the prop fixture right on the centerline, as well as hitting the canopy latch post in the center of the roll bar. In between it hits the cleco thats engaged in the center sky bolt location. Thats about as perfect as I can make it.

  Jun 13, 2023     Wretched cowling II - (14 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Once I had the split line between upper and lower cowl defined It allowed my to locate the sky bolt flanges that I'm using along the upper cowl/firewall flange.

one thing I forgot mention last time regarding the cowl split line. My original plan was to trim the split line so tat it would be parallel to the longeron line just for aesthetics, but I didn't have hardly any extra to cut off so it was a case just true the edges up and you get what you get & don't throw a fit. I think I took about 3/8" one side and almost nothing off the other.

Anyway, back to the sky bolt experience; Skybolt suggests 3 1/2" maximum spacing for these and thats what the flanges are really designed for. Based on where my cowl split Ines are, that was going to result in the second one up pointed right at the upper engine mount bolts. I think that they probably would have cleared, but I know some guys have reported interference issues here. Skybolt mentions that you can adjust spacing to account for tis if necessary.

Also, some people have issues with the cowling pillowing between the fasteners when the cowl is pressurized, and the sky bolt literature recommends a reinforcing strap adjacent to the firewall fasteners.

So, for a couple of reasons, I elected to modify the spacing. This took absolutely forever. What I ended up with was a 3" spacing for the first two, then 3 5/16" for the rest up to the centerline. Good clearance, symmetrical spacing, and overall just aesthetically pleasing and a nice tight spacing that will hopefully prevent any cowl pillowing.

There were a couple of places where this spacing required modifying the flanges by cutting off the overlapping feature so that the spacing would come out right and still work with the rivet holes in the firewall flange. Wherever that happened, I added strap doubler under the flange to pick up extra rivet holes and really tie these together.

Ive got this entire assembly trimmed, countersunk etc as required and it's all clecoed back together. Tomorrow I'll rivet this all together.

  Jun 07, 2023     wretched engine cowling - (30 hours)       Category: Fuselage

This entry covers work from the last week or so. I spent probably about 10 hours of touch labor on this and at least twice that long pondering, researching what others have done, measuring, and trying to decide how the heck to cut this thing to the proper shape without overdoing it.

Vans instructions are pretty rudimentary, but basically, the upper and lower cowl halves come oversized so you can trim to fit. The problem is taht year really isn't a straight edge to Strat from, so you're left trying to get some sort of reference to start from.

Of utmost importance is to make Sur ethat teh 2 halves fit as well as possible at the spinner back plate, both for teh gap from teh spinner and with respect to being an actual circle behind it.

rather than making a tool for this, I rented the one offered by FlyBoys. It's a milled shaft that bolts on the crank flange and a circular plate that slides and locks down on it. You adjust it to the proper distance, lock it down, mate the cowl halves to it, and trim the edges to fit. Seems eeze peeze, but the two halves don't fit together very well, and in fact aren't symmetrical side to side.

In my case, the spinner bowl sticks forward from the inlet openings about 1/8" more on the pilot side than the passenger side. This caused me all sorts of havoc trying to get it as close as I could, knowing that it's not going to be perfect and that I'm going to have to live with an asymmetrical gap or build up the starboard side.

Note- per whirlwind, the aft edge of the spinner backplate is 1.6" fwd of the fwd face of the flywheel. I believe in trust but verify, so I measured everything and that seems to check out, so I set up my fixture to leave approximately a .25" gap there per Vans instructions. I also set the cowl vertically so that the spinner would be about 1/8" high to account for eventual engine sag. This is also per vans instructions.

What followed was several days of careful fitting and trimming, including sanding down one the width of a sharpie line at a time. I've currently got the upper cowl fit with about .032" gap to the firewall flange and the lower fitting with just a .032 gap to sand down at the firewall and cowl split.

I hope to have all these seams finalized tomorrow and start fitting hinges and sky bolts after.

Holy cow this has been a job.

  Jun 04, 2023     Avionics access panels - (6 hours)       Category: Fuselage

Finished up these access panel openings. I riveted the nut plate flanges on wet with pro seal, then made gaskets of pro seal with turtle wax and Saran Wrap as a mold release.

I let these sit for about 3 days before pulling them apart and cleaning them up. there are some streaks in the pro seal where it evidently didn't completely mix, which is odd. This came from a sem kit and I mixed the snot out of it and shot it out onto a piece of cardboard and then applied it with a Popsicle stick. At no time did I see anything that would indicate it wasn't completely mixed. The sem kit was in my tool box in the garage one rthe winter and went through several freeze/thaw cycles, so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. At any rate, It looks good enough for gaskets, I'm just glad it wasn't a fuel tank.

  May 30, 2023     finished fwd fuselage skin - (3 hours) Category: Fuselage

Masked off the cabin and engine, the painted the upper glare shield area with good ol' rust oleum flat black from Ace hardware. 3 coats will hopefully be somewhat durable, but if it starts to look beat up I'll cover it with felt or vinyl for something. It would be a bear to repaint this after the windscreen is in.

The fwd edge of the black paint was carefully masked to the edge of where the sika fillet for the windscreen will abut. Thats one reason it took 3 hours- I wanted to make sure I didn't have any unpainted area at the windscreen base, but also wanted to make sure I'm not trying to stick the sika to rattle can paint.

I guess I forgot to take. picture of it, but you get teh idea.