|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Last Modified September 1st 1998
August 1st -6th At Oshkosh. Wow! What a show. Got to fly left hand seat in a Europa for the first time and even inverted the green and blue bits. :-) I also found a few new ideas for the Europa which will appear in this log over the next few months.
August 7th No building.
August 8th Laid up the glass on the rudder pedal floors, this is a simple job when using bid strips laid up on cling film. Glassed in the trim tab on the port trim tab - for the last time I hope!
August 9th Trimmed back the glass on the trim tab then fitted in the rudder pedals. I had to open up the tufnol bearings slightly to give free movement of the pedals but other than that the fitting was a fairly simple job. The pitch containment bracket mid fuselage was a bit trickier. The instructions have you set up the containment spacing while the bracket still consists of separate pieces of wood. I decided that it was going to be easier to tack bond the wood pieces together with the spacing roughly set then do the glass lay-ups over the pieces to create a solid unit. At that point I will trim the base down to reduce the spacing to within specification.
August 10th Got kicked back into the garage after dinner - Carol wanted some peace and quiet to study :-). I wanted to do the glass lay-ups on the pitch bracket but as a thunderstorm was looming and the humidity too high as a result I turned my attention to fitting the rudder cables to the rudder pedal arms. This did require dismantling the screw assembly that will hold the rudder cable so next time I build a Europa I won't use locknuts on this until I get round to this stage! The other thing I found was that there is more clearance on the cable against the frame if the free end of the nicopressed cable in on the underside. Like many builders before me I am sleeving the cable where it passes through the tunnel so I fed the cable through some 1/4" inside diameter nylaflow tubing in this area. Once I have the cable path sorted out I will attach the tubing to the side of the tunnel with offsets and P clips. As I am effectively building an XS the original method of setting up the rudder cables is no longer appropriate in that I don't have a tailwheel bracket to set the cables up against. It juuuust so happens that I now have an XS builders manual so I followed the instructions to set the pulleys at a fixed spacing off the tunnel wall. This spacing will be adjusted later once the tailwheel pivot arm is in place. I fitted the starboard rudder spring than hunted out the small offset bracket (not required for the XS which has the port footwell 1 3/4 inches further forward) and discovered I hadn't primed it so did that. Back to the rear of the aircraft where, once I had checked that the trim motor was at neutral, I fitted the trim tab arm. While at Oshkosh I noted that the factory XS demonstrator had a very neat method of preventing the arm from moving sideways when the stabilators are removed. The XS manual confirmed the technique. A couple of pieces of angle aluminium are attached to the inside skin just forward of the trim arm holes. Bonded to each of these is a piece of ply positioned to give a 3/4" channel for the arm to move up an down within but limiting sideways movement to 1/8" or so each way. I cut two 17cm long pieces of 40 x 20mm angle out of some scrap bits that I had and then cut pieces of ply so that they were 53mm wide.
August 11th Fitted the port spring assembly. When the manual states that the spring retaining bolts should be as far forward as practical they really do mean it. Anything less that full forward results in the spring slackening off. Riveted my ply pieces to the aluminium angle.
August 12th -13th No building.
August 13th Glassed the pitch bracket.
August
14th Adjusted the pitch bracket positioning - I was
right, this is much easier to do once the bracket is a
single piece. Glassed up the bracket support pieces...remembering
to place cling film between the bracket and the support pieces so
that it is removable! Fitted my trim arm angle brackets to the
rear of the fuselage. I used 3/16" screws from the outside
of the aircraft feeding into nut plates on the angle piece to
hold the plates in place. The system works perfectly at
preventing the arm from moving laterally as the stabilators are
removed from the aircraft. Marked out the lower fuselage rear
inspection hole then peel plied and glassed the inside surface
ready for inspection plate flange manufacture.
August 15th Drilled
the holes in the pitch bracket supports and bolted the bracket
into place. Adjusted the counterbalance arm to ensure that the
arm contacted the stop at 12 degrees up travel. Checked all of
the bolts located around the rear mechanisms and then stood back
in dumb realisation that I had reached another milestone of
construction. I wheeled the assembly out of the garage and gave
the floor its traditional end of phase clean up!
Off to the storage shed to bring back the wings and
fuselage top. With these back at the house I worked on the
trailer in order to bring its lighting system up to New Zealand
standards. It failed its warrant of fitness with the wings on as
the outboard lights couldn't be seen inboard of the wings. To fix
this I had to add a duplicated set of lights on arms inboard of
the wings and forward facing running lights on the outboard
plates. That kept me "amused" for several hours.
The wings have kept well in storage apart from the
spar end cup which has rusted quite noticeably. Next week I'll
get some rust remover and prime both the wing mounted one and the
one fitted within the aircraft. I removed the bulkhead from
within the lower fuselage as it will only get in the way during
the next build phase and then placed the fuselage top onto the
aircraft. Dream time - all of a sudden I had an airplane sitting
in front of me instead of a fibreglass boat hull :-) Building
tends to stop at moments like this as the poor afflicted home
aircraft builder drifts off into fantasies of flight. Once that
phase passed I marked out areas on the moldings that need
trimming to ease fitment of the two pieces. The main locations
were the flange forward of the firewall and the tailplane flange
on the upper molding, a small area at the intersection of the
firewall and lower molding that had been filled with flox during
manufacture and the top of the pitch bracket. I marked out the
upper molding inspection hole locations and then finished the
day by giving my stabilators a scrub to remove a few greasy
fingerprints that they had acquired during the torque tube set
up.
August 17th I carefully
scribed the outline of the lower fuselage inspection hole with
the tip of a sharp craft knife then, using a thin point Xacto
craft knife pierced the outer skin and cut along the scribed
line. Cutting the skin was easy except where there are multiple
layers of cloth seen in the photo as a slightly darker band. With
the outer skin cut through I then pierced the inner skin and
sliced the plate out. The hole is not absolutely perfect but I
suspect I am the only person who will ever see that as it looks
pretty good in the photo! Using the craft knife is much neater
than the junior hacksaw blade method that I used on the
plates on the underside of the aircraft. The rusted wing socket
only took a light sanding down with 600 grit paper to clean up.
This sanding was followed with a coat of zinc chromate primer.
The more observant builder will notice that there is a washer
missing from the aileron thrust plate bearing in the earlier
photo. This has now been rectified!
August 18th Carol's car was "remodeled" in an accident today and like most things, there is a bright side - I have the whole garage for a few weeks! I took the top of the aircraft off and placed it on two saw horses. With trusty dremel and Permagrit slitting disk in one hand and vacuum cleaner hose in other I cut back the glass within the three openings. I had enough time to hand sand back one of the openings and for this I used a short Permagrit sanding block that I acquired at Oshkosh. When my right arm had had enough of sanding I laid up a carbon - glass - carbon sheet on the workbench. My plan is to use this as the covering for the gap between the two door frames at the top of the aircraft. Within the gap I am making a map pocket and mounting the headset sockets and power supply for the Active Noise Reduction units. I am also contemplating making a small standoff at the front to house a couple of switching breakers to control infrequently accessed services and may also house my pip pin and door latch monitoring system.
August 19th Finished off the dremel cutting and did some more sanding. Another half hour of block sanding should have the job completed.
August 20th Sanding finished. Cut and shaped the foam for the top reinforcing.
August 21st No building as I had to make up the oven bake controller. This unit will be used to control the glass baking when John Caukwell and I bake our parts in his glider trailer. The controller is microprocessor based using a Basic Stamp processor and controls two independent heaters with programmed temperature ramp up and down.
August 22nd Prepared the glass for the top lay-ups. Laid in the peel ply for the top inspection plates.
August 23rd
Glassed up the top lay-ups and applied glass to the inspection
plate areas. I embedded a small aluminium tube within the front
reinforcing bar to allow wiring to be added later. I also laid up
six small brackets to allow the panel to be screwed in. With the lay-ups setting I cut the panel out of the carbon fibre I had laid
up earlier in the week. I am using carbon fibre instead of the
using the ply suggested in the manual as I like the texture of
the carbon weave and think it would give a good effect on the
roof panel. It is also a lot easier to bend it to follow the
curve of the roof than ply!
Best job of the day was adding a small modification
to my inspection panels. Another builder gave me this tip and it
is well worth doing. I bought some cheap (US$2) domed inspection
plates at Oshkosh. I drilled out the rivets holding the spring
steel clip to the inspection plate, threw away the plate then
riveted the steel to my glass inspection plates using countersunk
rivets. A very small hole was also drilled into the inspection
plate to allow the insertion of an allen key for pulling the
plate away from the aircraft.
The inspection plates now clip neatly into place
without any exterior visible support. It took me only two minutes
each to convert my existing panels to this method and the effect
is very pleasing indeed. I'll fill the screw holes in the two
plates underneath the aircraft with filler at a later date.
August 24th Cut the carbon fibre plate to shape then attached nutplates to the attachment brackets before screwing the plate into place. There are a couple of places where the plate is sitting proud of the top rather than following the curve. I can fix this by adding another set of attachment points in between each of the existing ones though I think I'll have a go at heating the plate and introducing a bend into it first.
I removed the backing glass and then cut out the two upper inspection holes. Last job for the night was to push back the foam in all of the inspection holes and plates with a small cross head screwdriver and then apply flox to seal the edges.
August 26th Trimmed the inspection hole backing plates and then bonded them in place. While I was doing that my carbon fibre panel was being bent into shape. I had propped the panel up so that it was curved then placed a small fan heater to blow onto it and heat it up. By the time I had finished working on the inspection plates the panel had developed a most satisfying bend and, upon refitting it to the top of the door panel, now fits the curve very neatly.
August 27th No building SAANZ meeting
August 28th - 29th No building, away.
August 30th Worked on trimming the top and bottom moldings so that they would mate correctly. The intersection of the firewall and glass on the bottom molding requires quite a bit of work to get the two pieces to sit together. The top of the pitch bracket also required a lot of grinding back to prevent it from keeping the top molding from sitting too high. I now have the vertical positioning right however the joggle at the front is still a couple of millimetres out of line and the rear vertical joggles are around 1cm out. The difference between the two is as a result of the upper molding bulging so the prime area to concentrate on is the front joggle.
August 31st No building, Tim Ward came round for a visit.
