|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Last Modified May 31st 1999
May 1st I had planned to do the wing incidence setup this weekend however the weatherman let me down. After a week of glorious weather and no wind it decided to rain today. Ground out the channel for the aileron trim push rod then fitted the motor to the aileron. I used countersunk 1/8" screws inserted from the top surface to hold the motor in place. A hole was drilled through from the motor space to the leading edge for the cables. I'll use a subminiature connector within the aileron to terminate the power wire to the motor.
I fitted two support brackets to the undercarriage
bulkhead. For this I used 1" x 1/2" aluminium with the
short side vertical. The brackets were fitted to the top and
bottom of the bulkhead and will be reduxed to the fuselage later.
The two support plates are 100mm wide and have 3/16"
nutplate fitted 25mm in from the edge. Spent a bit of time
painting metalwork.
After several attempts I have finally selected a colour and finish for my instrument panel. I am sure that the guy down at the local hardware store thinks I am a secret graffiti artist with a predilection for grey as a result of the number of times I have been in there. My instrument panel finish will be a light grey primer covered with a clear plastic top coat. This gives a great looking and hard wearing matt finish.
May 2nd Since
it was still raining I decided to make up the surrounds for the
rudder pedals. I selected a piece of thin stainless steel, worked
on it for a while to prove that I had made the right decision not
to build an aircraft in sheet metal and then threw the metal
away. Cut out a couple of 100mm x 70mm pieces from the firewall
segment that had been cut out in front of the tunnel. I then
drilled and reamed two 20mm holes in each piece to match the
location of the rudder pedal shafts and then cut each piece along
its length. A little filing was required to ensure clearance
around the shafts and one this was done I drilled two 5/32"
holes through each half in through the side of the firewall. The
lower halves I held in place with self tapping screws while the
upper halves had nutserts fitted into them and #4-40 screws
holding them in place from the inside of the cockpit. I used 3M
Firestop 2000 caulk to close the spaces around the crosstubes and
to seal the plates against the firewall.
Marked out some of the metalwork for the engine compartment fit out. Spray painted the flap drive tube.
While I was ferreting in one of my parts boxes (which look very empty these days) I found a tube labeled LG02B. Hmmm. Being reasonably bright I guessed that it was part of the landing gear! I checked out the manual and the diagrams but no reference to part LG02B was to be found. I assumed that it was closely related to part LG02A and yes, there it was in the diagrams. Part LG02B passes through LG02A and is the lower bungee cord support. Removed LG02A from the undercarriage, fitted LG02B and reinstalled LG02A.
When the caulk had dried I was able to confirm what I had hoped would happen. On moving the rudder pedals the caulk split neatly around the tube giving as close to a gas tight joint as practical. Should the worst happen, Firestop 2000 expands in a fire to seal the joint.
May 3rd Experimented with making up my own fast-on bus bars by soldering tags to a brass strip. Came to the conclusion that there were better things to do and decided to buy them from the Aero Electric Connection instead.
May 4th - 5th No building
May 6th Received my drill extension shaft back from the machine shop where it had been for a little rework. I had them cut it to length, add a flange on the front surface and tap the end for a screw. As the shaft is made out of stainless steel I didn't have the equipment to do a good job of this. I remounted the fuel selector and made up a plate to fill the hole in the top of the tunnel. Mounting the fuel selector in this position gives instant access in the same way that the selector is quickly available on the XS.
I am seriously considering replacing all of the fuel lines supplied with solid aluminium tubing as the thought of digging inside the tunnel in a few years time to replace the fuel lines supplied is one that doesn't fill me with joy. There will be a fair bit of messing around to accomplish this at this stage but I suspect that it would be nothing compared to replacing the pipes once everything is bolted up. If I do go this way then the original selector will be replaced with an Andair selector and gascolator mounted in a recess on the pilot's side of the centre tunnel.
May 8th No building
May 9th At last, a wind free and clear day on a weekend. I dragged the plane outside ready for setting up the spacers for the lift pins. Once Stefan and I had rigged the wings I set about making up spacers for the aft lift pins. I ended up making these out of 9mm ply cut into circles. Shaping these was quite a time consuming task and took the better half of a day before I had them set to the right size. Once I was happy with them I reduxed the spacers to the fuselage sides.
The spacing at the front was 4mm at its largest
dimension so I have decided that I'll make the pad out of
multiply layers of bid rather than using plywood. The spacing
varies from top to bottom and fore/aft across the pin so I'll
make up a pad thick enough to handle the largest dimension and
then grind the pad back until it matches the angle of the socket.
May 9th
Dragged the fuselage back outside and laid up four plies of bid
over the two aft lift socket supports. I found that I had to
build up a fillet of flox around the base of the wooden block
even though the block was angled. Without the flox the glass just
wanted to separate from the fuselage at the edge of the block. I
laid up a block of multiple layers of glass over the front socket
area.
In the afternoon I took the boys down to witness the
unveiling of a close friend's newly painted Fouga Magister
fighter that has joined the Auckland Warbirds collection. The
Magister spends most of its flying time zipping around the
Auckland skies as a naval radar testing target. Photo courtesy of
my 11 year old son, Nathan, who stole my digital camera for the
afternoon.
When we came back I did some work on the aileron quick disconnects. I primed these with System 3 primer some three years ago and unfortunately the primer now easily separates from the aluminium. These are the last pieces to be stripped back to bare metal and re primed with zinc chromate primer.
Before bed I ripped off the peel ply on the lay-ups and checked that all was well. I have one small bubble on the port lay-up which I'll flood with resin.
May 10th A gentle suggestion was made that I spend a bit of time in the lounge after having spent all weekend playing airplanes. Took up the suggestion :-)
Now I have a little confession to make, not all of the 'No Building' log entries over the past month have been truthful! In one week the new Maximum All Up Weight increase mod for the Europa will start shipping and I was "lucky" enough to do some early builder testing of this mod. The following are my experiences to date...
It should be noted that I did this work based on the original set of instructions provided by Europa. As a result of my experiences the instructions provided with the kit may be different though the procedures will be roughly the same as I document. It should also be noted that the mod assumes that the lift pins and wing incidence setting has been done at this stage. I was ready to do the wing incidence setup just before this mod and had everything set up to jig the wings at the correct angle so decided to incorporate the mod into my wing rigging procedure.
Day 1 Started the MAUW mod. This mod achieves four things for the original model of the Europa.
There mod is quite extensive but is broken down into several simple steps. The first of these is changing all of the spar sockets to accommodate 1/2" pins. A larger version of the original Europa pin positions the spars on the starboard side while a large pip pin secures and locks the spars on the port side. Drilling out the original spar sockets is done with a 3/4" hole saw and I found that the saw must be at least 1 1/4" in depth in order to drill out the sockets located closest to the port wing as these have to be drilled out from the leading edge. I had to buy another hole saw when I discovered this! All of the others can be drilled halfway from each side of the spar. Drilling all but the port wing side socket out on the spars and doing a tiny amount of filing to accommodate the new sockets took two hours. Most of it was spent waiting for the sockets to cool down as the heat builds up quite rapidly from the drill guide supplied with the mod kit. This guide is a sleeve that fits over the hole saw's 1/4" drill bit and is a close fit within the 3/8" bushing to ensure that the new holes are drilled perpendicular to the spar surface. The port wing socket is proving to be difficult.
Day 2 Drilled out the sockets in the cockpit module and then reamed out the spar positioning cup holes to 1/2". I also cleaned up the glass from the wing root lay-ups from around the spar sockets closest to the wing root. This created just enough space for the new bushing to sit against the spar surface. Went out and bought a length of 1/2 threaded rod and some nuts for the set up process. I came to the conclusion that there is no way that you can cleanly do the port socket without removing the cup so I removed it with the help of a bit of heat and then drilled out the bushing. I could have saved myself the cost of the second hole saw if I had removed the cup first!
Day 3 Also came to the conclusion that the starboard spar cup had to come off so I removed that. I rigged the wings and tried to follow the instructions to bolt the wings to the fuselage. Even though my wings don't have the fairings fitted I found this very difficult and it would be impossible to achieve with them fitted. Changed the build procedure. I took the wings off and set them up so that the spars overlapped. I floxed the spar bushings in place, covered the tips of the spars with cling film and then bolted the spars together. It is important to check that the bolts are perpendicular to the spars here. I must admit that I didn't quite get the port one right but the slight angle can easily be taken up when fitting the bushing to the fuselage though if I can get it out I might have another go. Cut out a section of the port aileron thrust plate to provide clearance around the port pip pin.
Day 4 Rigged the wings or at least tried to. That slight angle on the port side, while still allowing the wings to be rigged, just doesn't allow the pin to be inserted freely enough for my liking. After some deep thought I decided to remove the port side bushings. To do this I applied heat to the inside of the bushings until the flox surrounding them gave way. I cleaned the bushings and the holes up and sat the bushings back in the holes. I rigged the wings and checked that the pins could be inserted freely just to ensure that this was the only problem. The pins went in very easily this time.
Day 5 Graham Singleton suggested a method of getting the bushings in line - bond nuts to the aft bushings with rapid epoxy! This allows the bolts to be inserted from the front without requiring any access from the read of the spars and allows the fuselage and wing bushings to be floxed in place as was the original intent of the manual. Painted the aft pin cross fuselage tube.
Day 6 Floxed the port bushings in place and rigged the wings ensuring that they were set a 2.5 degrees to the fuselage. Unfortunately I discovered that epoxying the nuts in place wasn't strong enough to support the bolt and the nuts came off as soon as the bolt was driven through the spar. I derigged the wings and removed the aileron quick disconnect system completely. This gave me limited access to the spar end area. This would be impossible if the wing fairings were already in place.
I used a hemostat (actually I should say I ruined a hemostat) to hold the nut which then allowed me to fit it onto
the end to the bolt. At this point I discovered that the bolts
supplied were too long so I dashed out and bought a packet of
1/2" washers and added half a dozen or so washers under the
head of each bolt.
Day 7 Remounted the spar cups and did the bid lay-up on top of the port spar cup to retain the pip pin washer which I had reduxed in place. The manual says that this should be floxed in place however experience has shown that that flox doesn't bond well to steel so I used redux instead.
May 11th Gee some builders are dumb. Spot the deliberate error in the lift pin picture directly above the photo of the Magister. For some reason I had it fixed in my head that the forward lift pins sat vertically. Jim Thursby sent me some pictures of N512SA (G-ELSA as was) yesterday as he thought I might be interested in seeing what she looked like while it was being refurbished. One of the pictures showed the starboard lift pins. Hmmm, thought I, they don't look like mine. I spent the rest of the day thinking about this and upon returning home from work dived into the garage to check the manual. Sure enough, despite having read the manual a zillion times, I was about to install the front lift pins in the wrong orientation, they should be horizontal! The only way I can think that I got the orientation wrong is that I had done most of the work with the socket with the wings vertically in their holders, of course in that position they match the diagram in the book and my brain obviously got used to seeing them in that position. I should have rotated the sockets by 90 degrees when I rigged the wings. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Luckily I hadn't yet trimmed back the pad lay-ups and they are large enough to handle rotating the sockets to the correct orientation. I ground back the bits of the pad lay-ups which were not required leaving enough on the top and bottom to cater for any slight offset I may need when I come to grind the face back at the weekend if the weather is fine. I drilled the pin hole from the inside and will open this up further at the weekend.
May 12th Drilled out the inside rear wing crossbar plates. The manual says to drill one hole as a guide prior to fitting the external plate though I think it might be better to drill two to assure alignment. I'll leave it at one at this stage just in case there is something that I haven't considered.
May 13th In
preparation for the final plate bonding I added another set of
incidence blocks at 70% of the span. The incidence at this point
is more critical than at the root so setting the incidence
alignment at this point will result in a more accurate alignment
of the wings. Remembering that there is 1.5 degrees of washout in
the original wing, the angle of incidence at this point needs to
be 2.5 - (1.5 x 0.7) = 1.45 degrees. I'll settle for 1.5 degrees
as my digital spirit level won't measure .05 of a degree. I set
the wings up so that the spar was vertical then using my
reference mark on the leading edge positioned a small (and very
flat) piece of wood at the 70% span mark. A few blobs of hot melt
glue locked the block into place.
May 14th No building
May 15th The
weatherman wasn't nice to me and it was too windy to do the wing
setup. I turned my attention to the flap system metalwork and
fitted all of the bearings and end fittings to the pieces. Filing
back the FL19 flap horn took quite a bit of time as this piece
has to have a chamfer cut into it to enable it to clear the
landing gear support assembly when the gear is retracted. Once
the chamfer was cut to my satisfaction I primed and painted the
piece. Glassed up some thin plywood for use later in the flap
roots.
May 16th Fitted the flap horn to the undercarriage retract arm using temporary nuts at this stage as the arm has to be removed during the flap setup stage..
I felt that it was about time to delve under the aircraft and play with the undercarriage. First thing I discovered was that my jig, as I had built it, impeded the placement of the undercarriage so I cut out the centre of the cross bar to allow the wheel to sit there. I mounted the undercarriage on its hinge arm and loosely bolted everything in place. With a bit of muscle I was able to lift the undercarriage up to check that nothing conflicted with it. I found that fitting the bar that holds the suspension mechanism to the undercarriage arm requires some quite considerable effort and is something that you wouldn't want to do too frequently so I have left that disconnected at the moment. I had thought earlier of rotating the brake block by 120 degrees to place it above the wheel as some other builders have done but in order to do this I'd have to cut out enough clearance in the starboard thigh support and, more importantly, redirect the rudder cables t
o ensure that enough clearance is available. I'll have a look at another aircraft that has had this done before I decide whether to go ahead with this modification.
May 17th To get around the fact that I didn't want to insert the suspension mechanism connecting bar at the present time I went out and bought a couple of 3/8" bolts, cut the threads off them and rounded the ends. I can insert these into the undercarriage arm from each side so that they go through the suspension mechanism just stopping short of the dampers. What is more, they are easy to remove! With those in place I crawled under the aircraft and took the weight off the wheel while Stefan activated the retraction lever. All worked very smoothly though I did note that the locking slot in the slider plate may need a little more clearance. Convinced that the undercarriage will actually work I managed to resist going for a "fly", lowered the undercarriage and removed the wheel to give me more clearance while I am finishing off the inside of the tunnel. The muscles I used yesterday to get the undercarriage into the raised position are today telling me that they aren't used to that type of work!
May 18th - 19th No building, too busy. :-(.
Received a couple of Autocad DXF files for the main Europa panel and the Europa radio panel from Mark Clark in South Africa which will help with cutting my instrument panel out. [If your browser loads these as text within the browser instead of downloading the files simply highlight all of the text, CTRL-A, copy it, CTRL-C, open Notepad and paste it, CTRL-V, then save the Notepad file with a .dxf extension].
Forecast for the weekend, a nice fat high of 1032mb, no wind, no clouds, it's wing incidence setting weekend at last!
May 20th Made
up and fitted the snail cam brake lock. I first saw this on John
Tye's Europa and thought that it was particularly clever. The
secret to this clever little device is that the radius increases
as the angle increases.
May 21st A spectacular Auckland autumn day, 18c and crystal clear. I brought out the fuselage and rigged it to be level, this time using a pair of car jacks to compensate for the weight of the wings.
Stefan and I rigged rigged the wings, pushing them in as far as possible onto the fuselage before the lift pins struck the new pads. I opened up the holes to allow the lift pins to enter and then filed back the front pads until the wings could be rigged correctly. I checked the incidence using the new incidence boards that I had fitted and was far from satisfied that this was actually going to help as it placed the forward pins far below where they were when I had used the root as a reference. I decided to abandon using the 70% span mark as a reference, derigged the wings and reattached the reference blocks at the root. We rigged the wings so that they were set up at 2.5 degrees incidence at the root.
All told it took around four hours to get to this point and I was ready to finish work for the day but Stefan suggested that since we had everything set up perfectly why don't we bond the sockets in place now. Once he had accepted the fact that I would probably be getting him out of bed at later tonight I cleaned all of the bonding areas with acetone and applied Redux.
Before I left the parts to set I checked the wing sweep by running a line from the forward tip to the firewall and from the aft tip to the centre of the stabilator torque tube. To complete the triangulation I ran another line from wing tip to wing tip passing through the cockpit. A bit of quick drawing showed that both wings were within alignment to an accuracy of 3mm. The final check I did was to check the angle of the surface immediately in front of the ailerons at the tip which showed 10.4 degrees on both sides.
Having ensured that everything was still in line we
departed to the local model shop to buy some paint for the F22
kit that Stefan is building.
Upon return I checked the incidence again and then continued to check it once an hour. By 8pm it was pretty obvious that the drop in temperature was slowing down the setting of the Redux so Stefan and I bundled up warm, grabbed a pair of hairdryers and spent two hours keeping the area around the sockets warm.
It was then the moment of truth! If the wing lift pins that I had put in some months ago weren't in the correct axis then getting the wings out was going to be an interesting (or impossible) task. Having removed the pins I grabbed the end of the starboard wing and tugged. No movement. Gulp! Another tug and a tiny bit of Redux that had got onto the forward lift pin gave way and the wing came free. One down, one to go. A tug at the port wing had it coming away from the wing cleanly.
A very satisfying day.
May 22nd Cleaned
up the work I did yesterday, drilled the bolt holes through into
the fuselage. Matching the aft internal bar support is quite
tricky and I am still convinced it would be better to drill all
of the holes in the inner plate to match the outer plate prior to
fitting the outer plate to the fuselage. Note that this is the
new aft lift socket which allows the lift pin to rotate slightly
in the vertical plane.
Important note: The wing socket in this picture is upside down. The centre bolt fitting goes on the bottom. I made a mistake and had to fix this later on.
The steel tube supplied in the MAUW kit was slightly too long so I trimmed that back until it fitted comfortably inside the fuselage.
I cut the gusset support blocks so that they fitted correctly behind the bar. The port side spacing from the bar to the rear bulkhead is 25mm however the starboard side is only 19mm. This must have occurred when I was fitting the cockpit module into the fuselage with the bulkhead splaying slightly on the starboard side. The only consequence of this is that I will have to trim back the gusset plates for the MAUW mod so that the pre drilled plates in the gusset plates can be positioned over the centre of the cross bar.
Important Note: The original upgrade instructions did not include a note to trim back the two bolts protruding through the internal wing lift plate. As a consequence my gusset support blocks are further inboard than they should be. It is important that both bolts attaching the gussets to the cross bar also go through the internal wing lift plate. Fixing this up later was not a trivial task!!
I cut the slot in the central tunnel for the bar to pass through and then trimmed back the outer surface to accommodate the supplied foam insert. I trimmed the foam to fit the area that was cut back.
I bonded the gusset support block to the bulkhead and then once the rapid epoxy had set I laid up the four plies of bid over the gusset support blocks.
The XS manual (but not the Classic manual) has a section in the wing rigging procedure which has you check the alignment of the bolts that the aileron thrust plates pivot on. With the wings rigged I checked if the bolts were in line.
While the starboard side lines up perfectly the port side is going to need fixing as the wing fitting doesn't line up with the fuselage fitting. This is due to the fact that I used the rear of the spar as the reference for drilling the hole for the bolt on this wing.
May 24th Cut out some of the metalwork for my retractable landing light.
May 25th Removed the aileron thrust plate bolt from the wing and freed the hole up to allow the bolt to be realigned. This turned out to be extremely simple to achieve. I bored out the flox that was backing the bolt head and then gave the bolt a gentle tap to release it from the hole. A bit more boring was required to clear out the flox down to the Eurowasher within the wing core at which point I used a Permagrit circular needle file to open the hole up in the direction required. The bolt is only out of alignment at its thread by around 2mm so very little angular change was required. Next time the weather is fine over a weekend I'll rerig the wings and flox the bolt back into place. Once this is done I need to check the tufnol pad spacing as relocating the bolt will affect the spacing between the two plates.
May 26th - 28th No building
May 29th Re
rigged the wings in order to set the port wing bolt in place. I
cut a length of tube to match the length of the wing bolt, floxed
it in place and then rigged the wings. The piece of tube was then
slid over the fuselage bolt to ensure that the two were in a
common plane (so to speak).
I fitted the flaps to the wings and marked off the track of the flap actuating pin. This proved to be quite an entertaining task as the distance between the pin and the fuselage changes quite considerably over the actuating path of the flap. In the end a cut down whiteboard marker with the core removed sacrificed its life for the advancement of aviation.
I found that the new rear lift pin sockets have introduced an interesting problem when rigging the wings. As the sockets can rotate vertically, unless the socket is exactly in line with the wing pin, then the rear lift pins bind when rigging the wings. With the sockets line up correctly there is no issue but ensuring these are in line while rigging the wings is proving to be a challenge. I am trying to work out a way that will ensure that the rear sockets are lined up when rigging. This is going to be imperative if I am going to be able to rig the aircraft single handed.
My shipment from Aircraft Spruce arrived. First, the
manual shows the bolts holding the wheel brake block together to
be AN4H16A. They lie. I now have some spare AN4H16A bolts if
anyone wants any!
I remade the retract arm support out of 2024-T3 1/16" thick 1" x 1" angle that I had bought. This has proved to be a lot sturdier than the one I made out of sheet and hasn't affected the ability to move the arm out of its gate as was reported to me by another builder.
I discovered a side affect of building outside, out of the eight hours I had the aircraft outside today, just about two hours of it was spent talking to bystanders who wanted to know about the aircraft!
I cut out the core of the flap actuating arm slots and then tried to fit the actuating arm in through the slots. I finished the day trying to work out how to fit a metal bar that is wider that the aircraft in through the slots. What is complicating the matter is that the path for inserting the arm is restricted by the pitch tube.
May 30th Re mounted the aileron bellcranks on both wings and the fuselage. The area under the port bellcrank spacer need some cleaning up after the bolt was repositioned but this wasn't a major job. The thing that took the time was retrieving the bolt I had dropped inside the space between the seat back and the fuel tank!
Worked out how to fit the flap drive arm through the fuselage. Starting at the starboard side I opened up the top of the slot as much as I dared and then continued along the curve until I could slide the drive arm through. The arm was then pivoted forward until it entered the port slot and this was opened up until the tube could enter.
I was unable to do the flap setup today due to the fact that it was drizzling so I turned my attention to finishing off the MAUW mod. I cut back the starboard gusset plate until it would fit and then drilled out the required holes. I needed to use my 3/16" drill bit that I had modified to fit into my dremel flexible shaft to drill most of the holes as the holes were too close to the bulkhead for my angle bit to get into. I made up a thick mix of flox and used this to pack the space behind the inner cross bar plates then fitted the bar and the gusset plates. I used temporary bolts on the cross bar plates so as not to compress the flox pads.
The more observant reader of my index page will note that today is the one hundredth anniversary of Wilbur Wright's introduction to his design notes. Three and a half years later, less than the time that it is taking me to build this Europa, he and his brother had designed, built and flown their aircraft.
