Last Modified July 10th 1999

June 1999, Flap Rigging

June 1st - June 4th No building

June 5th I removed the rotating core of the port rear lift pin as it was very free to rotate and was causing me great trouble when rigging. I cleaned up the core pieces and reapplied the Loctite before rigging the wings.

I checked the spacing between the aileron thrust plates. The port side is fine but the starboard side has too much free play so I'll have to strip off the tufnol buffer plate and remount it.

Turning my attention to the flaps I opened up the slots until I could achieve 27 degrees of movement on both sides and then increased the width slightly to give clearance around the tube.

The tube is slightly too long and is causing binding when the flap is retracted and needs to be cut back around 4mm on each side. Getting the bearing retainer out of the end in order to cut the tube back proved to be a really interesting exercise as the retainer is a very tight fit in the tube.

I started work on the lay-up over the tube where it goes through the tunnel. I laid in two plies of bid over the top and then floxed the pieces of foam that I cut into place over the glass and around the tube where it exits at the sides. The instructions then have you immediately lay up two more layers of glass over the foam however I have decided to leave that until the first part sets to allow me to sand the foam back to closely match the shape of the tunnel.

I had mixed up too much flox so I added some more resin, mixed in some more flox and Europa supplied surface filler until I had a thick paste. I then used this to fill the joggles at the trailing edge of all of the control surfaces. Using flox within the filler results in a very hard edge which is less susceptible to damage than if I had used surface filler alone.

June 6th Cut a 7" length of MS20001-5 hinge to act as my aileron trim tab. I cut a slit in the top skin in line with the surface of the trailing edge flange and then floxed the hinge into place. Later in the day when the flox had set I fitted five MSC-32 countersunk rivets to lock the hinge into place.

I made the actuating arm out of aluminium angle and experimented with the shape until I could get complete movement of the tab and the arm looked good. I riveted the tab to the arm with Cherry solid plugging structural rivets. While I had the rivet gun out I drilled out the three rivets holding the rudder push arm socket in place and replaced these with structural rivets. I was a bit concerned that the rivets I had used before weren't quite far enough through the assembly so decided to replace the existing pop rivets with longer structural rivets. It's funny how things you aren't quite happy with keep nagging at you until you end up fixing the part!

June 7th Sanded back the foam that was used to fill the tunnel slot. I am glad I left the top lay-up until later as I now have a foam section that exactly matches the shape of the tunnel.

I dragged the plane back outside and rigged the wings. With the flap tube set evenly across the fuselage I was able to confirm that the 4mm I had taken off the ends now gave enough clearance at the flaps to prevent them being thrust outwards when the flaps were retracted.

I marked the position of the flap plates and then drilled and cut my way through the bottom of the fuselage to create the slots. The manual states that the slots should be 90mm long going backwards from the back of the bulkhead. It really does mean from the back of the bulkhead and not from the reinforcing glass lay-up! I found that I had to grind into the bulkhead and create a sloped face to the front of the slot in order to get the bracket to line up with the inner flap arms.

I was quite prepared for the fact that I may have to cut into the bulkhead in order to position the brackets as I had discussed this fact with Andy at Europa only a week or so earlier. It is critical to the operation of the flaps that the bracket holes are in line with the flap arms and if this means hacking into the bulkhead in order to position them correctly then it should be done. I didn't have to break through the bulkhead but the starboard side is getting pretty close to the front face so I'll make a glass reinforcement over that area later on.

This part of the job is being made easier by the fact that I have the new bulkhead which can be removed. I cannot imagine what it would be like if you were trying to do this with the original bulkhead and the top permanently bonded on in accordance with the instructions in the manual! I dare say there were more than a few expletives issued by the early builders when they came to this section of the build!

I finished the day by playing around with a spar guide with the objective of making the aircraft easier to rig. I haven't got it right yet and that port rear lift socket is still causing me grief when rigging the wing. One in twenty times it will go in so simply, for the other nineteen it simply jams up. I have noticed that the area around the forward lift pin is flexing when rigging the wing as I have not yet got the reinforcing in place around the pin area. Other builders have noted that the flexing causes difficulty in rigging which goes away once the reinforcing is in place. I hope that mine is the same!

Ooops, almost forgot to thank Carol for the loan of her Anchor 339 embroidery cotton which I used as a guide line when setting up the flap plates. I promise I'll buy another packet to replace it :-)

June 8th No building. One of the advantages of having your builders log on the net is that if you make a goof somebody tends to pick it up. I had a phone call from Kevin Pownall in Western Australia who let me know that my rear lift sockets were on upside down! The sockets are symmetrical other than one 3/16" bolt hole at the bottom (or top in my case!).

June 9th Decided that there was no way I was going to remove the rear plates and be able to match up all of the holes correctly without a lot of work so I drilled a new 3/16" hole at the bottom of each plate to match the one at the top and moved the bolts. Rather than leave the top holes empty I'll buy another pair of high tensile allen head bolts and fit them to the vacant holes.

June 10th - 11th No building.

June 12th The weather wasn't good enough to rig the aircraft outside so I removed the top to finish off work on rigging the tailwheel. I locked the rudder pedals at the neutral position by inserting a bar between the holes in the toe rests and placing two clamps over the rudder pedal cross bars in the centre well. The final connection to the tailwheel arm is by a pair of turnbuckles with clips connecting the turnbuckle to the arm. I nicopressed the ends of the cables and adjusted the tension so that the cables just had the slack taken off them.

The stop block needed to have its arms trimmed back to allow it to swing through 80 degrees each side. The arm ratio swings the tailwheel through sixty degrees when the rudder is at its full deflection of 30 degrees while another 20 degrees of movement is available for prop blast assisted turns. The XS configuration limits tailwheel movement to 45 degrees either side.

The final part of Graham Singleton's XS tailwheel conversion is to add a safety cord to prevent the internally mounted springs from fouling the rudder in the event of a tailwheel cable breaking.

I used 1/8" bungee cord as the safety cord adjusting its length so that if was just going taught at full rudder deflection. The cord was attached to the cable spring and tailwheel spring by cable ties.

Note that the tailwheel spring mounting bolt is not fitted yet as I have removed it until the aircraft is painted

June 13th With all of the tailwheel work completed I disassembled the tailwheel assembly then cleaned up the spring, the rudder push rod, the trim tab arm and stop block. A final coat of paint was then applied to tidy everything up.

While the paint on those bits was drying I applied primer then a coat of grey paint internally in the area around the trim tab slots. I did this to reduce the visibility of the internals of the trim slots when viewing the aircraft.

Can't put it off any longer. Time to fill the rest of the control surfaces. Having learnt the basics previously I filled one side of each of the ailerons and flaps and also filled the second side of the fin.

My technique for filling is to apply one scrub coat, scraping the filler hard into the weave then repeat the fill process, scraping the filler back off the cloth as much as possible. This dramatically reduces the sanding required and also reduces the filler required to do the job. Once this first layer is sanded back then any low areas can be filled with a second pass of the filler. The ailerons need a bit of care when filling as the counterbalance reinforcements create a slight lump which means that the rest of the surface has to be filled up to their level.

June 14th - 15th No building

June 16th Reassembled the tailwheel and refitted the aft push rods. In the original XS tailwheel configuration there is a pin pushed through the shaft to act as a stop at 45 degrees for the tailwheel. As mine now swivels further than that I don't require the pin, however it does serve one other purpose in that it fills the hole in front of the grease nipple. Without the pin the grease would simply spread out over the tailwheel. I cut the pin back to the diameter of the shaft and inserted it into the hole. Fitted a thin rubber bead along the edges of the cockpit area top cover plate to tidy things up a little.

June 17th - 18th No building

June 19th Rigged the plane again and spent six hours getting the position of the flap pivot arms in the correct place. To ensure that I had everything in the right place I rigged the flaps up with the actuating rod between them and then fitted the pivot arms into the slots to act as a positioning guide for the fuselage mounted plates. I needed to widen the slots to 16mm from the specified 15mm to get the correct spacing and enough freedom for the actuator to pivot.

June 20th Filled the second side of the flaps and sanded back one of the ailerons. Did some work refining my landing light design.

June 21st - 25th No building, working in Whangarei.

June 26th Spent a bit of time sanding back the fuselage area around the starboard lift pins where I had applied filler.

June 27th No building, family gathering.

June 28th No building, packing

June 29th - 30th No building, in Los Angeles - flying Kim Prout's Europa with Kim and CFI Steve "Mad Dog" Magursky. Kim's aircraft is fitted with the original tailwheel which makes the takeoffs "entertaining" to say the least and made me very glad that I have the XS tailwheel on the aircraft.

Landings I could handle. In fact my first landing was the gentlest of transitions from flying to a low rumble of wheels on the ground to which Steve's reaction was along the lines of "Gosh, that was a jolly good landing" - modesty and self imposed censorship prevent me from using his exact words! Takeoffs were another matter and took some time before the technique clicked. In the end Steve was happy to sign a type rating off for the aircraft. To celebrate Steve taught me to do rolls so I did a few on the way back to home base. The next day Steve took me up in his Zlin (hence Mad Dog!) to formate with Kim before showing me what aeros were really about!

Oh, and everything they say about Kim's aircraft is true, it is very very fast. I couldn't keep it in the green (135 knot cruise) if my fuel flow was more than 2 US gallons an hour! At full throttle the airspeed races towards Vne at an astonishing rate. And all of this out of a 95hp engine with two on board!!!!