Last Modified August 31st 1999

August 1999, Flaps Working!

August 1st Sunday dawned a beautifully fine day. While lying in bed I commented to Carol that it was it was a shame that I hadn't got the plane ready for flap rigging. Her reaction was that since I couldn't do any building then I should really fix the bathroom cabinet, strip back the varnish on the breakfast bar edge and, by the way, the sink in the laundry leaks. Any wise builder would take this as a subtle hint that work needs doing around the house so I set to work.

Having got all of the household tasks out of the way before lunch I clecoed the top onto the plane and moved it outside. My new design for the jig has two long beams cantilevered aft from the main assembly. These provide enough support for the back of the plane while moving it and can be propped up with trestles while doing work.

One very interesting side effect of changing to this type of support is that the wings now rig very easily. Stefan and I were quite surprised how easily the pins slipped into the sockets this time - a gentle push on the end of the wings, a clunk as they slid home and the wings were rigged. Instead of the wing shuffle that we used to do, this time we didn't even have to raise the wing tips to get the spar pins into place.

I checked out the position of the flap bar pivot brackets by using another piece of Carol's embroidery cotton. I needed a couple of wedges to keep the brackets in place so I made these out of mixing sticks and then, using a mixture of redux and flox, bonded the plates into place - the wedges becoming an integral part of the aircraft structure! To check on the position of the plates I temporarily fitted the pivot arms to the flap tube and visually verified that the plate and pivot arm were in place and that there was sufficient space for an FL11 plastic washer between them.

The workshop needed a bit of a tidy up and Stefan looked like he needed something to do so I put two and two together and let him do the work. Mind you, it cost me a few dollars!

While the redux was setting I applied the last coat of primer to the stabilator stubs.

In the evening I sanded back the stub faces with 240 grit paper until they were smooth to the touch. I then masked the area surrounding the stubs and, following a good clean up with water then Prep Wipe, applied the first layer of Polyfiber Flight Gloss. In all, three layers of Flight Gloss will be applied to the aircraft.

My nicopress go/no go gauge reappeared during the clean up so I checked the sleeves on the tailwheel and, having ascertained that they were squeezed correctly, I shrank the heatshrink over the sleeves and cable ends.

August 2nd Sprayed the second layer of Flight Gloss.

August 3rd Lesson learnt. Do not do any spraying unless you have good light. I ended up with runs on the starboard side which was away from the overhead light. No choice but to dig out some 600 grit sanding paper and sand back the Flight Gloss. Once I had the surface back to primer I reapplied another coat of primer to seal the surface off.

August 4th Worked on the door latching mechanism. This is one area where I feel Europa has done a disservice to its builders as the shaping of these pieces requires quite a bit of expertise. I decided that I didn't have the skills or tools to shape the ends of the rods so handed the job over to a professional engineering company. The rods came back with a note that there would be no charge as they had difficulty getting the ends right! They are passable but look like I had done the work myself. This evening I drilled out the pilot holes in the ends to their correct size and fitted the roll pins.

August 5th I must admit that there are days when I wonder why I am doing this. Why on earth didn't I just go and buy and airplane!! This feeling usually coincides with me discovering that I have goofed and this time was no different. I came to fit the support plate for the door latch into the door and discovered that it doesn't fit into the hole that I had previously drilled in the door.. I checked the placement of the hole and came to the conclusion that it didn't match any position shown in the manual. The horizontal location was fine but the vertical was some 7mm from where it should have been. I made up a two ply bid lay-up and laid it on the inside of the door to back the incorrect hole location. Spent the rest of the evening bench testing the door latches.

August 6th Before I went to work I filled the original holes with flox and peel plyed the surfaces. When I got home form work I tidied up the repair and redrilled the holes in the correct location. Applied another coat of paint to the stabilator stubs.

August 7th Brought the plane outside to work on the flap system. I drilled the holes through the flap arm pivot plates and fitted the bolts then trial fitted the pivot arms into the flap actuating tube before clamping the arms into place.

August 8th A red letter day. Fitted the pivot plates to the arm then installed the flap actuating rod. With the rod clamped in its mid position I reinstalled the outrigger system to both wings. I found that the installation of the pitot line in the port flap closeout fouled the outrigger mechanism so I removed the pitot line from the closeout. I will reinstall this with more clearance for the outrigger. I can now sit in the cockpit, pull the gear lever and have the flaps and outriggers actuate.

August 9th One advantage of assembling an aircraft in your front garden is that you occasionally get to receive some useful advice from passers by. Apart from an airline founder, two avionics engineers, an ex De Havilland Mosquito bomber fitter, the vice president of an aero club and this crazy bloke building an aeroplane in his garage, the residents of the street tend to be aviation unaware so the plane is always a topic of conversation. On Sunday I had a discussion with one interested passer by and the conversation turned to the difficulty I was experiencing in drilling the safety holes through high tensile bolts. Within a minute I had been given advice on the technique required and a promise that some suitable cutting paste would be supplied.

Shortly after arriving home this evening the said cutting compound was dropped off with a smile and I retired to the garage. First thing to do was to spot mark the bolt head where the hole was to be made then the bolt was securely held in place in the drill press. A new 1/16" drill bit running at 2500 rpm was used to create the hole with a good blob of cutting compound applied to the drill bit. With gentle pressure applied and the drill bit being retrieved from the hole every few millimetres it was incredibly easy to get the holes cut. In less than half an hour I had all the bolts on the aircraft that need safetying drilled.

August 10th - 12th No building, working out of Auckland. When I got home I found that my new brake support block had arrived from Europa. This block has the mounting holes drilled such that the brake block mounts in line with the swing arm. This prevents the loss of the brake block in the event of a flat tyre (a hazard with its previous orientation) and also tidies the plane up aerodynamically. I will need to adjust the location of the rudder cable support blocks to accommodate the brake block when the gear is retracted but this is a small price to pay for the overall improvements.

August 13th Mounted the new brake support block and safety wired the bolts.

August 14th Applied the final coat of Top Gloss then turned my attention back to the door latch mechanisms. The trickiest bit about fitting the standard mechanism is trimming just the right amount out of the door to allow the mechanism to be inserted. Europa refer to this trimming with a little note on one diagram that says "relieve to fit".

Once I had the mechanism in place I bent the longer aft action bar so that it wouldn't contact any of the door surfaces. I am fitting door locks so the next step was to drill a hole on the internal surface to give access to the lock and the clip that goes around the aft bar to act as the stop. I centred the hole on the bar but a better place would be to centre the hole about 1" up from the bar. The only down side of centering the hole on the bar was that a bent nose pair of pliers is required while fitting the lock itself. I drilled a pilot hole for the lock and then opened up the hole to the correct shape before fitting the bolt into place and testing the action. With the mechanism in place I tested the starboard door in place. With the revised length of shaft provided in one of the newsletters the door will not even close with the door latch open so I had to take more off the latch end than originally specified. I am modifying my latches to match the XS and will be fitting sleeves to the door surround as well as to the door so this extra bit taken off the tip of the bolt will not affect the security of the door.

August 15th Polished the paint on the stabilator stubs with 2000 grit wet and dry and then reassembled the torque tube assembly. Drilled the aft fuselage drain hole and cleaned all of the drill residue out the rear section of the aircraft. Replicated the door setup on the port side and then prepared both doors for bonding the latching mechanism in place.

I am fitting door handles to the inside of the door at the rear as this helps with closing the doors. These handles are wooden moldings bought at Home Depot in Ontario, CA and are already present on a few flying Europas. These door handles just needed a bit of shaping to the mounting surface before being reduxed into place at the same time as the I bonded the latching mechanisms into place.

I finally managed to source some speckle paint in New Zealand and sprayed the overhead panel with the stuff. I am going to spray all of the overhead surfaces and baggage bay with this paint as it covers surfaces very well and is a lot easier than fitting a head lining. The effect is really pleasing and hides a million building sins!

August 16th With the door latching mechanism now bonded in place I fitted the actuating bars to the mechanisms. I bit of light machine oil removed all of the stiffness in the joints and the mechanisms work as expected. I checked the spacing between the ends of the bolts with the door open and had to take a couple of millimetres off each of the tips to get the spacing correct. Speckle painted the plastic molding which fills the hole in the rear bulkhead.

August 17th No building.

August 18th Cut the door mechanism covers to shape then fitted the outside handles to the doors.

August 19th Mounted the main gear and checked how the new brake bracket looks. As can be seen from the photo to the left the new position is much better than the previous location. As well as removing the hazard associated with deflated tyres the brake block is now totally enclosed within the fuselage when the gear is retracted thus reducing drag.

The downside is that I am going to have to relocate the rudder cables as the new brake position conflicts with the brake block. This will also require repositioning of the tufnol sliders by the firewall.

August 20th No building

August 21st Started work on the LA mod. This is a pretty drastic modification which requires large sections of the cockpit module to be cut out. I started off cutting out the minimum area required to perform the mod. An earlier Europa Club newsletter suggested that it wasn't necessary to cut the lip at the top of the tunnel so I decided to try this first. One thing I do want to incorporate in this mod is the repositioning of the fuel selector which I want to place horizontally by my right hip. This requires a flat section some 7.5 cm wide so my mod will incorporate this.

I spent the rest of the day experimenting with different methods of assembling the foam required for supporting the glass lay-ups. After many attempts I came to the conclusion that the best method was to stick to the proven method of shaping foam blocks and trying not to get the brain too confused!

I also came to the conclusion that it was going to be a lot easier to implement the original Europa design for the mod removing the top lip as this is means there is one less awkward curve that the foam shaping has to match. For the sake of my sanity I am only going to do the mod on the pilot's side of the aircraft as there is no way I am going to do two bid lay-ups inside that tunnel!

The first picture is taken from underneath the aircraft and shows how the blocks have been shaped to clear the wheel. The flat area at the back will house the fuel shutoff valve.

The picture below shows the outside with the blocks still protruding. One block has been cut back to verify that I have the exterior shape mapped correctly. If you look carefully you can see a diagonal line on the top face. This marks the point at which the inset area will be opened up to create the space giving access to the fuel shutoff valve.

I have now removed the support block for the original fuel shutoff valve and will apply one layer of bid over the area where it was just to tidy things up. This clears the centre of the tunnel for the laying of fuel lines forward and gives me a straight run for the flow senders.

August 22nd Had a fun day shaping foam. The entertainment comes from the fact that the interior of the foam has to be shaped to clear the wheel and also match the desired external shape.

I made the filling out of three blocks and initially shaped the foam so that it matched the shape of the tunnel. With that established I shaped the interior profile of the foam as required. Once the blocks were shaped I used 5 minute epoxy to bond them in place then did a bit of final shaping on the inside of the tunnel.

Note the two black handles on the throttle. These were kindly send to me by John Moran and, believe it or not, are wine cask knobs from a brand of American wine! I built up a solid surface on the base of these with 5 minute epoxy then drilled a 3/16" hole for a bolt to pass through. Washers were places under the bolt and nut to provide some reinforcing and, with the tops put back on, certainly look great.

You do not want to see the state of the garage floor! Sanding blue foam for two days results in blue snow - even Marmalade the cat had it in her fur.

August 23rd Cut out the cloth for the interior lay-up. This piece of cloth is 40cm x 75cm and will consist of three layers of bid overlapping onto the existing structure by around 2" each side with a 5mm thickness of foam in between the two layers. At the same time I'll reinstate the panel into the top cutout and bond that into place. If I have any offcuts from this lay-up I will then use them to glass the MAUW mod foam into the tunnel at the same time.

August 24th No building. I have received several e-mails regarding the 'LA Mod', most asking what the mod is for. The Europa, being a British design, originally catered for a (slightly taller than) average British body frame - namely Ivan Shaw's. Many overseas builders found that their posteriors (or Large A**es) didn't fit into the cockpit very well. The LA mod was developed which opens up the hip room thus increasing the comfort level for these builders. In its ultimate form the LA mod turned into the revised shape of the XS central tunnel molding which gives a lot more hip room than the classic design.

August 25th Dug out the snowplough and cleaned up the foam from the workshop floor. Laid out the cloth for the lay-up.

August 26th -27th No building

August 28th Another beautiful Auckland winters day. Instead of doing the LA mod lay-up I took the plane out of the garage and finished off the work setting up the flaps.

This was the first time we have rigged the wings with the flap arms setup and I must say that the ease of rigging surprised both Stefan and I. All that is required is a quick look to ensure that the front lift pin is located then it's a simple matter of rotating the wing slightly forward and pushing inwards. Both sides ease into position without any effort at all though the starboard wing does need lifting slightly in order to get the pip pin into place.

I set the flaps up so that the outriggers were locked down and the OR5 sliders showed a small gap between the end and the bolt. Checking the flap angle showed that it had traversed through 26.5 degrees so I opened up the fuselage flap slots until I had 27 degrees of movement. With the flaps locked in that position I adjusted the flap actuating rod and then retracted the flaps.

There wasn't enough movement so I went through a process of adjusting the FL19 actuating arm and the length of the rod until I was satisfied with the action. I ended up with 26.9 degrees of flap movement from zero. I then removed the FL19 arm from the aircraft, drilled the holes and reassembled the arm before checking the flap operation once again.

At the back of the aircraft I had rigged the stabilators and rudder so that I could cut the trim tabs to allow full rudder movement.

I found that the best way of trimming these was to do the port side first. Starting at the point where the tab intercepts the stern post I projected a line at 30 degrees to aft and cut the tab. I then cut the starboard one to match.

As I documented earlier I wasn't happy with the way the aileron thrust plates interacted on the starboard side as there was some play which could result in flutter on the aileron. I measured the gap between the plates (no trivial task with the wings rigged) then sanded back a piece of 1mm thick tufnol until it matched the gap at 0.5mm.

I scuff sanded the original piece of tufnol then, using redux, bonded the new plate to the original. To finally establish the position of this new piece of tufnol I rigged the wing.

Final job for the day was to dig out the wing fairings that I had purchased from GFlight. These needed a bit of trimming at the back before I drilled a few holes and clecoed the fairings in place to establish their position.

August 29th What a pig of a job! It took me just on two and a quarter hours to do the LA mod internal lay-up - an hour and a half of that with my head buried inside the wheel well. I used my normal method of doing large surface bid lay-ups, first laying up the cloth on plastic sheet and then carrying the wet glass on the sheet to the job. Of course this job wasn't made any easier by the fact that the glass lays up on to the top of the tunnel and then laps down over a rather awkward shaped side. Anyone who has wallpapered a ceiling knows what this lay-up was like. Just to really make my day I spilt a pot of resin over me while I was peel plying the surface. I was lying on my back with the pot on my stomach painting each strip of peel ply with resin in turn. One slight turn in the wrong direction and I had resin all over my Tyvek suit. This did make it easier to apply the resin to the peel ply as I simple wiped them across me.

Having dumped the Tyvek suit in the rubbish bin and had a good shower I worked on the undercarriage swing arm. This has to have brass shims inserted between the pivot blocks in order to ensure enough freedom to swing. I loosely bolted the starboard side end then tightened the port side until freedom was lost. My feeler gauge showed a gap of 5 thou so I made up a set of shims, greased the tube and bolted the blocks together. Satisfied that the arm still swung freely I made up the same size shims for the starboard side and repeated the process. The starboard side was too tight at 5 thou so I experimented with shims at 1 thou increments until the arm swing freely with a 10 thou shim installed.

I made up a small batch of Supafil and filled the area on the port side where just above where the spar entered the aircraft. This area had been indented slightly during the cockpit module fitting process and needed the filler to bring the fuselage line back to match the wing fairing.

August 30th Sanded back the outside foam on the LA mod. This created a lot more blue snow. The cat, very wisely, decided to stay out of the garage this time. To establish the depth of the foam I used a satay stick with the last 5mm of the end marked. Pushing this into the foam gave me a guide as to where to stop sanding. I got all of the sanding done correctly apart from one area of convex curve where I went down a bit close to the glass. To build some depth up at that point I have used Supafil (it was easier than making up a batch of thick micro) and will sand that to shape tomorrow. At the base of the indent where the fuel selector will sit I cut the foam back to the glass, cleaned up the micro and then trimmed a piece of 4mm ply to shape. This will be floxed into place at the same time as doing the top surface lay-up.

August 31st Did the exterior lay-up of the LA mod. This was a two ply bid lay-up lapping onto the surrounding surface. As the lay-up involved a quite complex concave area I only wet laid up the first layer. Having carried this to the aircraft I fed the glass into the concave area and squeegeed it into place before laying up the second layer dry. Once this was wet out I peel plyed the entire surface. As I had some glass and resin left over I did the lay-up over the tunnel where the MAUW mod tube passes through.

This has been a very productive month. The MAUW mod and LA mods are now complete and the undercarriage swing arm is in place. The flaps are in and operational with only the root extensions to be completed and with only a bit more work the wing root fairings will be finished.

The plan of attack from this point on is to finish off the flap and wing roots, at the same time doing any filling that is required on the fuselage to get the roots mating properly. At this point I'll take the wings back to the storage shed and work on the fuselage right through to being ready to apply primer.