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Last Modified December 31st 1999
December 1st The flanges that attach the Europa instrument panel to the firewall are very small and once trimmed back to get a good fit can end up being too small to be of any use. To circumvent this I am building up a set of attachment points on the inside. First step was to create an internal flange along the top edge. I place the panel back edge down on a flat board covered with cling film and weighed the panel down with bricks to endure that it was sitting flat. A five layer combined glass and carbon bid layup was then used to create the flange with the layup lapping onto the panel by 4cm and the other edge laying flat on the cling film. This was a simple job to do, helped considerably by the fact that I had access through the front of the instrument panel.
December 2nd This evening I laid up two small five bid pads on the back of the 'coke' tray area of the instrument panel. These will be used to provide enough thickness for a countersunk screw to be used to attach this part of the panel to the firewall.
December 3rd - 4th No building, working in Wellington
December 5th Trimmed up the back of the instrument panel and then sanded back the filling on the two stabilators.
December 6th No building - too much work :-(
December 7th No building, Carol's birthday party. I decided that not attending your wife's party in favour of building an airplane would not be a wise move. And yes, it was a great party.
December 8th Pulled out the firewall pieces that I bought from GFlight and cut the holes in the top plate to fit around the upper engine support arms. Alistair, my tech adviser, arrived and gave the inside of the fuselage a once over. Actually he gave it more than a once over and declared my work so far as being impressive. I now have the go ahead to close up the fuselage.
December 9th - 16th No building. Basking with Carol on an isolated beach on an island somewhere in the South Pacific. No phones, no faxes, no Internet, no computers :-)
December 17th No building, working in Tauranga
December 18th With
the assistance of Carol I took the top off the aircraft for the
last time. Today is a big day - the two halves of the fuselage
are to be permanently mated. I scuff sanded all of the joint
areas on both the top and bottom halves of the aircraft. This
sanding included the the area inside the top of the fuselage
where the bulkhead would mate and where the pitch tube support
bracket would be fitted. Once the sanding was complete I
degreased all of the mating areas with acetone.
The fuselage wasn't sitting quite level in its jig so I used a few blocks to eliminate any twist that was present before bonding the top on.
John Caukwell (whose fine visage can be seen to the
left) came over to help me with the work as this is definitely as
two person job. We made up several batches of flox thickened
redux and applied this to all of the mating surfaces on the lower
fuselage moulding.
We then positioned the top onto the lower fuselage moulding, being careful to ensure that we didn't spread the redux that we had carefully applied.
Next step was to fit pop rivets to all 100 cleco holes that ran down the joints. As I went down the starboard side John went down the port. We needed to fit a couple more rivets in areas where there still were gaps and then used clecos to hold the front edge to the firewall.
The final part of the job was to clean up the bonds.
Quite a bit of redux had been squeezed out of the joints which
needed scraping off.
Cleaning up the outside was easy so John got that bit.
I on the other hand got to experience the joys of crawling inside the rear of the aircraft for the first time. This is not for the faint hearted, claustrophobic or thick waisted as it is a pretty tight fit in there.
Once the joint areas had been scraped I finished off the job by using a bit of acetone to remove the last bits of excess redux.
December 19th I drilled out all of the rivets that had been used to hold the two pieces together then got ready for the aft bulkhead layup. I laid up two bid strips on the rear of the aft bulkhead and then replicated the layup on the inside of the sternpost. While not specified in the build I also laid up a single layer bid strip along the fuselage join aft of the rear bulkhead. This layup provides a convenient backing for the filler applied to the outside of the aircraft.
The manual refers to a layup which all Europa builders hate - the two bid layups that hold the top of the pitch tube support brackets. Most builders end up either crawling into the back of the aircraft to do this layup or end up paying large sums of money to the nearest small child and then shove them into the back of the aircraft. With a bit of lateral (or should I say longitudinal) thinking I did this entire layup through the aft inspection hole. Admittedly it meant doing the whole layup blind but it did save me an excursion into the back of the aircraft. I wrapped cling film around the top of the support and then laid up a four bid layup over the cling film and lapped this onto the top of the fuselage before peel plying over the entire layup.
Next job was to fit the fin - a job that XS builders are thankfully relieved of. This job was made simpler for me by the fact that I had already fitted a sternpost. I applied redux/flox to all of the bonding areas and then fitted the fin to the fuselage. This ended up being a bit trickier than I thought it would be as I had a 0.5 degree tilt to starboard in my original fin setup. After much fiddling around I finally got the fin aligned with the help of two pieces of aluminium angle clamped to the side of the fin.
At the front of the aircraft I fitted the fuel filler moulding and associated piping and reduxed the moulding to the filler neck. Last job of the day was to apply filler along the joint lines both sides of the aircraft.
December 20th Filled more of the
joints and tidied up the pitch tube support layup. A Permagrit
saw blade came in very handy here as it was possible to reach in
through the rear inspection hole and use the blade to cut off the
excess cloth around the end of the support block without
venturing into the back of the aircraft. I have found the only
downside of using the inspection hole to do this layup (as I
discovered following the first day) is that the inside skin of
your arm gets rather torn. I fixed that this evening by wrapping
a bandage around my elbow area before starting the work.
I checked that the rudder would still fit into the trailing edge (it does).
The thickness of the trailing edge of the fuselage varies a bit due to the way the fin fits to the fuselage so there is going to be a reasonable amount of filling to do on the starboard side to get everything looking good - so much for filling the fin before fitting it to the aircraft!
December 21st No building
December 22nd Did some more filling around the fin and on the underside of the aircraft.
I discovered an interesting fact about the human body, it is possible to put a portion of your body into a constricted space and not be able to extract it. Small children have known about this for years but I found out that the most inappropriate time to make this discovery is when you are up to your armpit in an inspection hole!
Following my earlier technique of protecting my elbow with a bandage I delve once more into the inspection hole to trim back the glass layup at the top of the pitch tube support bracket. Fifteen minutes of work with the rodsaw has the second side cut off, at which point I try to get my arm back out of the hole. Last time I had no problem but this time I must have made that bandage just a bit thicker. Now I have a challenge, how do you take a bandage off your elbow when you can't get your other hand into the inspection hole to reach the safety pin holding the bandage on? Call for help - but the rest of the family is out Christmas shopping and the cats have just been fed so won't help. There must be something that I can squeeze past my upper arm to undo the safety pin that is keeping the bandage attached. My range is limited but with a bit of ingenuity I manage to drag a pair of forceps towards me. Reaching in through the hole I work on the safety pin and finally get it unclipped. Enough building for tonight.
December 23rd From discussions on the Internet I have found out that I, and a few other builders, have misinterpreted the mounting position for the Rotax 914 servo motor. From the diagram supplied (which Andy Draper described to me as a pre sketch of a sketch that somehow got into the manual and his worst drawing ever) I understood that the motor mounted inside the tunnel. In fact it mounts on top of the tunnel. The impact of this is that I am now going to have to alter the position of the inlet into the air plenum within the instrument panel to move it right over to the left hand side. No building today.
December 24th & 25th No building, Christmas with the family (families!).
December 26th Stefan and I dragged the plane outside and got the wings rigged. First job was to trim the starboard flap leaving a gap of three mixing sticks wide between the end of the flap and the fuselage when the flap is raised. I then sanded back the filler along the joint line on the starboard side. This turned out to be hard work in the heat of the day so I decided to do the wing root filling instead of sanding back the port side. I am building up the fuselage side so make a socket for the wing roots. The top ends up sloping very slightly outwards from the door surround, the leading edge has a very shallow conical shape while the underside fairs into the curve of the fuselage. I applied tape around the edge of the wing root and then applied the filler
While the filler was setting I mounted a number of screw hardpoints inside the tunnel. I had originally planned on both of the fuel lines travelling together along the length of the tunnel however I found that the space between the throttle housing and the brake cylinder was too restrictive so rerouted the fuel line along the port side of the throttle housing before bringing the two lines together forward.
To end the day I peeled back the tape on the wing roots. The filler hadn't hardened at this stage and this method turned out to be a really easy method of establishing the edge of the surround.
December 27th
Another full day's work on the plane. I sanded back the primer in
the tunnel and then applied the first of two coats of top coat
that would be applied during the day. I tidied up the filler
around the wing root fairings and then rigged the wings. Stefan
and I are getting quite good at rigging the plane now and can rig
the whole aircraft in under five minutes. Next job of the day was
to bond the wing root fairings on to the wings. Redux/flox was
applied to the bonding surface once it had been scuff sanded and
cleaned with acetone and the fairing clecoed in place. To ensure
that the edge of the fairing was flush with the wing I wrapped a
shipping strap around the wing, pulled it tight and then used
mixing sticks under the strap to hold down any spots that wanted
to stay high.
I have a small gap at the leading edge of the fairing so I filled that area with flox before bonding the fairing into place. Once it's set then I'll sand down the leading edge to a good shape and lay in a couple of plies of bid. With the fairings in place I made up a batch of filler then, using a straight edge to establish the surface, filled in the area between the top of the fairing outline and the edge of the door frame. Final bit of work today was to do a small layup at the top of the fin closeout. The sternpost didn't quite reach the top of the fin so I back filled the foam with flox and then laid up two layers of bid over this. At the same time I laid in two reinforcing plies of bid for the rudder hinges.
December 28th
Laid the fuel lines into the tunnel. The
route around the starboard side of the throttle housing is very
tight and some very careful positioning was required in order to
avoid interference with the flap acuating rod. After four hours
of work I had the lines laid in to my satisfaction. Since I
didn't really want to get out from under the aircraft (mainly
because I didn't think my back would straighten up again) I did a
bit of tidying up where my painting had resulted in a few
dribbles.I was concerned about the possibility of the tank outlet
lines contacting the rudder cables so I decided to make some
bridges to remove this possibility. The blocks are made out of
12mm plywood with a piece of nitrile bonded on top.
First bit of electrical work in the
tunnel was the connecting up of the fuel sender wires. I bonded a
four position terminal block on the starboard tunnel wall located
under the fuel sender, terminated the wires and then screwed them
in place. I have left the wires here deliberately long and
created a horizontal strain relief loop across the tunnel.
It was time to spend a bit of the day vertically oriented so after realigning my back I did some work tidying up the wing root fairings. One thing I did learn was that you need to make the wing stands high enough to cater for the root fairings - note the conveniently located concrete blocks now keeping the wings off the garage floor!
December 29th No building.
December 30th No building on the plane but in the evening, after six months of experimenting on and off, I finally got my digital ammeter working. Unlike most ammeters this design does not use a shunt, relying instead on a non intrusive hall effect current sensor to detect the current flow in the wire. It also gives me the ability to very easily customise the full scale deflection of the display so that each increment is proportional to the current capacity of the alternator rather than showing the current draw as a proportion of some manufacturer's standard meter deflection. Next step is to duplicate the configuration to cater for both of the electrical sytems and include it into my flight management processor package.
December 31st Spent part of the morning cutting cloth for the reinforcing strip layups and shaping foam for the forward lift pin reinforcing rib. After lunch I did the four ply firewall to top molding layup, floxed in the reinforcing rib and fitted the two reinforcing straps around the fuel filler pipe. I had intended that this would be the extend of work today however I completely overestimated the amount of cloth required so ended up doing the front layup on the baggage bay bulkhead. I also laid in a reinforcing strip along the fuselage joint line in the baggage bay.
