Last Modified May 10th 2000

April 2000, Doors and Panel

April 1st With the help of a couple of visitors we rotated the fuselage back to upright and rolled it out of the workshop. The rest of the day was spent doing fine sanding on the fuselage. At the end of the day I rinsed off the last bits of dust and, for a brief ten minute period the aircraft shone with a gloss finish. It looked very good indeed.

April 2nd I am duplicating the Jacobson- Shaw door locking system that Bob Jacobson has implemented on his aircraft. This modification adds a third shoot bolt at the aft end of the door driving vertically into the lower door frame. This modification provides very positive locking of the doors and also prevents the slight bulging of the doors in flight that is common to many Europas. The third shoot bolt is triggered by a pivot mechanism fitted to the rear shoot bolt actuating arm. The construction of the pivot mechanism is beyond my skill set so I commissioned Cliff Shaw to make it for me and at the same time supply replacement drive arms. Fitting the third shoot bolt requires a hole to be made to accommodate the mechanism and mounting plate so the first step was to make a splash moulding over the area to act as a cover once the mechanism has been fitted. I covered the area with packing tape and then laid up three layers of bid and peel plyed the surface. While I was doing some glassing I laid up 1" wide bid strips round the edge of the NACA ducts.

Next bid of work was to make a demisting vent within the instrument panel. I created a 4mm wide slit around 40cm wide in the top of the instrument panel positioned 5cm aft of the edge of the windscreen. I then temporarily fitted a 5cm wide by 2cm deep piece of foam underneath the top of the panel centred on the slit. This was then covered with tape and three layers of bid laid up over the top.

April 3rd - 7th No building, Computerworld Expo.

April 8th Started the day off by stripping off all of the temporary layups. I trimmed the demisting plenum to size then riveted a 1" duct flange to the starboard end and cut the glass out from the centre of the hole. A matching flange was fitted to the main air plenum at the base of the instrument panel. I refitted the 2" inlet flange to the inlet plenum where it no longer would clash with the turbo servo motor. To ensure a good fit to this area I made a gasket out of nitrile sheet.

I trial fitted the instrument panel and subsequently trimmed back another 5mm from the top edge and removed the base area where it sat over the tunnel. To provide some shock damping I bonded 3mm rubber pads to the areas where the screws attaching the panel to the aircraft would go. Along the top edge I have five screw placements... three on the new backing plate bhind the main panel and two within the flat surface above the "drink" tray. The three on the main panel areas with come in from the engine side terminating in nutplates on the instrument panel while the remaining two will be countersunk heads inserted from the cockpit side terminating in nutplates on the firewall.

April 9th Having carefully checked that the base of the sub panel was horizontal I drilled the holes for the instrument panel. To support the base I fitted two screws in the flat plate area underneath the main panel area. I allowed the drink tray area, which didn't butt up against the firewall, was left to float. I marked out the outline of the inside of the panel on the firewall so that I knew where I could penetrate the firewall for cables and the like, then removed the panel. I marked out the location for the air inlet to the plenum then drilled out a 2" hole. I fitted a flange to the aft side of the firewall and an RV Cabin Heat Box to the front of the firewall to act as a fire cutoff. These were attached to the firewall with 3/16" screws and nuts.

After dinner I fitted the nutplates to the instrument panel.

 10th April Removed the original door bolt arms and replaced them with the ones made by Cliff Shaw. I then marked out the position of the additional shootbolt which is 23" back from the edge of the door and laid up three layers of bid over the general area. This layup, which was done over packing tape, will cover the hole that I will make to fit the bolt pivot.

11th April No building.

12th April No building.

13th April Stripped the paint off the instrument panel main panel insert as I wasn't happy with the original finish.

14th April Applied a couple of coats of primer to the panel then fitted the nutplates to the back of the instrument panel.

15th April Fitted the remaining four nutplates onto the firewall that will be supporting the instrument panel. The instrument panel is now ready to be fitted out with the instruments and electronics. With Stefan and Nathan's assistance we flipped the fuselage back onto its side so that the port side could be worked on. I sanded back some of the filler around the fin and decided that more fairing was required so applied more filler around the base to fin area. Inside the fuselage I fitted the main trunking form using the same technique as with the starboard side. Applied the topcoats to the instrument panel.

16th April Three hours of sanding had the port side filler sanded back to its basic shape. There are a couple of areas which will need more filling but first I decided to do the reinforcing layup around the wing fairing socket. As with the starboard side I used deck cloth for this simple layup. To make a start on the cover for the filler tube I had to first work out how to define the basic shape of the cover. The shape of the filler tube matches the inside of the fuselage but how on earth do you copy a shape like that? I cut out numerous 5cm wide strips of card, making each one around 20cm long. The last 4cm of the strip was bent away at 90 degrees to allow the strip to sit up from the surface. I taped the strips on the inside of the fuselage alongside the filler tube, allowing the vertical portions to overlap as required then taped them together. A quick swipe with a marker mapped the shape of the filler tube onto the cardboard. I removed the cardboard shape from the aircraft, cut off the tags along the base and cut just above the marked line to create a pattern card to mark out some 2cm thick foam for cutting. Once the foam had been cut to shape this was stuck in place with double sided tape. My design concept for this area is to create a fixed ducting to house the electrical system and them have a removable cover for the filler tube.

17th April Removed the peel ply and masking tape from around the wing fairing. Correction, removed the peel ply and fought the masking tape.

18th April My replacement camera arrived. For those who are interested it is an Olympus C-830L (US C-330L). Photos are taken in High Quality mode and then reduced with LView3 to 320 x 240.

This is the back of the instrument panel. The black patches are the rubber shock mounts. Also visible is the newly relocated inlet to the main air plenum and the upper demisting plenum with its attached hose.

19th April No building.

20th April Sanded back yesterday's filler and applied another batch of filler on a couple of areas that needed more work.

21st April Good Friday. Started the day by passing my Biennial Flight Review. I left the landing light on while taxying back to base so that cost me a six pack of beer, but as that was the only fault the instructor could get me on I guess the beers are worth it.

I sanded back yesterday's filler and, having decided that the fin leading edge profile still wasn't correct at the joint, applied more filler. XS builders just don't know how good they have it. The starboard side of my moulding shows quite a few pitholes. These represent air bubbles that were left in pace when the pre preg sheets were being laid up by the factory - not enough squeegying guys! The downside of these pits is that I keep finding more of them and then have to do more filling. I am sure that they breed overnight.

The port door was my next target. I cut a small rectangle at the location of the additional slide bolt and then spent the next two hours playing until I had the support plate at the right location before reduxing it in place. The spare redux was used to bond the demist plenum to the instrument panel.

Last job of the day was to define the shape of another piece of the fuel filler housing and then applied release tape over some of the starboard side power channel.

At popular request (OK, you win) I am starting a glossary of terms to accompany this log. It is located at www.kaon.co.nz/europa/glossary.html and is also pointed to from the the index. Requests for glossary extensions can be sent to you know who.

22nd April Spent a couple of hours working on the door latch system. With the new shoot bolt in place the movement range of the arm is about 3mm less than I had originally. I trimmed a little off the new shoot bolt pivot arm to give some more movement and also trimmed back the horizontal bolts by a couple of mm so that they were within the housings when the door was open but still have 12mm of straight shaft for mating with the door frame shoot bolt guides. I then attached the three shoot bolt guides to the door, extended the bolts to lock position and bonded the shoot bolt guides into place with redux/flox. The flox was covered with peel ply to minimise the amount of cleaning up I would have to do once the glue was set.

Sanding time again. The fin leading edge is looking (and feeling) good but a small area aft of the leading edge needed some more filler to complete the profile. I might add that I am adding less than a mm of filler at a time so the actual weight build up here is tiny. The door frame is still causing me grief so I spent quite a bit of time probing the surround with a sharp point and then opened up any holes that I found before filling them.

As I am fairly hopeful that the filling is complete I masked off the bits of the port side that I want to keep clear of paint and as I had some filler left over I filled one surface of a stabilator trim tab.

Once the redux on the door bolt surrounds had set I tested the door bolt operation. It works very well indeed.

23rd April Sanded back the filler on the fuselage and then applied the first layer of primer to act as an exposure coat. It did! Yet more blemishes appeared which were filled later in the evening.

I started work on the other door. As always, just when you think things are going to be easy there is is a little trap. The housing on this door is thinner than the other one! The third bolt hinge mechanism sits proud of the inner door moulding on this door unlike the other door where it fitted nicely. Cliff had brazed a small length of tube onto the main pivot bolt to space the swing mechanism away from the mounting plate. As this was the only bit of the design that I could easily play with I filed this off. Using an AN910 washer to act as a spacer and trimming down the protruding screws to match I was able to reduce the height of the mechanism to the point where it would fit into the door.

24th April Applied two more coats of primer to the fuselage and bonded the base plate of the bolt mechanism into the door. John Caukwell came round, ostensibly to borrow my oven controller so that he could bake his motor glider wings, but I do note that his timing coincided with the first primer coat like it did with the first side of the fuselage. John didn't find fault with the profile of this side of fin though.

25th April The position of the hole I had made for the vertical shoot bolt wasn't quite correct so I had to open it up slightly aft to get the bolt to move smoothly. By the time I had finished playing around the hole was too large so I laid up three layers of bid on the inside and used flox, covered with peel ply, to establish the outside surface profile again.

Two hours of sanding was all that was required to get the primed surface back to a finish where it is ready for the next three layers of primer. It was once said that the Coleman family (of mustard fame) got rich from the amount of mustard that was left on the side of people's plates. I am sure that the Goldenbaum family (of Polyfiber fame) are getting rich from the amount of filler and primer dust left in my vacuum cleaner! Three coats of filler - some 600 ml when measured out of the tin - has been reduced by sanding to a microscopically thin layer by sanding.

26th April No building but I did go over my electrical diagrams to make sure that my wiring was going to be correct.

27th April No building, SAANZ meeting

29th April Prepared the port side ready for painting and cut out the cloth for the internal ducts.

30th April At three hourly intervals through the day I applied the middle coats of primer. In between I got to tidy up the garden. Joy oh joy. Not. :-(