Last Modified October 5th 2000

September 2000, The Engine Arrives

1st September A lovely sunny day so I pulled the fuselage out of the garage and sanded, and sanded, and sanded. Six hours later I had the fuselage almost ready for the first topcoat application on the starboard side and all of the topcoat imperfections on the port side cleaned up. I found a couple of deep scratches on the port side so I have applied a bit of filler on those areas. One thing to note when working on a bright white aircraft in the sun - snow blindness is a reality, wear sunglasses!

2nd September Still sunny so I spent the day attacking the control surfaces. First up was to fill the pinholes and visible imperfections in the stabilators. Applying the marker coat really does help show up the pin holes. After the stabilators I touches up one of the flat surfaces on the ailerons and filled the leading edges. Flaps were next with the most difficult job on these being the sanding back of the Europa supplied filler on the trailing edges where I had wanted a very hard surface. Am I ever glad that I didn't use that stuff as my primary filler, that is hard work. The rudder was the last piece to receive attention. As I have quite a thick rim on the rudder flange due to using Graham's stern post I am building up the surface of the rudder to compensate for the lip. First step was to apply a bead of filler at the leading edge. This will then be sanded back to match the fuselage trailing edge, the rudder surface built up to match and then a couple of layers of deck cloth applied to create a shell over the filler.

3rd September Sanded back the ridge on the rudder to align with the fuselage trailing edge.

4th September Sanded the patched up areas on one of the stabilators.

5th September No building, working out of town.

6th September The engine arrived! The box, having just fitted in the back of Carol's Ford Laser, was brought home from the distributors. The engine still has to have its secondary manual fuewl pump and the vacuum spindle attached but that can be done once the engine is on the aircraft. The other minor change required is to alter the position of the EGT sensor socket on the starboard exhaust pipe. Rotax are now fitting EGT sensor sockets as standard to the 914 however the starboard socket location as supplied fouls the cowlings. Europa Aircraft have a rework service to move the socket around the pipe to a more suitable location so I'll take the pipe off and send it away.

No building, too busy fussing over the engine.

7th September Dug the winscreen out of storage and spent some (a lot!) of time working out how it was going to fit. There is quite a bit of trimming required in order to get the windscreen to fit into its alloted space so quite a bit of foretought is required to ensure that the trimming is done in the right places.

8th September No building.

9th September I decided to start the trimming by giving myself a straight top edge. Using a permagrit grinding tool fitted to the dremel I ground the top edge back until I had an acceptable straight line. Testing against the aircraft gave me a good indication of how much polycarbonate had to be removed from the rest of the windscreen. I used a permanent marker to show where the edges were to be trimmed to and then started grinding away a couple of millimetres at a time. At each level I retested the fit and adjusted the markings as required.

10th September I found I had to trim the top edge again as the winsdcreen finally got close to fitting into place which really showed grinding the screen back in strips to be of benefit. Eventually I got the windscreen to fit into its slot and then took it out again for re marking and cutting it back to give the required 1mm clearance at the edges. I cut into the tip of a permanent marker to create a 90 degree inner angle then trimmed one edge so that it was 1mm wide. Running the other inner angle along the edge left a tidy 1mm wide line on the front surface to act as a trim guide. Having thanked the marker for its sacrifice in the aid of the advancement of light aviation, it was out with the grinder again to trim the polycarbonate to the final fit size. A word of warning, grinding polycarbonate is a messy job. The direction of rotation of the cutting tool should always be along the edge to avoid shattering the material and for safety, both dust mask and goggles should be worn.

11th September Spent the evening working out a technique which would ensure that I had a 1mm gap all round the windscreen when it is mounted into the aircraft. In the end I elected to use 1cm x 1mm x 1mm strips of rubber engine baffle.

12th September Cut out the baffel strips.

13th September Rapid epoxied ten or so of the strips around the perimeter of the windscreen frame.

14th September Trial fitted the windscreen. it fits very well and the little rubber buffer pieces do a great job of keeping the screen in position. To ensure that the windcreen will keep in place during the bonding period I used a couple of car tied down straps wrapped around the fuselage. These run along the top and bottom of the windsceen with localised pressure being provided by strips of foam pushed underneath the straps. I need another strap across the middle as there is some localised bulging in the middle of each side.

15th September No building

16th September Carried on with the trial fitting. I did need to trim just a bit more for final adjustment before being satisfied with the fit. Next job was to mask the surface to ensure that I didn't get any redux in places where it didn't belong.

First step was to apply a crepe masking tape along the edge of the inside this defines the are that needs to be scuff sanded for bonding. I overlapped the tape onto the cockpit, pushed the tape down until I had a clean edge and then cut the tape off the cockpit with a craft knife. After undoing the straps holding the windscreen in place I applied two cross coats of Spraylat on each side. Spraylat is a latex covering specifically designed for the protection of perspex and polycarbonates during construction and storage. It can be sprayed on or, as I did, simply applied with a paint brush.

17th - 18th September As the house is a bit chaotic now that the decorating has moved to the downstairs area I filled in a few hours making up a stencil for the signage to go onto the rear access panel. I wrote the text I wanted on the word processor on my PC then printed it out onto plain paper. Double sided tape was placed on the back of the paper over the entire area where the wording appears and the wording carefully cut out with a sharp craft knife - remembering of course to keep the insides of the o and a!

I removed the cover from the tape and stuck the stencil in place on the panel, protected the rest of the surface from overspray and sprayed on speckle coat in a darker colour. Carefully pulling the stencil off immediately afterwards revealed a very tidy bit of writing. While I was in tagging mood I touched up the bits of speckle coat immediately forward of the door shoot bolt guides that had been damaged while I was boring out the holes for the shoot bolt guides.

Once the speckle coat had dried ovenight I applied a protective layer of clear acrylic spray as a sealer.

19th - 30th September Alas, no building. The relocation of Kaon Technologies to its proud new home took all of my attention.