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Last Modified November 30th 2000
1st - 6th November No building. In England and then back via Los Angeles where I assisted with running the Europa builders workshop at Aircraft Spruce in Corona.
7th
November I brought back some more stainless steel with me from Europa so
that I could finish off the firewall. I sat in front of the TV with a set of
aviation snips and cut out the major shape of the three remaining parts. Also
returned from Europa is my starboard forward exhaust manifold with its relocated
EGT port. It took only a couple of minutes to reattach this to the engine. You
will see from the (badly centred!) photo that the port has been moved to the
side of the manifold and the original location welded over, this allows the
engine to fit inside the Europa XS cowls.
8th November Finished off trimming the firewall stainless steel. While I was at Aircraft Spruce I bought some instrument mounting nuts. These clever little devices slide through the back of instrument mounting holes and allow a screw to be inserted from the front of the panel without using a spanner at the back. I mounted all of my main panel instruments for the first time and I must say that I am very pleased with the result.
9th November Hooked up the pitot and static tubes on the appropriate instruments. I am using nylon fittings from Aircraft Spruce for this and Nylaflow tubing for the interconnections. I was concerned that the RMI MicroEncoder was going to be a problem as it is fairly long however this proved not to be an issue in the end. A trial fit of the main panel into the intstrument panel moulding showed I had I bit of a conflict between the ASI and the moulding however this can easily be resolved with a quick run of the dremel. I sourced some flexible polypropylene double sided tape from RS Components and used this to stick my piece of glass/aluminium insulation on the underside of the upper surface of the panel moulding. The top surface of the panel will get quite warm in summer and this insulation will help keep the heat away from the instruments.
10th November Applied the final primer coats around the windscreen
11th November Spent four hours getting the stainless steel firewall pieces to fit. I had to open up the slots and holes in the sheets more than Europa had specified in order to get the firewall pieces to fit without binding. With all of the pieces arranged I marked where they intersected and took them out of the aircraft to drill the holes. I can't finally fit the firewall at this stage as there is no access to the engine mount alignment bolts once it is fitted in place. Once I have checked the engine alignment I'll remove the engine and fit the tunnel firewall permanently.
12th November Sanded back the primer around the windscreen and then went over the entire aircraft surface checking for paint defects. The fuselage is now ready for top coating. I need to apply three coats to the port side and one to the underside and starboards side to complete the job. I opened up the engine boax and fitted a couple of the EGT sensors to the exhaust manifolds. While I was at it I noted that, unlike earlier 914's, the mechanical pump boss has now been removed completely so I have abandoned thoughts of having a backup mechanical pump. I will now remove the one way valve from the aft of the aircraft as this is no longer required. The final fuel system for ZK-TSK now looks like this...
One little task that I had to do today was adding a hose clamp to the aft door latching rod inside each of the doors. I had forgotten to put these back when I reassembled to doors and, without them, my door key lock won't work. It was a fiddly job but eventually I had them in place.
[I
had a query as to why I am returning the fuel to the reserve tank rather than
the main. On the Europa the main and reserve are actually the same tank!! The
tank has a saddle as can be seen here - the outlets for main and reserve side
come out of the two spigots seen at the front of the tank. When you fill the
tank the fuel flows into the reserve side then spills over into the main side
until the fuel is level with the top of the saddle and then continues up. You
run the aircraft on main until the engine splutters and switch over to reserve
which gives another hour's flying.]
13th November Did a bit of work on the instrument panel. I am moving the trim indicator from the left side of the main panel where I had it to the right hand panel between the air vents. In place of the trim indicator will be a modified display for a Rite-Angle angle of attack indicator. The Rite Angle comes with a vertical stack of LED's - what I am doing is replacing the stack with a multicoloured bar display mounted in a housing to match the trim indicator. I will be using the same style of housing for my fuel gauge as well.
14th November Sanded the entire surface of the fuselage with 800 grit paper ready for painting the top coats. Once my elbow had recovered I used a vacuum cleaner followed by a tack cloth to remove the dust and then washed the entire surface down with Prep Wipe. All of the areas that I didn't want painted were masked off and the interior of the aircraft covered with protective cloths.
I continued work on the main plate of my instrument panel with 22AWG wires being plumbed in for the indicator lamps. The lamps I am using a 12v assemblies from RS Components. These have Faston tags and the wires are being terminated with AMP PIDG Faston connectors. All of my crimping is being performed with an AMP professional crimping tool which results in a good quality crimp almost without exception. All of the crimps are tested with a good tub on the cable just to ensure that they will hold.
15th & 16th November No building, two Christmas (!!!) parties to attend.
17th November No building, proud dad attending school prizegiving.
18th
November Painting day. I applied two coats of top gloss to the port side and
then applied another coat over the entire aircraft surface. Once the final coat
had reached touch dry stage I peeled off the masking tape around the windscreen
to reveal a really sharp edge to the paint.
Earlier, while I was grinding back the the edge of the windscreen I let the dremel slip and as a result had a 1" long scratch on the port side at the bottom of the screen. While I was Aircraft Spruce I bought a windscreen restoration kit. This consists of a number of fabric backed grades of abrasive paper from 1500 to 6000 grit and a polishing compound. It took about half an hour to get the scratch out of the windscreen and it now looks like there never was anything there. I must admit that if I hadn't seen it myself I wouldn't have believed how easy it was to get a scratch out of polycarbonate.
19th November No building
20th November Started the sand back process. Around the door flanges and windscreen this is having to be done the hard way with a piece of foam backed 1200 grit paper. The paint actually cuts back quite nicely and I was able to cut back the paint in front of the windscreen in about an hour.
To help identify where the paint needs cutting back on the large surfaces where snow blindness becomes a real hazard I used 3M dry coat marker over the surface. This very quickly shows up the work you have to do and makes the job much easier. The large surfaces I am sanding back with a palm sander [US: Jitterbug] with the initial sanding being done with 1200 grit paper until there are a few marker coat speckles left and then following this up with a quick hand rub down with 1500 grit. The marker coat also helps prevent cutting through the top coat with the sander - something I did before I applied the marker and spend too much time working on a small drip and didn't notice that the sander was also contacting the surface at another point. Lesson - get rid of drips by hand! The nice thing of course is that I can easily fix that mistake up myself as I will be able to do with any surface marks in the future. The area I had cut through is about 2" long and 1" wide and goes down to the primer. Once I have sanded back the whole surface I'll sand back the surrounding area with 800 grit paper and then reapply three top coats with my hobby airbrush. Another thing I have learnt when painting the plane in sections is not to use masking tape to delineate an area. This creates too hard a line and it is hard work to get rid of it. A far better result is to simply blend out the rollered paint into the next area and, if necessary cut the overlap area back with sandpaper.
It the result worth it - well at 1500 grit the aircraft is already showing a gloss finish. It feels like glass to the touch and when water is poured over it the surfaces develops a mirrored gloss finish. Once the whole aircraft is cut back with 1500 grit then I'll go over the entire surface with 2000 grit before using poloshing compounds to bring out the final shine.
How long is this going to take you may ask? The area shown in the left hand picture above took 45 minutes to cut back so I reckon the entire fuselage should be able to be cut back in 8 - 10 hours of work. The underside may slow me down a little so that figure is probably optimistic.
21st & 22nd November Sanding
23rd November Worked on the main instrument panel.
24th November No building
25th November Sanded for five hours straight with a large portion of it being done by hand! I have almost all of the entire fuselage aft of the cockpit cut back with 1000 grit now and will hopefully have the rest of it done next weekend.
26th - 29th November No building, working in Taupo.
