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Last Modified January 5th 2001
1st December No building
2nd December Sanded back the front of port side of the aircraft. While sanding the top between the doors I discovered an 'oh darn'! These are little things that really mess your day up. In this case it was a soft patch of filler that gave way while I was sanding. I had obviously not completely mixed the filler and this area, despite having primer applied and sanded back, was just waiting to mess my day up. At least I am not paying a commercial painter to do the job otherwise the whole paint job would have had to be stopped. I cut out the offending spot and refilled it followed by a general sand of the the surrounding area.
3rd December Sanded back most of the starboard side of the aircraft at the front. I also sanded back the newly applied filler and then applied three top coats of primer. To get ready for the final top coats I masked off the windscreen once again. Back inside the aircraft I laid in the screened multicore cable for the headphone sockets which will be located in the upper panel, worked out that you can fit a Garmin GPS35 into the space between the doors and spent some time thinking about the turbo control unit. In the end I came to the conclusion that the easiest thing to do with the turbo control unit, servo motor and engine instrumentation termination was to make an insulated fireproof box and mount them firewall forward with vents back to the cockpit side. This frees up a lot of room and also results in fewer firewall incursions. I spoke to Carol about obtaining some appropriate metal boxes but was told that any that went missing from the kitchen would be noted and reclaimed. I'll need to source some stainless steel boxes elsewhere!
4th December Sanded back the newly primed spot on the aircraft. Back at the firewall I cut out insulation material to cover the front face and footwells. I am using a locally sourced product here which has two layers of fiberglass covered with an aluminium sheet. To help get the size right I aplied double sided tape to the aircraft surfaces, stuck the insulation cloth down and then cut the cloth to shape.
5th December Continued with the laying up of insulation on the firewall
6th December Ran some of the wiring to the back o fthe aircraft through the ducting. To make it easier to run multiple small cables to a location I first fed a piece of tubing to that location. The wires were then fed as a bunch through the tube and then, once the wires had reached their destination, pulled back the piece of tubing along the wires. This really helps in those locations where you have half a dozen or so wires to feed through an already busy cable duct.
Hmmm, it's starting to look good.
7th December No building - Carol's birthday.
8th December Europa don't provide any details of how to make the seats for the aircraft but having flown in several Europas I am getting a feel of what I (well, certain parts of my anatomy) want in order to be comfortable.
I am making my seats out of Temperfoam and BackSaver foam. It's horrendously expensive but soooo comfortable to sit on. The section at the front is cut back from a point 14cm from the leading edge. Underneath the foam I plan to have 1.5cm of blue foam at the base and another block shaped to fit the small of my back against the lower part of the seat bulkhead. A small extension to the base foam is required under the thighs but I'll make this of locally sourced (ie cheaper) foam.
9th December Test flew the seat. It's not too bad but could do with some more thigh support. I'll play with building up that area with more blue foam later. It was too hot to carry on sanding the paint so I worked on removing the fuel bypass valve and laying in some more wiring. I have noted that I didn't bring the ducts far enough forward - they really need to butt up to the firewall. This is easily fixed with another small layup. I am still not happy with the section of the roof in front of the forward door hinges. It just didn't feel right to the touch so I sanded this back to bare filler and applied some more filler so I could reshape it. In reality it was probably only our a couple of thou but it bugged me every time I ran my hand over it.
10th December While sanding the top of the aircraft I noticed that the dips where the door flanges go into looked a lot shallower than they used to. I realised that the primer and top coat had in fact been puddling in the dips with the net result being that the doors wouldn't open. As it was impossible to get sandpaper into the dips I fitted a fine point to the dremel and used this to grind back the paint and primer back to bare glass.
It
was while I was grinding back the port front dip that a blood curdling scream
rang through the house. Thinking that Carol or Nathan was hurt I dropped
everything and dashed to the rescue. My heart stopped pounding when I discovered
that I wasn't going to have to practice my first aid but was going to have to
capture that most feared of New Zealand creatures - a two inch field mouse. It
no doubt had been brought in by one of the cats as a play thing and had found
its way into the downstairs bathroom where it was now trapped in the bath. I extracted
the mouse and gave it to Nathan to take outside and returned to the plane.
Unfortunately, at the instant of the scream I had driven the dremel tip clean
through the skin of the aircraft and had to spend the next few minutes doing a
triple bid layup on the inside of the roof to fix it up! [By the way, Carol says
that she isn't scared of mice, it was just the shock of seeing it in the bath!]
I had originally planned to have the cables running up to the roof space between the doors going up through the duct I had carefully laid in by the windscreen.
What
I hadn't allowed for however was the fact that the door striker tubes that I had
added to the aircraft would prevent this duct from being used. To get around
this I redirected the wires to the back of the door, brought them up the side of
the fuel filler and then added a flexible duct going into the roof space. To
restore the strength of the roll over cage I floxed the duct into place where it
passed into the roof space. The duct sits very nicely in place and, as it is
effectively out of site unless you happen to be lying in the baggage bay I am
going to leave it as it is.
The last wires from the instrument panel on the port side were a pair of 18 gauge wires for the position lights. These come out of a hole on the underside of the duct to run down the seat front ready to leave the side of the fuselage at mid wing section. I am still working on how to bring the strobe wires forward well clear of all other wiring. Watch this space!
With the starboard side wiring now complete I continued with the port side. I am using polyflow tubing for the pitot/static tubes within the aircraft as this is flexible enough to grip the barbed connectors supplied. I found that Nylaflow tubing, while it fits the screw connectors well, doesn't mate with the barbed connectors. The pitot/static tubes follow the same path as the position light wires and will exit mid wing section.
11th - 16th December Silly season has arrived which means my business workload quadruples as everyone 'discovers' that the end of year is nigh. Not much building as a result but I did do some work trying to wire up the mater cutoff switch located on the starboard seat back. I use the word trying as I goofed. What I didn't plan for (read didn't know) was the fact that 4 AWG aircraft wire is unbelievably stiff. As a result I could either get to the switch mounting screws or I could get to the wire terminating nuts. The two turned out to be mutually exclusive which meant that I couldn't actually get the switch in place with the wires terminated and I couldn't terminate the wires with the switch in place. Oh, while I remember, I hereby promise not to use that sort of language again while Carol has visitors in the house. After six hours of muttering I took out a pair of wire cutters and exised the positive 4AWG cable from the aircraft.
Bob Nuckolls, in his excellent treatise on wiring aircraft, makes a suggestion that welding cable makes a very good substitute for large bus cables so I trotted off to a local welding supply shop. They were most helpful and for the mere sum of $NZ7 (what I had in my pocket at the time and no doubt used to pay for some beer on Friday) I acquired 5 metres of 16mm gauge cable. This cable is almost identical in cross section to 4AWG cable but has considerably more strands and is very flexible. The cable housing, by its very nature, is designed to be used in rugged environments. Next challenge was to work out whether I could use Bob's soldering technique for terminating the cable. As the wire isn't tinned I needed to use flux so dug out my bottle of locally produced Duzall (cool name) acid free flux, poured it over the exposed end and succesfully proved that the ends would go on nicely.
I haven't yet tried to plumb the new cable into place as I now need to get some more connectors. With a bit of luck I'll be able to get it into place without pulling back all of the other cables! I'll leave that until I have a calm day I think.
I carried on with the port side wiring. There are quite a few wires going out onto the port wing all told...
plus the Pitot/Static. The starboard wing is a bit easier with only the Nav lights and strobe.
17th December Bother. The new wire is so flexible that I can't actually establish a bend in to to help it go from the seat headrest into the ducting. it was a good idea but I have now abandoned the cutoff switch in the seat back :-( Ordered a master switch from Aircraft Spruce. I decided to retain the use of the welding wire for my ground so ran that from the battery to the front of the aircraft through the duct.
18th December No building, Christmas party.
19th December I shaped a piece of foam to fill the hole left by the cutoff switch and then did a two bid layup either side of the seat headrest.
20th December No building, another Christmas party.
21st December Drilled a sloping hole into the pilot's control stick to allow the seven wires from the Mac stick grip switches to exit the shaft. I am using 1/4" polyflo tubing to keep these wires together into the thigh rest and then will terminate them in a connector. I am going to run the switches back to the control column through a single 8 core twisted pair (category 5) cable. I am going to bring this into the footwell and then up to the panel in the centre.
22nd December Re masked the exterior of the aircraft ready for the final top coats.
23rd - 25th December No building
26th December Applied two coats of top gloss to the entire aircraft.
27th December Using the palm sander I sanded back the port side of the aircraft aft of the doors.
28th December Repeated the process with the starboard side.
29th December Sanded back the top coat on the starboard side around the doors. This is an exercise in patience as it has to be done by hand.
30th December Did some sanding around the port door until the wind outside blew up to the point where the aircraft wanted to weather cock. Abandoned the sanding and turned my attention to the the rudder instead. I had previously built up the surface to match the thickness of the sternpost but was concerned about comments made by Francis Donaldson of the PFA that some cracks had been appearing on aircraft where too much filler had been applied over rivets. To remove this possibility I ground back the filler over the rivets to make a slightly indented area. To give me a nice hard finish I then laid up a single layer of deck cloth over the entire port rudder surface. Later that night when the resin had set I applied a scrub coat of filler.
31st December Sanded back the filler to end up with a very nice looking rudder. As it was still windy outside I opened the garage door, set up a trestle and sanded back all of my control surfaces. Where I found defects in the surface I applied some more filler. One of the trickier areas to fill is the leading edge and I came up with a good (and fun) technique to fill these edges. With a glove on your hand slap a lump of filler into your palm then, with the leading edge running between thumb and forefinger simply drag your hand along the edge. The amount of hand pressure against the leading edge very nicely controls the amount of filler applied and, as I said, it is a lot of fun.
