Last Modified March 5th 2001

Early One Morning....

1st - 3rd February  No building, far too much work

4th - 6th February No building - attending the great Plains Fly In at Ashburton. I did get to log 16.5 hours of Europa time, flew across Cook Strait in a light aircraft for the first time, flew in an airshow for the first time, won the navigation competition and came home with the Safe Air Trophy  and performed a VTOL landing in a Europa at Wanganui in winds in excess of 45 knots. You could say that I had a great long weekend!!

7th February Rowing season has arrived with avengeance and Stefan gets up at 04:45 each morning to go to school. He needs some encouragement to get up at that time so I end up being his alarm clock. Now that he has his own car I am not needed for early morning transport so I have decided to use the two hours before I need to get ready for work as aircraft building time.

I pulled in some more of the electrical cabling and attached the starboard side cables to the firewall with Adel clips ensuring that I stayed within the lines that I had marked as being available for firewall mounted objects and thus clear of the instrument panel.

The primary power cables were each attached as individual runs while the rest of the cables, once sheathed in cable webbing, were attached to the ground cable with tie wraps. At each location where a tie wrap is used I applied a small piece of self amalgamating tape was to provide a buffer.

In the evening I soldered wires to the headset and microphone sockets in the overhead space. Actually I lie because I have mislaid one of the microphone sockets! 

8th February I sheathed the cables that run from the duct down to where I will be placing the wing electrical sockets then spent a bit of time pushing eight 22AWG wires through a piece of 1/4" polyfo tubing. This tubing was then laid up into the tunnel to provide protection for the wires going to the pilot side control column. I drilled a hole in the thigh support immediately behind the column and threaded through the matching tube that comes out of the control column. Next challenge is to get this tube from the buried portion of the thigh support into the open area so that I can apply connectors to both ends of the cable.

Europa recently issued a notice that the 12mm PVC pipe supplied for use a the sight gauge should be replace with the later supplied 10mm polyurethane pipe. Guess who had the original 12mm version! I untied the sight gauge piping and pulled it out of the aircraft. As I only need the visible portion of the gauge to be made of clear tubing I replaced the rest of the run with locally sourced fuel line. Once the new clear tubing arrives from Europa then I'll replace the vertical stand pipe as well.

9th February Continued with the cabling.

10th February No building, North Island Rowing Championships 

11th February I trimmed both of the doors so that there was a 1/16" (ish) gap all round the door when it was closed. I noticed (you'd have to be blind not to) that the doors were rather difficult to latch closed now that the seal was in place. The problem was related to the fact that I had all three shoot bolts trying to enter their respective holes at the same time. I loosened off the centre shoot bolt driver and adjusted it so that it only entered the hole once the other two were already on their way in. The result is a door that closes nicely then pulls in the centre to end up with a nice line.

12th - 15th February Continued work on the wiring to the point where all of the internal wires except for the strobes now runs to its destination and is sheathed. I started work on the lining using a very lightweight thermal liner along the lower section of the fuselage. This is stuck in place with a stretchable polyurethane double sided tape with the edges sealed with a wide cloth tape. This initial layer also provides some sound damping. I am making all of the lining relatively easily removeable as I suspect that I will be doing his several times before I get it right! The final lining cloth that I am using is a velcro receptive grey cloth which we use to cover display boards for exhibitions. 

16th - 18th February No building. At the Avalon Airshow in Australia.

19th February I am still scratching my head over how to bring the strobe wires from the strobe unit aft forward to the wing sockets. I spent a couple of hours pondering this one and in the end had to go to work!

20th February No building

21st February Mounted the cable supports for the port side cables then cut out a couple of slots in the instrument panel to allow it to sit over the cables. These slots are about 1" wide and 2 1/2" long cut out of the base at the rear left and right of the instrument panel. I tried an initial fit and noted that the port side needed to be opened up a bit more to clear the cables. It is my intention to leave the instrument panel moulding in place as a fixed unit (unlike most Europa builders) and have removeable sub panels and processing blocks that I can interchange when I come to play with control systems later on.

22nd February  Trimmed the instrument panel so it fitted tidily.

23rd February The nice little covers that I created for the third door bolt are causing me a bit of grief. Without the rubber seal in place they worked well but with the seal they make it very difficult to close the door. I hacksawed the bulge off on epoxied a flat piece of fibreglass on the cover in its place. This in itself was quite time consuming - have you ever noticed that 5 minute epoxy never sets in five minutes!

24th February Applied some filler around the flat plate so that the edges would look nice.

25th-26th February No building, summer has arrived with a vengeance so the wekend was spent flying and socialising. 

27th February I spent the morning working on the pilot's seat. Foam carving to fit blocks beside the control column tunnel took most of the time available. With the blocks in place I laid over a sheet of 5mm thick foam to tidy everything up. A bit of experimenting (ground flying) showed that some more back support was required so I started carving out a block of foam to extend the rake of the headrest all the way down to the top of my temperfoam block.

28th February This morning's task was to try to get the Microencoder out of ZK-UBD working again. It has become quite intermittent so I suspect I have a dry solder joint in there somewhere. Of course it wouldn't fail on the bench would it!