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Last Modified March 3rd 2002
1st February Sprayed on the final coats of paint across the entire fuselage. This used three pints of Top Gloss and took the best part of two hours spraying across two sessions. I did quite well and only got three drips.
2nd February I used a nib removing tool to remove the drips. This is a razor blade, held in a plastic frame, that is run across the surface to shave back the drip bit by bit. I started the big sand job.
3rd - 4th February Sanding
5th-6th February No real building as I got laid low by a stomach bug... blecchh. I couldn't even claim a day off work at the 6th is one of our national holidays. During the latter part of the recovery phase I finished off the layout for the radio panel which has now undergone so many revisions I have lost count.
8th February Sand, polish, what else is there to say!
9th February No building, at the North Island club rowing championships with Stefan. A silver medal came home :-)
10th February Spent nine hours of my day sanding and polishing the starboard side of the fuselage. The section from the cockpit aft to the stabilitator now shines to a satisfactory level.
11th February Sanded back the starboard side of the fin and the door pillar. It didn't all go to plan as I has a surface separation just above the stabilator stub which lost an area of 4 x 5cm. This will need to be resprayed. Getting a good key onto the smooth prime is essential and I obviously missed this patch when I did the pre coat sanding. Having said that, I'd still recommend using Top Gloss if it's being painted by a raw amateur like me if only for the fact that it's water based and therefore easy to thin and clean up.
12th February Sand
13th February Polish
14th February Sand
15th February No building
16th February Only a bit of polishing today as I had to get ZK-UBD ready for next week's Sportavex fly in and airshow.
17th February
Turned the fuselage around and started sanding back the port side. I also worked
on getting the control surfaces ready for their final spray and finished off the
surfaces which had already been sprayed.
After quite a bit of experimenting with finishing compounds I have selected Simoniz Diamond Glaze for my finish. I found that Carnauba wax yellowed the surface too much while other waxes were too much hard work. The Diamond glaze gets rubbed on, allowed to dry and is then buffed up to a lovely gloss finish.
The photo to the left shows the reflection in the surface of my rudder (which was not on my plane at the time!).
18th February I'll take the hint from my right elbow that I need to stop sanding for a little while. Having thus taken the hint I removed the wraps off the engine and put it on a stand in front of the aircraft. First challenge.. the hex heads on the mounting bolts are larger than any allen key that I have so I'll need to go and buy one.
19th February No building
20th February I sorted out some of the sender wiring. For the oil pressure sender I am using 20AWG wire terminated with a PDG connector. All of the other senders come pre terminated or with Rotax supplied connectors on them which makes life easier. What you do have to work out yourself is how to route the wires back to the firewall!
The engine mounting process roughly works out as follows...
To lift the engine an engine hoist is required so I'll be doing a bit of running around seeing where I can hire one from.
21st -23rd February No building, SportAvex 2002 Fly In.
24th February I brought back the cooling duct parts from the hanger and assembled them. First step in the fitting procedure is to check that it fits inside the centre section of the firewall. I found the fit widthwise to be spot on but found the starboard vertical plate has been cut and trimmed incorrectly as it didn't match the shape of the top plate. I was able to alter the top flange of this plate enough to make it fit the top plate but this still left the side plate 2cm short at the front. I made up a short piece to fit into this space out of sheet aluminium and rivetted it onto the top plate at the same time as rivetting the other side plates on. I then rivetted on the baffle material. The diagrams show regularly spaced rivets along the entire length of the baffle which I fitted, then noticed that the photos supplied in the manual showed only a couple of rivets used to hold each piece of baffle. I have ordered more rivets! One little trap I found with the assembly was to leave the space around the top holes and slightly forward of there clear of rivets otherwise the they conflict with the location of the radiator and oil cooler. Of course I only found this out later so had to drill out the six rivets which were being a problem.
I fitted the outlets to the oil tank and oil cooler and temporarily tightened
the fittings. These need to be torqued correctly as part of the installation. I
opened up the supplied holes for the radiator pipes in the duct top plate as the
pipes wouldn't pass through the holes as supplied. The instructions call for the
radiator to be bolted to the side plates with AN4-5 bolts. This would be fine if
the radiator was as wide as the duct but it wasn't. To fix this I passed
the bolt in from the outside of the duct and added three full thickness washers
to each bolt then fit the radiator. I'll add a bead of sealant to the leading
edge of the radiator to seal off the gap once everything is setup.
When I initially looked at the Rotax ring mount frame I was a bit puzzled as to why the frame holes were 11mm but the bolts supplied were 10mm. I checked with Andy regarding this and he said that it was to take up slight variances that occur in welded frame structures..
25th February
I mounted the oil cooler to the duct. Liek many before me I decided to drop the
cooler down below the bottom of the water cooler and, as I haven't yet got my
cowlings on I asked the email group as to how far I should drop the cooler down.
The figures varied from 20 - 63mm so I used the scientific method of selecting
the longest 1/4" AN bolts that I had and used those. I made up 35mm spacers
which means that the bottom of the cooler is excactly 13cm down from the face of
the top plate. This position also allowed me to use the two supplied oil cooler
outlets as they were still proud of the top surface. If I had dropped the cooler
down much more I would have had to replace the right angled outlet with a
straight outlet. I may need to do some adjustment to the position once I have
the cowls on but it'll do for now.
26th -28th February I turned my attention back to the instrument panel and cut out the holes in the small panel under the main panel. This panel will be holding most of the switches and breakers, which in my case, are the size of standard fuses. These holes are a pain as they are a circle with two flattened sides on the vertical faces. As a result many hours of careful filing was involved with getting the shape of these just right.
