Last Modified August 31st 2002.

August 2002, Lots of Little Bits

1st - 2nd August No building, working in the Hawkes Bay.

3rd August The rim around the front windscreen presents a 3-4mm wide lip visible to the occupants on the lower edge and to the outside on the sides and top. The redux turns this edge a shade of green and it doesn't look very nice. My first task for the day was to paint this lip (very carefully) with black acrylic paint. The effect turned out to be quite a dramatic change in how the aircraft looks as it cleanly defines the shape of the windscreen.

I called on Stefan to assist me with rivetting up the lower nutplates that will secure the cowling. The ones on the very lowest part of the plane need to be countersunk as the fuselage is quite thick at this point. All but one hole worked well but I ended up drilling right through into the interior with the drill I was using to countersink the holes on the last one and ended up having to fill the hole again.

I fitted the two retaining straps for the battery and then trimmed up the final edges on the cloth interior.

On an earlier page I stated that many Europas have paint chips where the door bolts hit the plane if the doors are closed with the door latch in the closed position. Carol uses 15 thou aluminium sheet for embossed areas on greeting cards and handed over enough to make striker plates. Each plate is 4cm x 3cm and is shaped to match the door flange. A bit of contact adhesive keeps the pieces very neatly in place.

4th August I had previously applied filler to the tailwheel cowling where I had succeed in cracking off the gel coat while moving the aircraft one day. I sanded back the filler and then spray painted the area to match.

For some time I had been putting off cutting the two inspection panels while I explored the best way to cut the panels out. Neville at Europa gave me a tip to grind down a hacksaw blade until it was very narrow and then use this to cut the curves. I cut each of the straight sections with a standard hacksaw bland and then cut the curves with the cut back blade. I must say that I was very pleased with the effect and wish I had used a cut back blade to cut out all the other inspection panels. I taped the panels back into place, covered the panel interior with tapes and then laid up four layers of bid on the inside.

Later in the evening I popped a screwdriver under the edge of the panels and very easily popped them off the layup underneath.

August 5th The latches for the inspection doors require holes to be cutout for the actuators. I measured the actuator and drew the shape up on Visio before printing the template out and marking the shape onto the doors. These dimensions might need a bit of adjustment when I cut them out so I am going to cut within the dimensions shown and then adjust as required.

The box section at the top is 17mm wide by 19mm high with a 1.5mm high curved extension at the top. The long bar section is 11mm wide by 29mm high.

The grey shaded section at the bottom is the latch surface area which should not be cutout. This section latches under the cowling.

The oil inspection door has quite a bit of curvature to it so the metal plate surrounding the actuator needs to be bent a little to allow for this and is easily achieved.

August 6th - 7th No building, working in Wellington

August 8th No building

August 9th I fitted the instrument panel into the aircraft in order to establish a final location for the choke control. The location I had planned for the starter button, which is two inches above the original location I had for the choke very nicely resolved the leverage problem I had with the original location. As it is located on an independent panel I am also able to detach this from the main panel and leave it in place when the main panel is removed. I am now redesigning the breaker panel to include a starter switch.

August 10th Cowling inspection panel fitting day. I cut out the holes in the layups and trimmed them to shape. The door latches were relatively easy to fit however the one over the oil filler did need a bit of reengineering in order to accommodate the extreme curvature of the cowling. It only took a bit of extra filing to accommodate the hinge and get everything working well.

I plumbed in the new choke cable and tested it. Much to my satisfaction this new location works extremely well with good leverage available to pull the choke on and minimal friction in the cables.

My other task for the afternoon was to countersink all of the holes in the cowlings. On the lower cowling I need to push the cowling out slightly to cater for the area where I have built up the fuselage. To accomplish this I reduxed two AN9703 washers on the inside of the cowling over the two top holes. While I had a batch of redux mixed I reduxed the new static port tip I had bought from Europa for my pitot/static probe. The plastic tip had been broken off at some stage so a replacement was obtained.

August 11th Discovered the hard way that it is really important to put a spacer underneath the door handle. The kit doesn't have these as standard but with out the spacer it is really easy to scrape the door paint off.

August 12th Sanded back and filled the large scratch on the door. I also found that the door handles would look much nicer if the plates that Europa supply were bent to match the curve of the the door before the handle shape is built up. Next time maybe!!

August 13th Scuff sanded the top cowling.

August 14th - 17th  No building. We have just bought a holiday house at Pauanui on the Tairua Harbour so the week was taken up with getting ready to move things in.

August 18th Added a new hole in the radio panel to allow for the remote indicator on for the ELT. It is now mandatory in NZ to either have the ELT reachable in flight or to have a remote panel fitted. Painted the section on the fuselage where I had filled to match the shape of the upper cowling and also painted a couple of areas on the port door that I wasn't happy with.

August 19th Sanded back the paint on the fuselage. it'll need a couple more coats but it's looking good so far. While polishing a bit of the windscreen I discovered that MicroGloss polish does a superb job on Top Gloss paint and brings up the shine beautifully.

August 20th - 22nd No building.

August 23rd During the most recent 100 inspection on ZK-UBD the LAME who looks after the plane drilled a series of holes in the instrument panel top to assist with cooling of the radios. The holes resulted in what looks like a series of bullet holes across the lower part of the windscreen where they reflect in the windscreen. as a result of this I have decided to move my demisting slot forward under the window lip as the slot I currently have will also reflect onto the windscreen. I filled the existing slot with superfil as best as I could and left it overnight to set.

August 24th Forget using the superfil on the slot! I ground out the superfil and did a two ply bid layup over the slot.

August 25th Sanded back the layup and applied filler over it.

August 26th Ran up the instrument panel. It is important to spin the gyros up at regular intervals especially on the RC Allen electric AH otherwise the bearings can dry up and it's expensive to fix them afterwards.

August 27th Sanded back the filler and sprayed it with primer. Once the primer had dried I applied a bit more filler to touch up the odd pinhole.

August 28th The Rotax 4 cylinder engines do not have any standard fitting point to measure water temperature, something I feel is important on a water cooled engine. Skydrive in the UK now have a kit available and I took part of this kit, together with a Westach water temperature sensor, to create an additional input into the AV10 engine monitor. The T piece supplied by Skydrive was easily plumbed into the port forward water coolant hose and tightened with a pair of jubilee clips.

August 29th 30th No building

August 31st A glorious early spring day in Auckland soon had me dragging the fuselage outside for the day. I finished off the sanding and polishing task and now only have a small section to repaint. I added a temperature sensor close to the turbo air inlet and then buttoned up the AV10 sensor termination block. Down at the back of the aircraft I fitted the push rod to the rudder - a task which took close to an hour, and then tightened up the tailwheel spring retaining bolt. At the end of the day I fitted the starboard door onto the aircraft.