Last Modified September 22nd 2003.

August 2003, My Baby Came Home :)

1st - 2nd August I continued with spray painting the final bits of metalwork

3rd - 4th August No building, at Pauanui

5th August Started assembling the jigsaw puzzle which makes up the outrigger mechanism. The easiest way of doing this to make sure that you don't get everything in the wrong place is to assemble them at the same time as mirror images. I found that I needed to trim a bit more off the latch bar due to the fact that I'd had the latch plate in back to front the first time I did them. There is a very subtle difference in the angle of the ends of the latch plate which can only really be seen in the manual diagrams if you extend the lines at the end of the latching plates. As soon as you do that then it becomes a lot easier to visualise the setup on the mechanism

6th - 11th August No building, working in Wellington and Hastings

14th - 15th August No building, overseas guest.

16th August  Home again and looking absolutely stunning in a hard gloss white finish. So far I've only got the fuselage, wings and stabilators back so I'll work on the fuselage first.

Sailplane Services, who did the painting for me also very kindly (and without being asked) polished out all of the scratches in the perspex.

The wings are like mirrors without a single defect being visible across the entire surfaces. I am sure that if I had been doing the final profiling myself I would never have got even close to the finish that these two guys achieved.

The only areas of painting to be done are the wing tips where I need to do a bit of reshaping to accommodate the lights. This isn't going to me an issue as the paint that was used - a two pot polyester, can be retouched any time without having to spray an entire surface.

I must admit that most of the rest of the day was spent just looking at the plane in wonder.

August 17th First task was to start making a list of things i needed to do to finish the plane off. By the end of the morning the list was quite long and each time I looked at the plane I noticed something else that needed to be done.

First task was to install the door surrounds and gas struts. Getting the door surrounds on was interesting as they seemed to be shorter than they were when I took them off! To eliminate the gap I started at the top back where the join is. I then went down the vertical with one end, tapping it into place with a hammer as I went. Once I'd got it firmly seated in the lower left corner and started along the top. It was important to keep the surround fairly taught all the way along the top and down the front edge so that all I needed to to at the bottom was tap the beading into place.

Another trap to avoid is getting a twist in the surround as you'll only notice it once you come to tap the bottom into place (been there, done that)!

Up at the noisy end of the plane I fitted a few Rotax tube clamps that I'd bought at Sun 'n Fun earlier in the year. They are stupidly expensive for what they are and I could possibly have used a different style but I wanted all of the terminations of the engine management tubing to be clamped the same way. I used nylaflow tubing for the ambient pressure line however I just noticed that it really doesn't grip well on the pressure sensor so I'll be changing that for  PVC tubing.

To check the viability of the seals on my radiator overflow bottle I added a couple of inches of water and marked a line on it.

August 19th  The two lowermost cowling screw nutplates caused me a bit of trouble before I sent the plane away for painting as the thickness of firewall meant that the rivets had to be countersunk from the outside. Of course, as luck would have it I ended up countersinking too deep so the rivets had nothing to draw on. To fix this I laid up a layer of triax cloth (wing leftovers) over the area where the two nutplates go and once it's set I'll use this as the new base for them.

One commonly reported issue with the fuel filler hose is that it allows the aromatics in petrol to seep through, or in other words, it ends up smelling of petrol. To get around this problem Tim Ward in Christchurch had a length of aluminium pipe bent to the appropriate shape for his aircraft and I tacked onto his order. The pipe took very little time to trim to length and this was then inserted where the rubber hose previously sat. I cut a couple of 8cm sections off each end of the hose to create sleeves to attach the aluminium pipe to the tank and filler mouldings then used 50-77mm hose clips to hold everything in place.

August 18th -23rd No building, too busy dashing around the country fighting virii and internet attackers.

August 24th With the new aluminium filler line now in place and the appropriate hose clamps sourced I fitted the line. Then I realised that I was going to have to remove it again in order to gain access to the cross bar gussets.

When the MAUW mod first came out I was the first person to fit it to an already constructed fuselage. There was one little point missed in the documentation at that time which was that the smaller bolt passing through the fuselage wall needed to be shortened and that the outmost gusset plate bolt must pass through the internal lift pin support as well as the cross tube. Adding that extra bolt with the cross bar in place is entertaining. I'd made new gusset plates earlier so now "all" that was required was to cut back the fuselage bolt and then drill throught the cross tube and lift pin support. Cutting the bolt was fairly straight forward using a pad saw. Then came the fun bit. I used a 90 degree chuck on my drill, applied a good few drops of cutting fluid and then just gave it all I could. Each end used up a drill bit but I was able to get the additional bolt into place in the end.

Now that was done I finally got to fit the fuel filler line. I added an addtional hose clamp to the centre of this aluminium section and trapped a length of wire braid under the clamp. I then led this braid aft through the cable duct and will earth it later.

I fitted the last two cowling nutplates which worked out very nicely with the layup I'd put in place to support them.

August 25th Big task for today was to counterbalance the stabilators. I fitted the trim tab to the starboard side stabilator and then started to fit the stabilator to the fuselage. I say started because it because very apparent that something was seriously wrong once I slid the stabilator onto the torque tube. Everything felt very sloppyand when I tried to pull the stabilator off again it was very difficult.

The problem soon became obvious once I had the stabilator off the aircraft. The TP5 tube which acts as the outer guide for the torque tube had become disbonded and was now floating inside of the stabilator! I was able to get it towards the outside of the stabilator with my fingers but the expoxy and bits of foam surrounding it made it impossible to extract. I eased the hole in the outer surrounding resin slightly and then spent a good hour with a piece of sandpaper removing the expoxy and foam from the outside of the TP5. With the resin volume reduced and with some less than gentle persuation with a vice grip I was finally able to get the TP5 out of the aircraft.

The resin bond to the TP5 was still firmly in place but it was clear that the disbond had occurred against the foam. As I've rigged the stabilator many times in the past I suspect that the damage was caused trailering the plane from the painters back home with the stabilators in place on their trailer supports.

As I introduced some marks on the TP5 while I was extracting it I have now ordered a replacement part.

Having vented my frustration by attempting to shoot a couple of Katanas out of the sky I returned to the workshop. I applied some thin alumnium tape around the edges of the foam blocks and over the push to talk wires which lead through this area.

August 25th Next area requiring my attention was the base of the control column. Last year we had an incident here in New Zealand with a Europa having to make a forced landing as a result of a small stone becoming trapped beneath the base of the column. With only limited aileron control the pilot did a remarkable job of getting the aircraft onto the ground but unfortunately hit a cow with a wing. The cow became a lot of steaks and the aircraft required a new wing and fuel tank.

In order to prevent this occurring again most NZ Europa owners are now fitting a cuff and sleeve to surround the control column.

 

I made up a couple of cuff templates out of foam, covered them with aluminium foil, applied release wax and then tacked them to the floor with double sided tape. Tomorrow I'll layup a carbon/glass/carbon sandwich around the outside.

August 26th Laid up the glass on the outside of the former and lapped it onto the floor by around 1". The entire layup was covered with peel ply and left until it it was at soft leather stage for trimming. Unfortunately while waiting for the glass to reach it's semi set stage for trimming I got called out to a customer site so I'm now going to have to hacksaw the glass to shape rather than being able to do that with a craft knife.

August 27th The introduction of the cuffs means that my nice leather boots no longer fit. I took them off the columns and unpicked the base until they could be opened up. A small section of leather needed to be trimmed off at the back of the boots to allow them to fit at the base and this was easily achieved. I'll add some velcro to the outside of the cuff and inside of the boot and use that to attach the boot to the cuff.

August 28th - 31st No building.