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Last Modified November 4th 1996
1st-4th October Not a lot of building. having been away for a couple of weeks the family was keen to see a bit of me. I did however get the port stabilator jig bonded to the bench, the two stabilator halves bonded together, the cloth cut for the layup and the bench prepared for the layup. I do remember seeing the family. Actually, all of that only took about an hour a day.
5th October Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where my mower iz? You guessed it, no building - time to be a gardener.
6th October Filing. As most of the metal pieces on the Europa have been nibbled out of sheet metal it was necessary to clean up the rough edges. I used a fine farmers file to do this. All of the pieces for the wing kit took around six hours to tidy up
7th - 9th October Now for the really messy bit. In order to prevent corrosion in Auckland's salty air a good metal treatment is necessary. Firstly each piece was scrubbed with a Scotchbrite pad to remove grease then etched with Deoxydine - a phosphoric acid solution. A quick wash in water and then a bath in Alodyne (aka chromic acid) chemically converted the oxide surface into an anti corrosive finish. Parts that are going to be embedded in resin will be left at this stage however any pieces exposed to the air will be further treated with System Three Resins anti corrosion primer at a later date.
10th - 11th October No building.
12th October The first layup of the second stabilator went well, just like the first stabilator. It really is true that the more you do of this glasswork the better you get. I have found that it is very easy to extract too much resin when using the hairdryer which results in small patches of speckle. The patches aren't enough to worry about but could be improved. With this layup, once I had done my normal sqeegeeing of an area with the squeegee and hairdryer I added a bit more resin and did a squeegee run with no hair dryer. Over the whole surface it probably added only 20-30 grams of weight over the previous layups but the finish is great, not a speckle in sight.
13th October Ripped the stabilator out of its jig ready for the next layup. A bit of sanding of the glass cleaned up drips and the edges of the layup. I laid up the first side of my final coating test piece today. There is a good size wedge of the stabilator foam core that doesn't get used on the aircraft and I intend using this as an exposure test for the final coating I am planning to use. Once this piece is laid up on all four sides I will finish coat the top surface, bake it and then put a few coats of System three finish coat on. It will then be mounted to my roof and exposed to the elements in a far worse manner than my aircraft ever will.
14th - 18th October Re jigging the second stabilator, like the first took a bit of persuading to keep the thing in a straight line. Judicious use of five minute epoxy convinced everything to stay in line. Having checked the surface with my straight edge to ensure that it was perfect I was ready for the next layup.
19th October I had friend help me with this layup. Rex Booth can only be described as an aircraft mad Baptist Minister. I mean, how many other church offices do you know with pictures of the cockpit of a 747! Rex will be my helping hand on the large wing layups later so I thought that it would be a good idea to show him the ropes on a simple bit first. The layup proceeded smoothly until the second cloth layup where we positioned the cloth too far forward for the offcut to fill the triangle that is left. Having decided that there was no way that we were going to move the cloth that was in place there was a mad dash to cut another piece of cloth off the roll to fit the gap - not an easy task with epoxying kit on I can tell you. Anyhow we got the piece in place, finished the job and, having attached a couple of aluminium angle irons to the trailing edge to keep it straight, left it to set.
20th October A very nice looking layup indeed, the finish looks just right. Out of the jig for finishing and then onto the next bit. It was at this point that things became rather unstuck, or should I really say, stuck. As I pulled the piece out of the jig, instead of a few quiet cracking sounds from where the five minute epoxy was holding the piece to the jig there was a distinct sound of quite a bit of foam being torn. Upon turning the piece over I discovered a chunk of foam around 15 square centimetres in size firmly epoxied to my previously good looking lower surface. It appears that the resin, when squeegeed off the surface we had been working on, had run down the root and then wicked between the stabilator and the jig. Much grizzling. It took around an hour of sanding and scraping to get the surface back to the condition that I had left it in.
21st October With the lower surface back to square one, I spent an hour this evening sanding and scraping the leading edge and tip peel ply areas so that the inevitable peel ply bumps were removed. The Europa newsletter arrived with another set of modifications. Nothing that affects anything I have done so far thank goodness so they got filed in the builders manual ready for me to fall over at the appropriate point in the build process.
22nd October I trimmed the trailing edge this evening. The task is made simpler if a straight edge is clamped to the trailing edge and the piece sanded back to the straight edge. Just to make sure that I did have two stabilators that were of similar shape I put them side by side for the first time. Two things really are noticeable at this point. First is how big these things are - my workshop looks very small when you look at the overall width of the stabilators, goodness knows how Europa can make the statement that you can build this thing in a single garage. I very much suspect that Carol's car is going to end up spending a bit of time outside for at least some part of the build process. The second thing you notice is how much the resin changes colour over time. The underlying blue foam now looks distinctly green when the one I made earlier is put alongside the newly finished stabilator.
23rd October The "five minute" job of cutting out the root foam core, like the last time, took about an hour. Thanks to more careful positioning of the peel ply this time to fully cover the gap between the root core and the inner core, the surface finish on the inner core is a lot tidier. Measuring the trim tab was done very carefully and checked against previous measurements recorded from the first trim tab before cutting the trim tab out of the stabilator. The tab came away well and I now have two the same size (sigh of relief). Cutting away the stabilator trailing edge foam occupied most of the rest of the evening until a rather pointed "Well, I am going to bed" message was thrown in my direction. Off to bed said Zebedee. (1970's English in joke).
24th October Only a bit of work this evening as most of the time was spent at my first Cessna 177RG flying lesson. I finished cutting back the rib foam on the stabilator by using my dremel to neatly sand away the foam at the edge where the trim tab had been removed.
25th October I prepared for the next layup this evening. The stabilator has to be positioned vertically in order to make it easier to do the layup so I clamped the piece in my workmate to make life easier. I also fitted a thermostat to my resin cabinet heater so I can keep the resin at a constant 24c. Just to get my resin "fix" I made up a batch of flox and used this to build up a dummy corner on my previously finished trim tab leading edge. This will allow me to extend the top surface to fill the gap that would otherwise occur at the trim tab root. The left over flox went into filling a hole in my bathroom where the Gibraltar board had got wet over the years. Epoxy and Flox makes a great all purpose filler though it is a little inflexible when set!
26th October A very busy day. First task of the day was to rearrange the garage/workshop so that it was capable of housing the wings once construction started. This also involved removing a lot of junk, cutting back on the amount of blue foam I was storing and also moving the workbenches around and relevelling the main construction bench. Once that was done I recalibrated the resin pump. It had drifted very slightly to pump a bit too much hardener (about 1 drop in five grams!) so I patiently readjusted it. I gave the System Three Resins paint kit a try out and primed a few of my metal bits that I had been working on. This is really nice stuff to work with and goes onto alodined aluminium quickly and easily with a sponge brush. To finish off a busy day I started preparing my port wing spar for layup. Preparation consists of sanding the rough edges back and then scuff sanding all of the surfaces. As I got towards the tip I notices that there was a row of long thin bubbles under the skin at the lower edge. There were also quite a few places where bubbles had already been removed as was evidenced by the collection of 1/8" drill holes dotted along the spar. To get rid of these bubble I drilled a few 1/16 inch holes at each end of the run of bubbles spread over almost two feet and injected resin into one of the holes in each bubble. It took almost 20cc of resin to fill the bubbles up and I am surprised that these were missed at inspection. I will be filling my drill holes and the holes left by Europa with flox to get back to a nice clean surface. I sanded back my trim tab flox corners just to finish the day off.
27th October One last check that everything was ready and it was on to the stabilator closeout. My method of laying in the first layer wet and then following up with dry cloth for subsequent layers certainly makes laying up the closeouts simpler. Convincing wet cloth to position itself nicely when all it wants to do is stretch out of shape is no fun. Even with the cloth dry it takes a bit of work to keep it to the correct dimensions when working on a piece mounted vertically. All went well however and three hours later I had a good looking layup. I ended up with a small pool of resin in the tip area and got out as much as practical. When checking the layup a couple of hours later I noted that this had built up again slightly but decided to leave it. If I get really enthusiastic I may drill it out at a later date.
28th - 30th October The edges of the layup needed sanding back so after a brief attack with a dremel cutting blade it was out with a sanding spline to get the edges nice and straight. As can be seen from the pictures, the workshop also needed a bit of a tidy up!
