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Last Modified January 13th 1997
1st December Laid up the first wing rib today. Two layers of bid doesn't take a long time to apply so I amused myself for the rest of the day painting some metalwork.
2nd - 6th December An hour of work each night allowed me to trim up the first wing rib as well as cut a hole for the wing tip light ducting. This hole (like the pitot tube hole) has to be bored through the first wing block which presented a challenge as the block is around a metre long. I sharpened the end of a length of bathroom towel rail and used this as a drill. The use of wing lights is not specified within the kit so I followed the recommendation from Europa USA as to the positioning of the hole for the duct. I will be mounting Whelan combination light and strobe units on the wing tips which saves me the trouble of cutting into my fin to mount a strobe and white rear light. The wing lighting duct hole is bored 10cm up from the spar and comes out into the first lightening hole in the second block. I epoxied the duct (light weight flexible electrical conduit sourced from my local electrical supplies) to the foam between the first and second lightening holes and then made three 2cm wide support blocks which were glued at equal spacing along the lightening hole to provide further support. I will reproduce this support in the wing tip block once the three blocks are finally glued to the spar.
7th December No work
8th December Laid up the second wing rib and went for a fly around the city.
9th - 11th December Came down with a throat infection :-( so didn't do much work other than jigging up a couple of the trailing edge blocks and epoxying the slots. These blocks are in much better shape than the stabilator blocks and only required double sided tape to keep them straight while epoxying. I also made up the pitot tube mounting block and glass layup while I was at it.
12th - 13th December No work
14th - 15th December I am now at a point where the next major job to do in sequence is the bonding of the leading edge blocks to the spar. I can't do this until I rivet the aileron bellcrank and mount this on the underside of the spare. The catch here is that the person that I know with a solid rivet squeezer is away at the present time. I skipped ahead in the build procedure and spent the weekend preparing the trailing edge blocks and doing the bellcrank housing and tube glass layups. These layups are fairly straight forward being only one layer of bid. The only catch it that it is very hard to get a layup that isn't too wet as one layer of bid is very flexible and has a mind of its own. I probably gained an extra few grams of weight in this layup as a result. I spent Sunday evening cutting out bi directional cloth as the movie on TV was pretty lousy!
16th December No building
17th December Sanded back the rib inserts on the trailing edge blocks. This is to allow the glass ribs to fold back under the end of the block to lie against the spar thus (once floxed in place) creating a strong rib to spar joint.
18th December Ooops! Just discovered I goofed on the trailing edge root block. I have laid up the single ply of cloth in the root aileron rod channel at the wrong end of the channel! The documentation tells you to lay up at the inboard end and even has a nice picture. Unfortunately the picture is of the starboard wing and I forgot to mirror image it for the port wing. A bit of judicious work with a sharp craft knife and the ply peeled away nicely and only took a millimetre of foam with it. At this bit is hidden inside the wing I won't bother tidying it up.
19th - 20th December No building
21st December Grabbing my bag of aileron bellcrank parts I zipped off to Gary Spicer's workshop at Ardmore, my local airfield. Gary is building a quickbuild RV6 following an unfortunate and unplanned arrival with the ground in his previous RV. His workshop is very well equipped and, for a nominal fee, Gary makes advanced tools available to other homebuilders. My task on this occasion was to rivet the bearings to the bellcranks and Gary, being an aluminium aircraft constructor, knows how to rivet! Gary very kindly taught me how to use squeeze rivets and how to check if the job is done properly. Once back home I assembled the port and starboard bellcranks and attached the ball ends to the bellcranks.
Problem. Europa pre drill the holes in the spar and the corresponding holes in the bellcrank assembly so fitting the two together should be a simple task. The spar holes are drilled from the same side and at the correct spacing but, as I discovered don't necessarily appear on the other face at the correct spacing. Now this isn't too much of an issue with the starboard spar as the bellcrank will be attached to the face where the drilling is inline. The port spar is another matter as this is the reverse of the starboard spar and my bellcrank holes don't line up with the holes in the spar. I can get two of the four holes lined up but the other two holes are off by 1/16" and 3/32" respectively. I have contacted Europa for advice.
22nd December
A quick workshop clean up today. It is amazing how quickly the floor starts to look like a resin sculpture. I did the quick aileron rod channel fixup and then proceeded with the first of my trailing edge rib layups. Unlike the leading edge rib layups these have a metal plate bonded into the layup which consists of four plies. The metal plates will later on have the flap brackets attached to them. The layup was easy to do with the foam block perpendicular to the floor and the layup surface horizontal. In order to ensure a good bond to the glass I scuff sanded the plate with 60 grit sandpaper and then floxed both sides. The picture shows the rib before it is tidied up. I still need to sand back the edges and scuff sand the entire surface before it is laid up into the wing.
23rd December Removed the peel ply from the layup and tidied up the edges. I have a couple of small bubbles on the surface which will need backfilling with resin. These came as a result of the whole surface being peel plyed and therefore unavailable for inspection as the resin was setting.
They say that problems come in threes and this one came with a vengeance. I was tidying up my bench following the last layup and in preparation for sanding back the glass on the last rib layup when I dropped my container of acetone which is used for cleaning brushes. Acetone and blue foam don't get on very well as you can see from this picture! I ripped off my shirt which was also covered in acetone, grabbed my eyewash bottle and quickly sprayed the foam to wash off as much acetone as possible, turned the vent fan on and then dived for the shower. Once I got my breath back I was able to inspect the damage. Fortunately it wasn't too severe so the first thing I did was mark an area around the damage and, using a sharp craft knife, cut the area away. A real advantage with mouldless composite construction is that you can do this sort of thing quickly and easily.
In the picture on the left you can see the block that has been cut away and the hole left behind looking into one of the lightening hole cores. Also visible is one of my support blocks inserted into the lightening hole to support the nav light cable duct that is hiding somewhere in the gloom. I then cut out a block of foam which was slightly larger than the hole in two dimensions and used five minute epoxy to glue it into place as can be seen in the picture on the right.
After a cup of tea I came back and sanded back the foam to end up with a surface that was as good as new.
24th - 25th December No building, Christmas.
26th December Snuck out for a while and sanded a rebate in one of the spar blocks.
27th December My parcel from aircraft spruce arrived containing some more hinge so I could finish off my starboard stabilator. I cut the hinge, drilled the holes and bonded the hinges to the trim tab today.
28th December Mounting the trim tab was a straight forward job and is lines up better than the port tab. I decided to remount the port tab and found a small lump in the underside of the flange. Once this was removed the port tab now lines up a lot better. It still has a slight warp but is only 1mm out of line now.
29th December No building
30th December I was going to work on setting the torque tube linking the two stabilators today but we are being hit by a tropical cyclone. The humidity is close to 100%, the dehumidifier has given up and it hasn't stopped raining since yesterday afternoon. Time to go read a book.
31st December Still raining. Got the stabilator and tailplanes all lined up ready for bonding if it ever stops raining.
Postscript It stopped raining just before the year ended. Auckland got drenched with over 290mm of rain falling over two days. The Coromandel peninsula - twenty minutes flight away by light aircraft got close to that each day! The eye of the cyclone passed within 150nm of Auckland and caused close to $2 million worth of damage to east coast towns. This is the first big cyclone we have had since 1982.
