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Last Modified May 5th 1997
April 1st No Building
April 2nd - 4th No Building, being a good dad and helping at my youngest son's school camp.
April 5th - 14th No building. You can find me at Sun 'n Fun in Florida :-)
April 14th - 15th No Building. Family time. Sun 'n Fun was brilliant. The trade show left me penniless and the airshow left me breathless! I spent quite a bit of time with other Europa builders exchanging gossip and building tips. I bought some more Permagrit files - maybe I will be able to find one when I need it from now on rather than having to search the workshop every time! I loaded up on nutplates, washers, bolts and screws since they were so cheap - a pack of 20 or so items selling for less than a pair in New Zealand.
April 16th Cleaned up the starboard aileron upper surface layup and rejigged the piece for the second surface layup.
April 17th A big day - the fuselage kit and trailer arrived! My two sons, Stefan and Nathan, and I spent the evening unpacking the crate and counting the pieces. All looks good and it is a great feeling to see the rest of my plane arrive.
April 18th Finished off the parts count. Other than a couple of small items which seem to be missing everything else is fine.
April 19th Not much building today - the house needs my attention. I did fit the new brake handle to the brake cylinder however. The manual refers to this as a simple exchange but I found that the new handle was just slightly wider than the old and therefore wouldn't fit into the slot in the cylinder. I used a fine file to open up the slot in the casting until the new handle was free to rotate.
April 20th Laid up the starboard aileron lower surface and prepared the workshop for next weekend's big wing layup. I have been warned that the floor gets really sticky so I went out and bought some sheet plastic to protect it. I cut out some of the ply pieces from the fuselage kit. I use a Japanese pull saw for cutting ply which leaves really clean edges and helps make very straight cuts even though they are done by hand.
April 21st Cleaned up the aileron layup and performed the undercut for the bid layup before bonding a straight edge onto the surface to keep the edge straight. Once this was complete I jigged up the port aileron ready for its first surface layup. This is the second port aileron which I brought back from Sun 'n Fun with me, not the first port aileron, which will be used for surface finish testing at a later date!
April 22nd Did some filing on fuselage metal bits.
April 23rd-24th No building
April 25th Prepared the workshop for the big layup. I had been warned that the wing leading edge layup creates a very sticky floor so I have covered the area around the wing with plastic sheet. Cut the biaxial cloth for the wing layup.
April 26th The big layup. This is quite a long layup to say the least. We had three people working and we spent four and a half hours working on the layup and I had already spent an hour and a half microing before Rex and John arrived.We found that that best way of doing the layup was to have two people applying resin and one other following with a squeegee afterwards. To protect ourselves from all of the resin that was dripping off the wing we wore plastic bags over our feet and rubbish bags around our waists - combined with our normal protection apparatus we looked light a real bunch of idiots! Safe and clean, but idiots nevertheless. We micro filled the surface first then placed the single sheet of biaxial cloth over the whole surface. Two and a half hours of playing with resin later we were ready to lay on the root reinforcing consisting of one piece of uni and two pieces of bid. Once this was done we peel plyed the edges, ripped off our protective gear and left for lunch.
April 27th A busy day. Having checked yesterday's layup I discovered a long bubble strip along the leading edge towards the tip. This got the standard treatment of backfilling with resin. I then made two support jigs and an incidence template and bondo'd them onto the wing. A couple of sharp taps with my hand broke the bond to the jig and I flipped the spar off its jig and onto its new home on the floor. I dug the starboard spar out of its storage area and mounted it onto the jig. I spend several hours on and off getting the spar aligned. Bondo was applied at the point I wished to level and the spar held in position while the bondo set. Once the spar was setup correctly I located the forward cores onto the spar. I worked out an easier way of cutting the wing light duct hole in the root core. Instead of using my metal tube as a drill I heated the end with a butane gas torch and with three pushes cut the hole all the way through the core. It took ten minutes compared to almost an hour doing it the other way. Having made the hole I mounted the aileron bellcrank to the spar. If I hadn't done it myself I would have believed how quickly the spar can be set up. The port side took several weeks to get to this point - now that I know what to do it took under eight hours to get the other spar to the point where it is almost ready to have the cores bonded on.
April 28th - 29th No building, working in Wellington
April 30th Rechecked the spar level. It does have a habit of moving a bit with the temperature so I am only concerned with getting it to within 0.1 degrees of twist at this point. Having glued a couple of pieces of aluminium angle on the end cores I spent a bit of time checking the wing block alignment. This one could be tricky as the centre core has quite a determined twist to it.
