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Last Modified October 14th 1997
September 1st Trimmed back the glass at the
edges of the port wing layup then started working on the root
flange.First off was removal of the foam in the trailing edge
area of the the root flange. This is a very simple job as the
foam is backed by one of the ribs. A few minutes with a knife
blade had the foam removed from this area. The next thing that I
had to do was reinstall the wing incidence jig as the reference
line that was drawn on the foam would be removed as part of the
layup. I levelled the wing using my alignment mark as a reference
then positioned the incidence guide on the top surface and
ensured that it was level. The block was attached to the wing
surface with hot melt glue and a strip of duct tape laid over the
top to make sure that it wasn't going to move until the wing
incidence was set. Once I was happy that the incidence guide
wasn't going to move I proceeded with removing the foam from the
leading edge portion of the wing root. This is good fun and
mainly consists of digging the foam away until you meet the
smooth surface of the next wing block. The trick of course is not
to dig into the wing block in the process. There were a few areas
where resin had wicked between the two blocks during the layup
but these were easy picked off the surface. The rather lethal
looking tool (shown in the picture below) that I use to hack the
foam away is actually a ceramic trimming knife stolen from
Carol's tool collection! The buried end has a very useful curved
surface which is perfect for this job.
September 2nd - 5th Not a lot of
time was spent on the plane this week.Work has had to take
priority. I did manage to find enough time to mark out the wing
tip for the starboard wing. The manual provides a set of
coordinates for marking out the tip so I made a template to fit
these coordinates then transferred these to the tip under
surface. The wing upper surface doesn't follow the same curve as
the lower surface so I drew a set of vertical lines on the outer
surface and transferred the shape to the upper surface. I am
going to have to diverge from the building process when it comes
to installation of the wing tips as I am installing wing tip
lights which are not included in the build process as supplied by
Europa.
September 6th Flange layup day. I had thought this was going to be a major task but in the end it proved to be quite a simple layup. The layup is broken into two halves - forward of the spar and rear of the spar. I did the trailing edge layup first as this seemed to be the more complex. Two full length layers of cloth are laid in first that extend onto the spar. I used my standard procedure of wetting the first layer out on a piece of cling film before applying it the the flange and then laid subsequent pieces up dry. A metal plate was bedded into place with flox 5cm from the vertical part of the flange. Two layers of shorter cloth covered this before another plate was bedded into place. This plate was covered with another two layers of cloth and another plate added before being covered with one short length of cloth and a final long length. When I was happy with this layup I repeated the process for the leading edge portion of the flange. A few hours after layup I trimmed the edges while it was at the soft leather stage - not a trivial task considering that there were seven layers of glass involved!
September 7th
Confident that I could complete the flange layups in one weekend
I got up early and cleaned out the flanges on the other wing and
fitted the incidence jig to the wing. While I was removing the
foam from the flange I put all of the heaters on in the workshop
as it was quite a cool morning. After an hour's work it became
obvious that there was no way that I was going to get the
workshop up to working temperature so I spent some time cleaning
the floor and then trimmed off the flanges.
September 8th No building.
September 9th I marked out the inspection hole on the starboard wing then cut out the hole. The starboard wing is now ready for fitting the aileron and flap so I trial positioned them to see how they were going to fit. The aileron doesn't quite fit into the flange area, in fact is it some 5mm longer. I asked the opinion of some other builders on the Internet and came to the conclusion that trimming back the aileron by 5mm at the tip was the best answer. I checked the centre point measurement of the aileron hinge against the desired centre point measurement of the hinge on the flange and found the flange point as supplied in the manual was 2mm inboard of where my aileron mid point would fit best. As my aircraft will be flying at subsonic speeds I feel that I can live with the 2mm discrepancy :-). After tea I marked out the hinge locations on the flange then checked them against the ailerons. Funny, they didn't match the hinges on the aileron! What was more, the reinforcing cloth that I had placed in the flange didn't match the marks I had measured out on the surface. A quick check of measurements showed that I had laid up both ailerons and hinge reinforcements on the flange at 107cm between hinges rather than the specified 117cm. The fact that all were identical was that I had actually made a mark on my ruler at the wrong place and had used that reference mark for all the layups. Of course if I had used imperial measurements where the hinges are 46 inches apart I would have not made the error! Damned metric rulers. I didn't think that the discrepancy would be a major problem but I rang Roger at Europa just to be sure. He agreed with me and told me that on the Europa XS, which has extended ailerons, they in fact left the hinge locations in the same place so the XS has a similar hinge to end spacing on the inboard end of the hinge. I then cut the hinge notches and, using stirring sticks as spacers, fitted the aileron to the flange.
September
10th Trimmed the foam mounting blocks for the starboard
aileron static balances. I needed to trim these quite a bit to
get them to fit into the flanges so the effort I had put into
getting these to match the supplied templates had largely been
wasted. If I was doing them again I would use the templates as a
rough guide leaving the finishing until they were mounted.
September 11th Fitted the aileron to the wing, drilled the hinges and trimmed the flange to give the required amount of movement. Once this was complete I then removed the aileron and fitted the mounting nuts to the aileron hinge. To finish the evening off I glued the foam blocks to the aileron and temporarily attached the lead counterweights with duct tape.
September
12th Time to make more holes in my wing. The
counterweights swing in a channel cut into the wing and this
requires part of the lower surface to be removed and the foam cut
back to the upper surface. I positioned the aileron against the
wing and drew the outline of the counter balance then cut the
surface back with my dremel. Once I had established the base
channel I tested the aileron again and drew the required 5mm
clearance line. I repeated the cutting, sanding and checking
procedure several times until I was sure that the counterbalances
has the required clearance all through their motion.
September
13th Laid up the port wing root flanges. In order to make
the layup more accessible I propped the wing up (with a cat box
that the cat didn't seem to need that day!) which brought the
wing root up to mid chest height. Four hours after completing the
layup I trimmed back the cloth.
September 14th Laid up the cloth within the starboard wing counterbalance channels. I used triangular offcuts of bid for this and found it relatively straightforward to get a tidy finish. I sanded back the port root layup then proceeded to mount the aileron, trim the flange and fit the mounting nuts to the hinge. To simplify to job of trimming the flange (I progressively sanded the last one) I cut a 3mm strip off the top with a slitting disk before sanding it back. Even with this large slice removed I had to do a fair amount of sanding before I got sufficient clearance. I am happier with the clearance on this wing and tomorrow I will sand back the other wing's aileron flange a bit more to match this wing. At the end of the day I trimmed back the glass in the starboard wing counterbalance channels. While I was doing the layups earlier in the day I had some spare resin so I laid up sheets of four plies of bid. I used triangular off cuts laid onto plastic film and wet out in turn. The last layer was covered in peel ply and another layer of plastic film before being compressed with a roller and left under a heavy piece of wood. The sheets that come out tomorrow will be used at various places around the plane where a flat plate is required.
September 15th Didn't sand back the flange! I wasn't happy with the positioning of the aileron inspection hole on the starboard wing so decided to fix the problem. I had used what I felt was the edge of the spar when I marked the surface out but when I actually cut the hole out I was 5mm too close to the spar. The secret here is to use the edge of the micro filling the gap between the foam and the spar as the edge reference and not the edge of the visible spar. While the positioning would work, it would result in my having to create an angled edge in the 3mm perspex inspection panel where it approached the spar. To remedy the situation I made a new inner hole lining out of my glass sheet and bonded this where I wanted the final hole to be. Then I recut the wing surface to match the hole which was now 5mm further away from the spar than the original. I had a 5mm gap close to the spar which needed filling so I fitted in some more foam and trimmed it to match the hole. The new hole is positioned where I want it - though I will not be able to use the ring of glass that will be cut from the wing surface to make the inspection plate mounting as detailed in the next build instruction. This is easy to get around as I will simply make the mounting ring out of some of the glass sheet I made earlier.
September 16th Marked out a new inspection panel mounting ring on one of my fibreglass sheets
September 17th -30th No building, on holiday in England.
