I'm gonna buy me an airplane, and fly all over this town.

7 hours.

Yesterday, I recovered from my cold enough in the afternoon to get going on the engine. This means I rolled the engine out on its stand into the middle of the room where I could work on it and prepared to take off a cylinder so I could have a look at the cam lobes. This would be the step that determines the way forward, because if the valve train parts are trashed, I have to send the engine in to a rebuilder and I’m looking at the possibility of a very expensive repair, because there’s no way to fix the camshaft or the lifters without splitting the case, and that STARTS at around 2 grand. So off we go. First thing was to de-pickle the engine. This meant draining out all the oil I’d had filling up the case since I bought the engine in 2008. There was oil hiding everywhere in this thing. Even after draining out the oil, every time I moved the crank or tilted it, more would come out from somewhere. But that’s kind of the point. Parts submerged in oil don’t corrode. The crankshaft bore gave me a bit of a scare. When I pulled the end cap off and fished out the old sock that had been shoved in there to keep the oil in (WTF?) I discovered a load of gray sludge in the crankshaft bore. This is lead and oil, congealed into a gray goo, like bad nanotech. At first I freaked, I thought this stuff was from the sock partially dissolving in there. The sock wasn’t dissolving, but the lead sludge was now all oiled up and nasty. I scraped that all out with a wooden tongue depressor and moved on. After I got most of the oil out, it was time to have a look inside. I went for the #3 cylinder, because it was the most accessible. The #1 was obstructed by the governor and bracket. Taking a cylinder off one of these things is not really that big a deal. Follow the manual, don’t lose any parts, and dont’ force anything, you’ll be OK. So that’s what I did.

Lots of rags to pick up oil drips, and another one wrapped around the connecting rod so it doesn’t bash on the case and damage it. This would be bad. To get this far, I had to take the rocker cover off, remove the shroud tube retaining clips, then remove the rocker arms. After that, I could pull out the pushrods, and pull the shroud tubes through the cylinder head. At that point, the cylinder was free to go, after removing the oil drain line. With each one of these steps, more preserving oil dribbled out, hence the progression of rags on the floor. The drip pan doesnt fit under the engine stand, nor is it wide enough to catch oil from opposing cylinders. So what was the point of this? Oh yeah.. have a look at the camshaft and tappet bodies. Maybe that’s Greek to you, but essentially what happens is this: The crankshaft, which the prop is attached to, spins round and round. There’s a gear on it that drives the camshaft, which also spins round and round at a higher speed. The camshaft has a bunch of teardrop-shaped lobes along its length, so when it spins, the point of the teardrop pushes against the tappet body. The tappet body pushes on the pushrod, which pushes one side of the rocker arm. The other side pushes down on a valve, which, depending on its function, lets air into, or allows exhaust out of, the cylinder. The camshaft and the tappet body are a metal-to-metal contact point, which means that for them to work for any length of time, their contacting surfaces have to be as frictionless as possible. This is done by having those surfaces polished to a mirror finish and constantly bathed in oil. However, if there is corrosion on either surface, they’ll grind each other down to nubs, oil or no oil, but before that, the engine will start losing horsepower, compression on the affected cylinder will go down, and metal flakes will start showing up in the oil filter. Keep flying it that way and you’re asking for trouble. Metal bits migrate into bearings, block up oil passages, all kinds of nasty stuff, not to mention that if your valve train fails, you could be looking at an engine-out scenario.

So I was pretty keen to find out how that was. First pass with a bright light and an inspection mirror showed no corrosion, which was what I was worried about primarily. This is a Good Thing. I also ran a fingernail along the camshaft lobe and found nothing. If it fails the fingernail test, game over. Time for a teardown and a regrind on the camshaft, possibly a replacement. I was able to get the mirror behind the tappet body on the cam lobe I’d just checked and that looked good. No spalling, which is mech-speak for tiny dings and chunks of metal beaten away.

At that point I was totally chuffed. I was stoked to only have to replace the cylinders, which I wanted to do anyway, after seeing the compression numbers in the logbook. Something tells me the aircraft this engine came from was flown infrequently at best. So with that in mind, I moved on. This engine was to be converted into a fuel-injected one, changing from an O-360 to an IO-360. I have the Superior forward-facing cold-air sump, and the Airflow Performance fuel injection system ready to rock, along with the high-pressure fuel pump necessary to feed it. So I figured I’d do that next.

This shows the fuel pump pad almost cleaned off and ready to have the new pump put on. The old gasket material pretty much baked itself on, so even this little bit of work took a lot of elbow grease with a plastic scraper and a scotchbrite pad. That little round button sticking up back there inside the case between the two bolt holes is the actuator shaft. This is driven by a cam on one of the accessory gears, and with the engine installed, makes installing the fuel pump a royal pain. Upside down on a stand, though, it’s a breeze. I put the fuel pump on temporarily with a new gasket (since I don’t have the proper gasket sealer) and went on to the next step.

The next thing was to take off the original backwards-facing sump and replace it with the Superior one. No big deal right? Wrong. Old gaskets suck. They suck so much, I don’t know where to start. Once I was finally able to get the old sump off, after some persuasion, I was faced with the task of removing the old gasket. This is a slow crawl, square millimeter by square millimeter, carving off old gasket material. Can’t use a razor blade. Razor blades are steel. The case is aluminum. A razor blade will shave off case right along with gasket. plastic scraper is best, after loosening up the old gasket with gasket remover. Keep that stuff off the paint, out of the crankcase, and out of your eyes, and plan on being there a while. I’m still not even half done.

The other good news is that I didn’t find any corrosion in the gear train either. Maybe I don’t know what to look for, but I know what rust looks like and I didn’t find any.

I took a break from gasket scraping for a while. During this break, I don’t know why, I went to have another look at the cam lobes, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I’m both glad I did and really bummed out at the same time. The engine was rotated to a different position by this point, one which got the exhaust lobe on #3 into a different position. Also with the engine back upside down, it was easier to get light and mirrors in there to have a look. So I did. Sure enough, the lobes were good, as far as I could tell. The tappet body I checked earlier was fine. But the next one over, the exhaust tappet on #3 was not. I could get my finger between the lobe and the tappet surface, and I could feel something. I got the mirror in there, and bang, there it was. The tappet was a near perfect match for the picture in the lycoming overhaul manual captioned “starting to spall.” About a 1/8″ square area was pitted and rough, and It wasn’t the Rockwell marks either. So there it is. Pretty much a day out the window, and potentially quite a few thousand dollars. Any spalling of the tappet bodies means they need to be replaced, and the camshaft now needs to be inspected with at least 10x magnification. So now I know what to do next: Find an engine shop and get it torn down.

In retrospect, perhaps it would have been better to just buy a crate engine from Mattituck or Aerosport, or even Van’s, or maybe buy a zero-time rebuild from one of the various engine suppliers out there, but this combination was going to be mine. 6th order counterweight, no rpm restrictions, front-mounted governor, forward-induction. It may very well cost me the equivalent to zero-time this engine and configure it for what I have in mind, but at this point, I’ve almost got too much invested to just chuck it all and start over. Or, maybe somebody can build me a long block and I’ll finish the rest. But hey, at least I got to use my Lycoming cylinder wrenches once. In any event, Tim’s Aircraft Engines gets a call from me on Tuesday.

5 hours.

Mostly a cleanup day. And a rearrange day. And a figure-out-what-to-do-next day. So there was cleanup. I rearranged the guest house bedroom and gained back a few more precious square feet. Then I went over the construction manual and checked off things I know I did but didn’t check them off during the actual work, mostly from wing mating. After that, I screwed the panel back on and started tinkering with the throttle quadrant. I didn’t get far with that. I needed to get the canopy out of the attic. It was beginning to drive me nuts that it was sitting up there, with the spiders and the heat. So I brought it down and then I realized I’d never put on the canopy latch handle or the outside canopy lift tabs. Not fun, but necessary. I hate cotter pins. I got the handle and tabs done, then had to take the canopy off and put it up in the rafters of the main shop. It’s pretty empty right now. More parts are on the plane than off it, at least parts that came with the kit. Oh sure, there’s lots of fiberglassing to be done on the empennage tips, wheels, landing gear etc.

But I’m at a crossroads: What next? leave the airframe for a while and do the O- to IO-360 conversion on the engine? Order avionics and start wiring? Or just do it all. Go to town. Work on the wiring while i’m waiting for engine parts and vice versa. But something tells me I’d rather not have nasty stripped-down engine between the plane and the workbench for extended periods of time unless that’s all I’m working on. Engines can be whole projects in and of themselves. But the truth is, if I find enough nastiness in the engine when I pull a cylinder off, it goes bye-bye to be rebuilt by real engine builders in real shops. If not, I replace cylinders as necessary, install the hi-pressure fuel pump, the new sump and tubes, the AFP FI system, and bolt it to the airframe. Fortunately, I’ve got all the parts for that, I think. I need to make a checklist for incidental parts, like hoses and gaskets, other stuff like that, and order it in advance. I also have to be singularly anal about the teardown process and not lose ANY PARTS WHATSOEVER and adhere strictly to the manual. This is no Oldsmobile Rocket V8.

4 hours.

The 4 hours is yesterday, not the week before, in which I finally got to repairing my sanity-saver and nearly sole mode of transportation. A few weeks ago, the Buell snapped a motor mount on the way home from SIGGRAPH, not quite leaving me stranded, but putting the bike in the barn for some time. This is the second time I’ve had mount-related issues with that bike, and the last time I had it repaired, the monkeys at Bartels not only didn’t replace the mount, they used the wrong bolts. The mount was weak from its impact on the frame and hanging by one bolt. The dynamics on that piece of aluminum are pretty brutal, but it might have lasted a little longer if they hadn’t used the short Sportster bolts that only go about 10mm into the head boss. The result of that was mashed threads in the head boss on the left side. The end result is this:

The piece on the left is the original mount, with the arm snapped off. The piece on the right is the NHRS billet replacement. Nothing’s going to break that short of a nuclear event.

I hung the Buell by its frame and jacked up the engine so I could drill out the head boss, install a helicoil, then the new motor mount.

Once that was done and my bike was running, the shop went back into airplane factory mode. Yesterday I cleaned up some odds and ends that have been driving me nuts for a while. I installed the F-824 control horn access panels at the end of the tailcone. There’s two more parts I don’t have to find later.

Then I finally got around to installing the eyball vents and vent tubing. The only thing holding up this process was the need for a spacer between the retaining ring and the vent bracket. I wasn’t able to find a suitable candidate at B&B, so I made them myself from .063. I was then able to cut the hose to go from the vents to the NACA scoops on the sides.


These will probably come out during the beating the cockpit is going to take during wiring and other installs, but they’re good to go for now.

The day started out as the pondering of where to mount the VA-168 fuel/oil/MAP sensor manifold, and I realized I have no idea how large the sensor modules are, or how they would fit with the engine mount installed. So of course I installed the engine mount instead. Did I mention I love my new Makita cordless drill?

Those four big rings on the white tube structure are where the actual engine mounts go. They’re big rubber pucks designed to buffer the vibration between the engine and the airframe. The landing gear legs will stick out from the tubes at the botttom corners, you can see the left gear leg tube next to the bolt at the bottom right of frame. Yes, it’s confusing, but when we talk about left and right on an airplane, we use the perspective of sitting in the pilot’s seat.

I’m glad I got the engine hoist. It will come in handy when I have to lift the whole airframe high enough to put the gear legs on. At that point, it’s going to be freaking tall. I”ll need an elevated platform to get in and out while working on things like the panel and wiring.

4 hours.

Finished the platenuts in the left wing. Other than a slightly messy install of the trailing edge platenut, the process went OK. However, for the first time, I regret not getting the platenut jig for the 8-series K1000 and K1100′s. I still have to figure out what to do about the wiring that’ll eventually go through the fuselage to the panel, but I there is no longer any interference with the control tubes (yeah, that was a big one, glad I caught it now). The wings are now back in the little garage for storage until they go to the airport.

So what next? The engine is supposed to be next, but I need the space and tech to fix a busted motor mount on my Buell, which is my daily transportation. However, I am dying to find out just how bad my motor is inside. Here’s hoping the guy who stored it for 10 years stored it properly and I don’t have a rusted camshaft.

9 hours.

I’d say that only 7 hours was actual, tools-to-metal building. The rest of it was cleaning the shop, looking at plans, arranging parts, and various distractions. I’m also including Wednesday night, when David came over and helped me with the final wings-on/wings-off activities. We drilled the wing root fairings and the bottom skin, then pulled the wings off and moved the plane back into the guest house. Then I slacked off for two days while I took a break and watched bad movies.

Today, I got back on it and tried to get the wings into shape for more cold storage. Because I’m an idiot and didn’t attach the pitot and static fittings, the AN connectors slid up (down?) the tubing of the pitot and AOA into the pitot mast and got stuck there, with no way to wiggle them loose. I had to take the pitot tube off and shove the fittings down to the point where I could grab them and hook them up to the plastic tubing running down the wing. Of course, this demanded that I unclamp the plastic tubing from the Adel clamps attached to the bellcrank bracket to give it some slack. Finally, I got all that back together, ran my wires back down the conduit, and moved on.

I deburred and dimpled the wing root fairings, and deburred/dimpled/countersunk the wing roots. I also drilled all the holes for platenuts. I got all the platenuts done on the right wing, which was slow going on the forward edges because they went family style on the pro-seal. It also didn’t help that I drilled the fairing root holes a little too close to the root rib. I had to grind down some of the platenuts so they’d lay flat on the skin. But it’s all good, they’re all installed. I’ll do the left wing tomorrow, then they go back into the garage to await the trip to the airport. And some wiring. And some other stuff.

As promised, a wider angle. All the bits flap like they’re supposed to.

First one, from Dave’s iPhone4. Shelley has a wider shot that’s higher res.

8 hours.

Saturday was a pretty huge day in its own right. The night before, I’d cleaned up the workshop and put all the tools away so I could start making a fresh mess. I gloated over my handiwork in drilling the wing spars for a few minutes, then got going on the flap rigging. The flaps are attached at the trailing edge of the wing with a strip of piano hinge. The right side, the inboard edge of the flap rubbed against the fuselage, which didnt allow it to travel its full range of motion. So off it came, and I filed and scotchbrited off enough metal so that it did. However, in that sentence is contained about 4 or 5 iterations of trial, error, and scratching the crap out of the flap with the file until I got smart and put some tape around where I’d be working it. Eventually, it fit fine and was able to swing up and down, and in the ‘up’ position, the skin lay flat on the belly. The left side wasn’t a problem.

After that, it was time to reinstall the flap motor and rig the flaps. This is where the first setback occurred. The flap motor was one of the first things I did on the fuselage, so maybe I screwed it up, but there are many reports of the flap motor channel interfering with the canopy latch bar. Supposedly, they fixed this in the matched-hole kit, but I have a matched-hole kit and I’m telling you now, it ain’t fixed. What I had to do was put a 3/16″ spacer between the bushing block and the F-705 bulkhead to move the canopy latch bar forward enough so that it would clear the flap motor channel. I also had to change the rivets on the upper part of the flap motor channel to flush AN426 rivets. After this, I was able to see daylight between the latch bar and the channel. Of course, this also meant that the pushrod between the latch handle and the bar was now about 1/4″ too long. Put that on the list.

Then came the weird ceremony of drilling the flap pushrod holes. I”ll post pictures of this whole mess when I get the chance.

9 hours.

Nine. Hours. I had a list, a big one. Much things to do. Because I’m utterly beat, I’m not going to boil it down to bare essentials. Most of the morning I spent chasing the elusive sub-$100 engine hoist. This was not to be found anywhere west of Covina, so I settled on secondary prey: A replacement for my ailing cordless drill. The 14v DeWalt served well for 15 years, but now it drains batteries, the motor’s getting weak, and the replacement batteries only lasted about a year. So today, I picked up the ultimate badass cordless drill, a Makita BDF451. 18v, 3 speeds, and the torque of a 71 Chevelle SS. This hunt took most of the morning. I didn’t get on the stick until about 11am, which sucked, because like I said, I had a list.

David was due to arrive at about 1pm, but before, I got the tank brackets drilled, and a few other things. Honestly, I was doing so much stuff, I forgot exactly what I did and in what order, but these are the things that got done:

Vent lines made
Fuel lines trimmed, ends fitted
Canopy pushrod remade (because of the spacers I had to put on the c-611 blocks)
Rudder cable links made (should be using AN turnbuckles, those links are stupid)
Tank bracket platenuts installed
Triangles marked on wings for belly skin lineup

This process was not without its setbacks. Braided steel hose sucks to work with, and we’ve got the poked fingers to prove it.

I got pictures and video, I’ll post them tomorrow when I’m not too tired to think straight.

2.5 hours.

I win. Sweep and incidence are set, aft wing spar bolts are in. I made a drill guide from some 5/8″x1x4 bar stock (which I’ll have to replace, I think it goes with the wheels or brakes) featuring holes of 17/64″ and 5/16″ to guide the middle and final steps of drilling.

But about that stuck drill bit. As I suspected, I was able to drill just below my ‘relief well’ and pop the broken bit out from the front. Once I drilled it with the 5/16″ bit, all traces of nastiness went away and I have a nice round hole with little to no play on the AN5 bolt that goes in there. On VAF, there are a good amount of people who recommend using a .311 reamer to obtain a close-fit, precision hole. There are also a good amount of people who say that using the plans-recommended 5/16″ bit works fine too. I don’t have a .311 reamer. I don’t want to buy a .311 reamer, or any other kind of reamer right now, and I certainly don’t have time to wait for it. I think the drill guide did the job, and as long as that bolt is torqued and cotter-pinned, I seriously doubt the wing will fall off. If it should come to pass that the wing wiggles around that bolt, I’ll go up to the next size, use a reamer and a NAS close-tolerance bolt, and that’ll be the end of that. But there are plenty of RV’s flying with 5/16″ holes in their aft spars and they don’t seem to be having much of an issue.

I’ll have to take the wings off again to deburr the holes and shoot some primer on the raw metal where it was drilled or filed, as well as do the lineup for the wing root holes, but while they’re on, I’m going to do the flap pushrods, the rudder cable links, and maybe just for giggles, put the wingtips on to make sure everything lines up along the trailing edge.