4 hours.
And that’s a rough estimate, because I’m going to tally up the last 3 or so days with this entry. After I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler was sore, I figured out that the only way these push tubes are going to get painted is if I just paint the bloody things. Many things were suggested, most of them variants on “blow a lot of paint in the tube and swirl it around.” This turned out to be the way to go, except when I poured some from a can into the tube. Oh, and important safety tip: Those red plastic cups people swill bad margaritas from at parties? They melt when paint hits them. “Use a cup to catch the excess,” was the advice. I should have thought about what happens when a volatile solvent hits a cheap plastic cup, but instead I spent 20 minutes power-washing spill off the concrete. A soup can was a better pick for that task afterward. So with that done, I moved on to the actual hardware. Fascinating setup, the bellcrank assembly. Drilling out the brass bushings was interesting, but I got that all done without too much trouble, and the only thing I fouled up was making the spacers for the aileron hinge bolts.. No biggie, got a length of 6061 5/16.058 tubing coming from spruce this week. Got one done correctly, and I should be able to finish the other in short order. But the left aileron fits on great, of course I’d expect it to, it’s a QB aileron. the bellcrank works, and everything moves freely. I have to get into the manual to see how to initially set up the push tube adjustment before I go tightening everything down on the bellcrank assembly. The next thing to do, past the right aileron, is the flap braces, then the flaps. Then I have to figure out if I want to do a return line for a fuel injection system.
Pics soon.
Bunch of stuff.
W-818
.5 hours
Didn’t do much, cut the push tubes to length for W-818. Most of this was prep, as in, finding a safe, soft place for the VS and rudder, cleaning up the shop for a fresh start, and locating all the bits and pieces. For the record General Tools sucks. I have their pipe cutter and the plastic knob for tightening it cracked at the base, so now i have to use pliers. When I get round to it, i’ll drill a hole through the center for a pin, or find something like a faucet handle with a setscrew. I don’t want to make tools, I want to make airplanes. Still have to come up with a genius way of priming the inside of tubes. Something involving irrigation spray heads and rubber tubing, I think.
Emp is DONE!
The empennage is finally frickin’ done! Except for the fiberglass tips, which i’m going to do much, much later, everything is done. I closed up the rudder yesterday morning before work.
The trailing edge is a lot straighter than last time.. And it’s within the tolerances, I measured it!
Rudder all closed up
Mouted on the vStab, by the numbers, swings freely.
So BOOYA! Emp done, we’re on the wings, baby!
Almost done with the rudder.
4 hours.
Did a lot of stuff, so this is a combo entry. Got the skeleton drilled, dimpled, primed, and painted. I was going to finish the rudder last night, but genius me didn’t order the K-1000 platenuts for the rod-end bearings in the last AC Spruce run. This whole thing was a pretty mundane process except for one clever hack that I hope helps somebody.
The trailing ends of the rudder ribs are notoriously skinny. They are so skinny that the recommended procedure for dimpling them is to bend the flanges apart, dimple them, then bend the flanges back into shape.. I dunno about you, but this was a beeyotch for me on the elevators and on the last rudder, and I was dreading doing it on these, because once I bent them out of the way and back again, the fit kind of sucked. Then it hit me.
The 3/32 female pop-rivet dimple is pretty thin. Really thin. And the yoke that came with my squeezer had a lot of the nose ground off. Like so:
And it fits on the standard 3/32 dimple die:
And the adjustable squeezer set will get it up to the end of the range:
A bit of masking tape holds it in place (removing the tape on the surface for clean mating:
and the whole thing fits in the narrow end of the rib!
Apologies for the blurry photos. Macro photography isn’t my specialty.
Proseal. Ech.
2 hours.
Man, I don’t know how some of you guys ever got through building your tanks. This stuff sucks. But I actually got the TE wedge on the rudder done. By the book and by the numbers this time.
The gray goo from hell oozing out.
More gray goo. I was smart enough to put a layer of Boelube on the aluminum angle below so I won’t have much trouble with stickage.
As a side project, I’ve decided that I need some practical experience with high-performance vehicles powered by air-cooled pushrod engines that lend themselves well to customization, so I picked up one of these:
This is a 2000 Buell X1 Lightning, Millennium edition, an American sport bike powered by a heavily modified Harley Davidson 1203cc motor, the one usually found in the Sportster. That black thing on the side with the little screen is my first mod. It’s an Airtech Streamlining airbox, which comes to you as raw, white gelcoat fiberglass and you have to do all the drilling and fitting yourself. I cut the mesh out of a cheap air filter from Kragen to put over the intake hole. Inside is a round UNI filter. The little screen was my first foray into fiberglassing, and it worked well enough that I think I can handle the tips on the empennage. We’ll see tomorrow when the paint is totally dry and the resin has totally cured.
countersinking.
.5 hours
Didn’t get to work on the plane this weekend.. The bastards got me on 6 day weeks again. But whatever, the more they make me work, the faster I get all the airplane bits. What I did get done tonight though, was countersinking the AEX wedge for the rudder and dimpling the aft row of holes on the rudder skins. I need to make some sort of scale for the proseal glop so I can measure 10:1, but I’m not going to try that at 10pm on a schoolnight. If, by some miracle, I don’t have to work the weekend, I’ll try to get that done. I don’t want to order a triple-beam scale off the internet, I don’t need to be on any watchlists. But building a simple 10:1 thing should be easy enough. Hmm.. do I have enough scrap aluminum around? I think so.
WINGS!
2 hours.
First legit entry in the wings category! Not because I’m finished with the empennage or anything, but here’s how it goes: After doing some tests on some scrap with both JB Weld and 3M 5200 Marine Adhesive (recommended somewhere), it became evident that neither of those substances were going to hold up during back-riveting the trailing edge of the rudder. So I bit the bullet and ordered a pint of proseal from Spruce, which should be here in a couple of days. I’m not about to mess up another rudder, this one’s gotta be the one, so I’m going to bond the TE together against an angle piece, then rivet just like the book says when the proseal bond cures. But while I’m waiting for that to show up, I have the rest of the airplane to work on, so I went for the aileron brackets. This is out of sequence, but also in that Spruce order is my drill jig for holding tubes in place in the drill press, which I need for the aileron pushrods, among other tubular activities. Everything went well, except for I got a little carried away with the countersink bit and countersunk more holes on W414A-L than I should have. So I’ve got an email into Van’s to see if this is kosher or if I need to order a new one. Since this is the attach point for a control surface, I’m guessing they’ll tell me to suck it up and rebuild it. No big deal, it’s not a huge piece, and I haven’t drilled it to the wing yet. But I went ahead and finished it using AD426 rivets along the countersunk row just in case they tell me it’s OK.
Rudder 2.0 stiffeners
2 hours.
Finished deburring rudder skin edges and dimpling stiffener holes. Riveted stiffeners to right side, half done with left.
More rudder
2 hours.
Just got back from Vegas. Every time I go to that city, It reaffirms my belief that the United States is the greatest nation on the face of the planet, bar none. Not sure why, but that’s where it happens. Before I left, I started stripping the old rudder for usable parts, which was the rod-bearing reinforcing plates, the counterweight, and the counterweight hardware. Today I got the R917 shim fabbed, as well as the bottom-attach strips, trimmed the reinforcing part that attaches to the control horn (can’t remember the R number), and clecoed all things skeletal together in prep for drilling out.
Rudder 2.0
1.5 hours.
Started on rudder 2.0. I thought I was going to be able to make it rudder 1.5, but the original is sufficiently messed up so as not to be able to salvage the spar, counterweight skin, etc. I managed to save the bearing reinforcing plates though, so it’s more like rudder 1.95. Drilled the skin off, drilled the reinforcing plates off, saved the rod-end bearings.. I’ve got more K1000-6 nutplates, so that’s no big deal. Basically starting at square 1 with the rudder. Difference this time is, I know what everything’s supposed to look like when it’s done and where I messed up last time. If I go full-on with this, I should have it done in a week.
Off to Vegas!