If you get that reference, I say well met, gunslinger.
Priming sucks. I don’t like liquids, goo, solvents, pigments, etchants, detergents, or lubricants. Primer sucks, and it’s never going to be any different. But at least i like the color of my chosen primer, and my prep/prime/cleanup process has been whittled down to a mere inconvenience than a showstopping chore.
So once everthing was prepped, I primed the ribs, spars, stiffeners, and even that little counterweight. Now on to riveting some stuff.
..but my pump primes backwards.
Dimpled, deburred rudder stuff
3 hours
Got all the rudder stuff prepped. The spars and ribs went fairly well. New confidence in metalworking skills has enabled me to attempt things I would have been scared to try before. The coolest thing I’ve learned so far is basically how to undo mistakes. For instance, I managed to bend the rudder spar. Yeah. Bent it. I was being a moron, leaning it against a corner of the workbench and putting some pressure on it to straighten out a ding left by catching the edge on the Scotchbrite wheel and it folded up like a piece of paper. But not to worry, I just bent it back into shape and hammered the flanges straight again with some light flush-set rivet gun action. holes line up, no cracks in the metal, ready to rock. I’d have freaked out big time a couple of months ago.
One thing that did kind of puzzle me was what happened when I dimpled the lower rib. R-904, I think it was. I had the squeezer in the bench vise, like i’ve had it for every dimpling op where the part is handheld, but this time, the process caused the rib to be gently bent outward from fore to aft, like the opposite of fluting. I checked everything. Dimple dies were matched, holes were drilled and deburred, there was clearance between the die and the web. Just plain ODD! So I wound up consulting the VAF board, Dan C, and Van’s, and the upshot was that fluting it back into shape was fine, just keep it from turning out twisted. So that’s what I did.. Fluted the hell out of it. Oh, and BTW, that little trick of bending the flange out so you can dimple it, then bend it back is harder than it sounds. I spent a fair bit of time smithing the rib back into shape after that.
Rudder Skeleton
4.5 hours
Drilled/deburred the rudder spars and ribs, finished fabbing r-917, matchdrilled control horn assembly and bottom spar. Fluted and prepped upper ribs. Going to do the counterweight next.. Hope I don’t have to sand it. Lead dust isn’t cool.
One more thing….
Remember that riveter’s tape? the really slick stuff with the outsides adhesive and a clear non-sticky center? Don’t leave it on overnight, or for a couple of days. You peel it off and it leaves the green sticky part on your airplane for you to remove later. These are some of the things we learn the hard way.
More Rudder work
1 hour
Finished riveting on the stiffeners and began prepping the skeleton. Going to wind up fabbing the R-917 shim out of a spare HS404 because I used part of the strip I was supposed to fab it from for shims in the HS somewhere. Feh.. No biggie. I will sneak what time I can this week and prep the skeleton. No idea how long it will take to get all the bits prepped, countersunk, drilled, dimpled, and primed.
Some editing
Some shuffling going on.. I decided to put the pictures from the activity of mid november 2005 a little closer to its chronologically accurate point. So all the HS and VS pics should now be located further down the page, or you can look in the archives.
Some thoughts on power
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been pondering engine choices. I really like Jan Eggenfellner’s Subaru H6 package. I trust his judgement, and he has several happy customers who have installed it on their airplanes.. I’ve seen one fly. It makes neat sounds. The thing I don’t like about it is the price. I know all about how important it is to stay in business to continue to support the product and develop new things, and I realize he’s probably not making money hand over fist on this. Problem is, by the time you’ve put the Egg H6 on your firewall, plumbed everything, and bought what you need to make it work and work safely, you’re into about 28 kilodollars and that’s WITHOUT a prop.
I’m the worst.. I’ll oversimplify a complex problem, then not understand why it falls apart, which is surprising, given my line of work. However, I do know a complex problem when I see it and I’m well versed in learning from the mistakes of others. But here’s how I see it: Eggenfellner doesn’t open his engines. Gets ’em right out of the crate, new or barely used (5k price difference in the package), strips off the garbage that you need in a car, puts on a bell housing and PSRU, modifies YOUR engine mount, assembles it, along with the necessary cooling plumbed and mounted, then crates it up and sends it to you. Well, hell.
A quick search of car-part.com turns up an EZ30 for about $3500 and below. I can’t find a price on a new crated one, but a JDM EZ30R with the aggro cam, plastic intake, and AVCS goes for $1700. No ECU, but you can get that fairly easily too. Maybe, just maybe, by doing this myself, I can save enough for that electric constant speed prop.
Because the days of finding a mid-time lycoming for 8 grand that’ll be worth a damn are pretty much over.
More later. Sushi now.
1.5 hours Working on the
1.5 hours
Working on the other skin now. Same process.
Rudder skins and stiffeners
4 hours
This process is easy. Make the stiffeners on the bandsaw, then run them on the Scotchbrite wheel to finish them up. Cleco to the skin, then matchdrill.
Stiffeners for the rudder
1.5 hours
Just got back from Thanksgiving vacation.. went to Florida. Land is no longer cheap there. bummer.. Anyway, today I fabricated the 16 stiffeners for the rudder. This rudder is the new 2-part skin design. I’m not sure if 1.5 hours is long or short for stiffener manufacturing time, but I tried to do each step to all 16 stiffeners. One trick I figured out that was pretty cool, is that on the pre-punched stiffener stock, there are notches for reference as to where to cut the forward edge. Let me see if I can describe this properly, Since I Still. Can’t. Effing. Post. Effing. Pictures. Just do this: After you’ve cut the 2nd stiffener down to size, you should have a bit left over with a rivet hole, a notch at the angle, a little notch on one edge set back from the big notch at the angle, and another little notch on the edge that lines up with the one in the angle. The bend, that is.
place the scrap with this notch/hole/notch with the hole lining up to your last hole on the end of the stiffener. Mark the notches with a sharpie. Cut from the edge marks to the center mark.
I suppose I should go back out there and do some more stuff, but I need to do some more research into why the VPN connection isn’t working.