Stjohn's RV-7

6 hours.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been reassembling some of the bits and pieces I had to take off to paint the interior. The flap motor and brace is back in, the fuselage gussets are in and torqued, and the roll bar is finally in and torqued with the center channel riveted on. I also dimpled the firewall for the panel support ribs. That’s the good stuff.
Now for the fail. I tried to install the trim servo. I messed up drilling the bearing block, but that was OK, I was able to salvage it. The crap part is, I cut off the trim servo arm a little short. There’s not enough shaft left to drill the cotter pin hole. Ordered new part. Grr.

6 hours.
I have finally painted the cockpit. It’s not an award winner, and in some places it’s not even pretty, and in a few other places, it’s downright abhorrent. But it’s done, and that’s what counts. Yesterday, I did my raft of chores, then began creating the Dexter-scene in the shop that was to become my paint booth. Fortunately we had a roll of painter’s plastic left over from a drywall job that I was able to use.

Here’s the beginning of the tent. This stuff is mostly to protect the rest of the shop from overspray. HVLP guns are better with overspray, but if you suck at painting like me, you need all the help you can get.

Here’s the coccoon from the outside. Shelley thought it was creepy, and I sort of agree. Looks like something unsavory is going on under there, and that’s not far from the truth.

This is before I shot any paint, right before Hell on Earth was brought forth and the Great Old Ones erupted from the Stygian depths to unleash unspeakable horrors on my project. Everything’s taped up, using the packing paper left over from an A.E.R.O. shipment. I could care less about the control tunnel, but I definitely wanted to protect the bearings and control column hardware, as well as the spar. The spar’s the prettiest part of the plane so far, why shoot a coat of gray paint over it? Everything on the firewall was masked off too, but that’s where I got lazy: I masked off everything forward of the brake pedal mount holes and left the rest to fend for itself. With carpeting and everything else down there, it’s doubtful you’ll even see it, and trust me, I’m an expert in the field of visual triage.

I didn’t shoot a lot of photos between the last pic and here, because the process turned into an epic nightmare never too far from corkscrewing into the hardpan of abject failure. I followed the directions; I prepped the metal using EkoClean (which is great if you don’t put a big oily handprint on a major surface you’ve just done), then shot a light mist coat. While that was drying, I mixed up another batch of my Stewart Systems EkoKote interior paint, then went outside to shoot some other parts I didn’t do last time. This is when the fun started. I leaned over to examine something and the top popped off my gravity-feed reservoir, letting a significant amount of catalyzing paint loose on the concrete patio. The swearing brought Shelley over, and she started asking what she could do to help. Of course I had a respirator on, so she couldn’t understand a damn word I was saying, and that was before the compressor started up. She grabbed a rag and soaked up the spilled paint, then left me to my own devices. While I was shooting the second coat, my inline water/oil filter and regulator started leaking, maybe it wasn’t tight, maybe the teflon tape wasn’t good enough, something. So I started fiddling with it, gun in hand, gloves, resp and goggles on, trying to silence the annoying hiss. The compressor started up again, which for some reason, amplified the urgency of the catalyzing paint in the gun’s reservoir. But the universe wasn’t done messing with me, not even close. In my fumblings with the air stuff, I dropped my paint gun on the shop floor, indoors, on my nice plastic garage tiles. Before I could pick it up, ten bucks worth of paint had spilled out and I was now in trouble: Not enough hands, no place to hang up the paint gun, a major air leak, and catalyzing paint in the gun and all over the floor. Shelley soaked up the paint once again and brought me a hook, which I screwed into the workbench and hung up the gun long enough to get it together and fix the air leaks, clean up the mess, and get back to work. But now, half my batch was on the floor, so I didn’t have enough to finish the job.. I mixed up the rest of the paint and finished.
This picture is the end result of all that pain and suffering. Was it worth it? Sure, I guess. Does it look good? Well, no, not exactly, but I’m not about to sand it off and start over. And any future painting is going to be done with the tried and true method of the Rustoleum rattle can, unless I paint the exterior matte black, by myself, in the dead of night, in a lone hangar out in the desert, in the middle of a lightning storm.

The next day (today), I had to get my motivation back. The whole point of painting the interior was so I could go on to install systems over the paint. Like any comp, you get your background layers first, then start putting stuff over them. I peeled the tape and plastic off, then put a few of the previously painted parts in place. Much to my surprise, it’s not utterly horrific. There are some pretty big drips on the floor, but guess what, those’ll be covered by either seat cushions or carpeting. I may have to touch a few things up with a rattle can, but that’s no big deal, battleship gray is a pretty common color. Since the plan is to get the Classic Aero Aviator package for the interior, the paint really just has to cover up the parts the interior package doesn’t. Of course, if budget becomes a factor and I have to go for the cheap option (van’s foam, homemade upholstery), at least I have some semblance of a cabin.

Looking aft.

Pilot’s side looking forward. You can see the splotches on the seat floor where my oily fat hand touched the metal after the prep job. I think I had used an oily rag to clean up some leaked oil from the engine, which sits on a stand aft, outboard, and to the port side of where you’re looking. For some reason, it decided to piddle a load of preservative oil on the floor prior to paint day, so I had to clean that up before I got started.
So yeah, it’s done. Cause for celebration, maybe not, but at least now the main obstacle to things like fuel lines, electrical runs, rudder rigging, and pitch servo installation is out of the way. I can even rivet the subpanel, which I was going to paint, but didn’t. Maybe I will, with rattle cans, but I’ll leave that for another day.

4 hours.
Drilled deburred, dimpled F-711 skin, matchdrilling to the firewall flange. Stainless steel is a bitch. It’s really not advisable to run your finger along the underside of the holes to feel for burrs. That stuff is sharp, and it has a taste for fingertips. Imagine what it could do to your eyes. Even so, I managed to get it all debured and dimpled, as well as drilling the center subpanel rib attach angle. The skin is now off and put safely away while I go to town on the remaining bits. I’m also entertaining the idea of not painting most of the interior and going with a Classic Aero Designs interior, which should give the ship a more polished aspect. Of course, that stuff is heavy, but if I’m going to be riding in it for significant lengths of time, I want a nice, comfy ride. Check out their stuff!

6 hours.
The fresh air vents take in air from two NACA scoops, one on each side, just forward of the panel. Each one feeds a length of 2″ tubing that ends in an eyeball vent, similar to the ones on commercial airliners, the overhead ones that the inconsiderate nong next to you insists on keeping open and blowing frigid air into your ear while you’re trying to read or sleep. Rather than use the cheap plastic ones from the kit, I opted to spend the cabbage on the nice machined aluminum ones from SteinAir. The SteinAir vents are different in that they mount in a 2″ hole and are held fast by a threaded ring, while the Van’s ones are square and have four AN3 bolt holes designed to grip an angle bracket and a point on the panel. What this means is the mounting needs to be a custom fab, like so:

The next thing to do was dimple the angle for mounting to the side skin. Once that was done, and the part clecoed on, I could match-drill the panel attach hole, then put a nutplate on it. This took lots of measuring, then a bend, then some more measuring, then a few cuts, some drilling, and presto, it’s done.

The second one was easy, all I had to do was make the 90 degree bend at the right distance from the edge of a piece of scrap, then trace the outline from the original part on the opposite side from the bend. Some bandsaw and hole saw work and I got a mirror of the first one. Repeat dimpling/nutplate process.

With the eyeball mounted, it looks pretty sweet.

The only issue here is that the threads on the eyeball don’t go far enough. Minimum thickness this thing can clamp down on is about 3/32″, and my aluminum bracket is maybe half that, so I need to find or make a bushing for the backside so the eyeball can be screwed in tight.
After that, I deburred and dimpled the rest of the subpanel, plus I finished riveting on the weather seal angles. The left-side panel support rib, F-745-L has been truncated at the subpanel to make room for the EFIS. This is a common mod, and the F-745 ribs aren’t structural, so I figured I’d go ahead and do it. If you ask me, putting a panel support rib right down the centerline of the pilot seat is kind of dumb, but I can see where it maximizes efficiency in manufacturing, and it does stiffen the panel. The piece sitting on top of the subpanel in the photo is the aft-of-subpanel piece of the F-745-L rib. I’ll figure out another way to stiffen the panel.

Of course, the skin will have to go back on so I can matchdrill the firewall, as well as the center rib to firewall angle. I wasn’t quite ready to mess with the skin.. That forward top skin is a pain in the butt, so I decided to do something completely different: Start playing with the placement of the throttle quadrant!

The idea is to get the quadrant centered, and I figured I could mock that up by cleco-clamping it to some angle, then try it on for size. It’s easy to reach, doesn’t block the view of anything, and once it’s all bolted in with cables attached, should be solid. Not only that, the aluminum angle strung between the panel and the subpanel for the mount should help stiffen the panel.

This shows the placement relative to the pilot in fore and aft direction.

I have to consult the oracle of VAF to see if I’m even remotely on target with this quadrant thing, But it looks like it should be fine. I’m still avoiding painting the interior, go figure. But there’s plenty to do, like rivet on the firewall recess, fabricate the quadrant mounts, and maybe even do a couple of firewall-mounted items before I need to have a paint day. Then the next discrete step is that engine conversion, which, I gotta tell you, makes me nervous. More on that later.

4 hours.

The subject of todays efforts was the subpanel. When I had it all clecoed to the airframe, I drilled the F-644 and F-643 ribs to the skin. as well as the F-643B angle that attaches to the firewall. I’m not being to squirrelly about primer, most of these parts are alclad, and even the ones that arent will probably get a coat of gray paint, assuming I have enough left over from doing the interior. If not, big whoop. This is a sction of the plane nobody will ever see. In the plus column for painting is insulation. There’s going to be a buttload of wiring under here, and if something chafes or comes loose, contact with paint is going to make fewer sparks than contact with metal. In the minus column is that painting is a pain in the ass. In any event, today saw the riveting of the center subpanel, and for anybody playing at home or at work at the FAA, here’s a photo of me riveting the thing together. Not the most flattering pic in the world, but it’ll do.

The other thing that got done today was a loose end that’s been bugging me for a while. I got the brake pedal bracket riveted to the firewall recess angles. I hadn’t done it before because I needed to paint it first. It is now painted.

Speaking of paint, here’s a current state of the nation. The weather’s been gloomy, salt-damp, and cool, suboptimal paint conditions at best, so this is as far as it’s gone. The uneven splotch on the baggage compartment bulkhead is just an exploratory shot with the paint gun, just to see the effects of paint on a completely unprepared surface. Big surprise, it looks like ass.

I still have to fabricate mounts for the eyeball vents, then put in the NACA scoops for fresh air. That involves Proseal or RTV, and I’m leaning towards RTV. But I realized today, dude, you’re about ready to order electric bits. Of course, I still have to finish painting the interior, do the canopy, run fuel lines, and install the autopilot pitch servo before there’s much point in that. But at least things are happening.

2 hours.
Riveted and installed panel attach points. I still haven’t painted the interior, and i’ve got a crawl-under-the-panel task waiting for me. My gaskets have arrived, so there’s really nothing stopping me from doing the FI conversion, but I’d really hate having so many separate process branches unfinished. I keep putting off painting the interior, because one, I suck at painting, and two, it’s a process which requires hours of uninterrupted time, usually more than I plan on. This doesn’t encourage me to get it done. Not only that, I can’t just wash the interior with a load of soap and water, this needs to be done in such a way that no water pools anywhere I can’t get to, or runs out of the fuse onto my garage floor, where it will sit below the plastic snap-together floor tiles.
I know I need to just sack up and rock it out. They have a saying in Gilead, ancestral home of Roland Deschain, the Last Gunslinger: “Soonest begun’s soonest done.” Good thing I’m not from there.

2 hours.
F-703x panel attach brackets and panel reinforcing angle. The subpanel/panel is coming together, and it’s slow going. Because summer is starting, we have to do all that house-maintenance stuff that happens around now. I still have to finish painting the interior of the plane as well.

4 hours.
I’m too lazy to post pictures, so I’m just going to lay it out: Installed the roll servo in the wing, after cutting out a section of PVC wire conduit so the bracket and box could clear. Turns out I would have had to do this anyway, since I’d have needed to get the servo control wire out of it at that point, but this will turn out all right.. I have to run up to Kragen for some wire wrap, though.
The big thing today was the foray into painting. I need to get a better, faster measuring system for mixing the paint parts, but I was able to get going with the Stewart Systems Eko Poly. I suck at the paint, let me tell you. I might have to call this ship the Orange Peel Special. I painted the lower section of the baggage bulkhead cover, and even though I got some good practice in on the aft side, the forward side looks like ass. Turns out my paint was too thick and there was probably too much of it going on. The weird thing was, even in the blazing california sun, I couldn’t really tell if my light fog coat was actually going on. Tomorrow, I’ll start cleaning and roughing all the loose parts like vent covers, etc and cleaning out the cockpit for the eventual paint job. On the plus side, that Stewart Systems paint does actually clean up with water, assuming you don’t let it dry on the gun, which is badass. I’d say it’s the least painful option outside of a rattle can there is, and the low toxicity bonus is great too. I still don’t have the hang of reducing paint to the point where it will shoot correctly, but I wanted to go through the process from startup to cleanup and see how long everything takes. The HVLP gun, however, is genius. The flea-market Taiwan special has a 1.7 tip, I needed a 1.5 or a 1.3. Fortunately, there’s an auto body supply shop a few blocks away, and the crew there is nice and knows their biz. I picked up a Sharpe HVLP gravity-feed gun, some containers, a regulator and a gun-side water filter. The gun rocks, It’s me who’s the dumbass. But I’m getting the hang of it, and I should be able to knock out a bunch more parts tomorrow before I have to get shelley from the airport.
Oh, and yesterday, I got started on the subpanel mounting.. there are a lot of non-pre-punched things to do in this section, and I’m getting everything clamped up in preparation for drilling.

1 hour.
Havent’ had a lot of time to work on the plane lately.. crunch time on Terminator 4. I’m not putting in a lot of overtime, but there’s some, and there’s just enough to make me not want to do much of anything after the household tasks are done, which seem to be growing in number. But this morning, I made all the fiddly brackets for the subpanel. The ones on DWG 24, I had to pull from the preview plans, as i can’t find DWG 24 anywhere. I might have purged it when I saw that it was for the slider canopy. I did manage to drill the hinge brackets to the subpanel, but that’s as far as I got. And I’m very quickly running out of things I can do without painting the interior and all the assorted parts. Maybe I’ll get a paint day Sunday, but my schedule is currently at the whim of Skynet and its metal minions. Oh, and my bathroom sink is clogged again. Shelley, home from work on an extended vacation, tried to help out by freeing up the slow drain in the downstairs bathroom. Not only did she stop it up completely, but the plunging process has now half-filled my sink with noisome black liquid. So that’s going to be my Saturday, assuming I get one.
Even my dreams are filled with Terminators and broken plumbing.

1 hour.
Deburred some F-703 notches, then clamped the angle to the panel for drilling. Guess what. Even though the drawing says “Full Scale” on the detail for the notches in the .063 angle, the part as shown on the drawing isn’t drawn accurately to those measurements. What I did was mark a line on the angle, then placed the angle on the drawing and marked the notch cutout marks from where they are on the drawing. DO NOT DO THIS. The measurements called out are reliable. They will put the notches exactly beetween the holes pre-drilled on the panel. The notches as shown on the drawing aren’t even close. All the notches must be measured out as spec’d. Now I have to make a new one. Problem is, i’m out of .063 angle, so I’ll hit up AC Spruce when I’m done here.
In all fairness to Van’s Aircraft, there was probably something I read long ago in the construction manual about referring to measurements rather than the picture itself, but I don’t remember it. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense from a layout point of view, but dammit, when something is described as ‘full scale,’ I tend to interpret that to mean ‘full scale.’ Silly me. Now I know never to trust the picture, but always reference the actual measurements. Grr.
Regardless, I’m not going to get to it this weekend. I have to retrofit the doghouse as a chicken coop and help Shelley get ready for her chicks to arrive in the mail.