Stjohn's RV-7

Apparently, one should keep up on one’s FAA registration number reservation. I didn’t, and I lost N808FX to an Aerospatiale helicopter owned by Wells Fargo. That was kind of a bummer. But I got a better one: N313TD. 313TD is cool in two ways, first and most importantly, it’s not a tongue-twister on the comm. “Three One Three Tango Delta” is linguistically less laborious than “Eight Zero Eight Foxtrot X-Ray.” The other cool thing is 313 is Detroit’s area code, and was Ann Arbor’s before the suburban explosion of the 90’s and the accompanying telco deregulation and infrastructure upgrades. “TD” is short for ‘technical director’ which is what I’ve been doing in the FX business for a long time, and I’ve got screen cred to prove it. So there it is. New N-number.

Every so often I start getting that spread-too-thin feeling on this project. Too many things unfinished because they’re dependent on other things, and sometimes, the genuine chicken-and-egg scenario. I’ve also got a whole lot of ‘blow that off until you get to the airport’ type jobs to do that usually come about due to lack of space or lack of helping hands. After yesterday’s autopilot fun, I decided to make a list. I’m going to do it here, so bear with me if it goes fractal and sounds like Ginsberg from time to time.
What i’ll do is list what I have to do, then list the excuses for why I haven’t done them. Sound good?
We’ll go by subkit and make it easy:
Empennage:
fiberglass tips – Can’t do that until the final elevator balancing is done, which needs to be done with everything rigged.
strobe/position light wiring – No excuse for this at all, just haven’t done it. Need to do the fiberglass work as well.
trim servo cotter pin (yeah, this is an easy one, I know) – I just have to do this one.
trim servo wiring run – I may have hosed myself on this one. I’m not sure exactly where/how to feed the servo wiring from the servo to the root of the emp so it can run forward to the cockpit.
body filler/damage control – The empennage is where all the early mistakes got made, so there’s some ugly stuff I need to plaster over with body filler. An extra hole from a badly placed dimple die while dimpling for the stiffeners, for instance
Wings:
wingtip wiring connectors, nav antenna wire – I’m storing the wingtips on the overhead ledge. I filed this task under ‘airport.’
Autopilot servo – My clever conduit interferes with the bracket. I now have to take a section of conduit out and route the wires around the bracket/servo assembly. See yesterday’s entry.
closing the wing skins – Airport or right before. I’m not closing those up unless I’m absolutely sure I won’t need to get in there again.
Fuselage:
Autopilot Pitch servo – Just haven’t done it yet. Need to fab bracket and make pushrod, but I can’t do this unless the elevators are rigged and neutral. I just took the emp off so I could move around the shop again.. I should have waited. Whaargarbl.
Rudder cables – need to paint the interior before I run those cables.
Brake pedal support – need to paint it and paint the interior. first.
Firewall recess – waiting to see if I do or don’t need to reach my arm through that hole to buck something (lame)
Fuel lines – Need to paint interior first.
Subpanel, panel and canopy supports – in process now.
Finish kit – Everything.
Well, that’s all I can think of for now. I’ll probably edit this as I think of new stuff.

Unpacked the finish kit this morning. Not a big deal, but it’s out of the crate and into the guest house. the canopy bubble was the most unwieldy, and that cowling is PINK, yo. So now I have to inventory everything, and soon, before things grow legs and run off.

I’l have pics of this later, but there was a whole lot of aircraft Tetris to get my crate out of the truck, then some other folks stuff back on.

I’m still here, just so you know.. I’ve been offline for a few weeks because I’ve had other obligations and a couple of significant distractions. Work has been an avalanche of hours, plus I took the plunge and decided to try to make Mac OSX run on my PC, which consumed most evenings and mornings. It’s also wedding season, which means I’m sometimes trucking off to far-flung places to watch people get married. I’ve had family visits, a music festival, and quite a few working weekends. Basically, when I’m working long hours, I’m not too keen on building, which sucks, because it’s therapeutic as well as productive. Most often, i’ll plink around with the music software on the (now rebuilt) computer, veg out in front of the TV, or play some Wii with Shelley. These are all fine activities, but it’s killing the building. Problem is, I don’t have that many of what I call ‘anchor days,’ where a lot of stuff gets done and i can immerse myself in aviation tech, swimming in the plans and manuals, and setting up a whole lot of small tasks that I can do in half an hour to a couple of hours. And of course, Shelley gets first dibs on most of my spare time, which is how it’s supposed to go, I reckon. Next week, Shelley and I will be driving up the coast and staying in various Central CA hotels, walking in the woods with the dog, that sort of thing, so no building will get done then either. When I get back, I’m on a Hyundai commercial, and I should be able to squeeze some time in then.

Yesterday, my .093 Burraway developed an oscillation, due to me pullingit out of a hole at the wrong angle. In the foolish attempt to bend it back into shape, I snapped the shank right in half. That was a big ‘Oh frak’ and not the Galactica pronunciation either. Cost is $TBD in treasure, and a nice gouge in the base of my thumb from the snapped end in blood.

3 hours.
Yeah, that’s a long time to check a bunch of parts off a list, but I was making labels and organizing at the same time. After a while, part designations become somewhat redundant, at least when it comes to standard AN/MS hardware, so it got faster.

This is where the weird music plays and everybody goes to the lobby to get popcorn and puzzle over what happened with the monkeys and the black monolith. Right now I’m on a bit of a hiatus, because the guest house is currently uninhabitable by plane or man. It started off simply. We were going to pull out the carpet, clean the concrete floors and acid-stain them in preparation for the kit arrival and some serious remodeling of the main house. So following a reasonable progression of events, we wound up with the bathroom stripped down to the studs and the lower 9 inches of drywall removed from half of the walls in the main room. Our issues were manifold: One, when we pulled the baseboards in preparation for the floor-cleaning process, we discovered mold along the bottom of the drywall, because the idiots who installed it didn’t leave a gap between the drywall and the floor in some places. All the spots that had contact with the concrete had black mold growing on them.. Ick. Not knowing how far up or wide the mold went, we just roto-zipped out the lower 9 inches of drywall on all affected walls. Two, the moisture had to be coming from somewhere, and we figured, correctly, that it was the shower. See, the shower was one of those fiberglas stall deals, with a short lip on the bottom and a molded surround. Unfortunately, the previous occupants didn’t see fit to install a glass door (yeah, i know we should have done it when we bought the place, but we were flat broke afterwards), but instead had a shower curtain gleefully spilling water onto the floor. the subfloor had to be pulled up and replaced and all the bathroom drywall had to go, including the ceiling. The vent fan flap was iced closed with a layer of caked dust, so it was just pushing moisture around instead of venting it. Three, the plumbing had to be redone for the shower valve we bought a couple of years ago which the plumber refused to used when fixing our #2 shower, and the shower drain had to be relocated to fit the pan of the shower kit we got (this one has doors). I’ve picked up some useful skills along the way, but what went from a weekend job has now dragged on three weeks, two weeks into the danger zone of impending delivery. We still have to put up a few pieces of remaining drywall, do taping and mudding, and painting, then tiling, then install the shower kit walls, the toilet, then new vanity, and lighting. Fortunately, work is way slow at the moment, so we can get it done, I think. The biggest problem is that we’ve never done it before and we don’t know how, and we’re in the zone where screwups can be costly, not to mention time consuming in the extreme. With luck and drive, we can finish it this week, and that’s good because I still need to build my wing cradle and get ready for Tony Partain’s driver to show up with the QB kit.
Freaking out.
Scared.
Need to focus.

Called Van’s this morning, the kit is marked ‘paid’ and there’s a ship under way right now that probably contains my kit. When it shows up, they’ll call me. Until then, I build stuff. Problem is, I’m not building airplane, I’m building bathroom. This is how it happened:
I took last week off to prep for the coming of the kit, part of which involved getting the main room of the guest house ready to be an airplane factory instead of a crash pad for drunken revelers after a night at the bar. We decided to pull the carpet out of the guest house, to prep the concrete floors for staining/sealing (going to look very, very cool), and discovered some mold under the baseboards. Well, one thing led to another and by Tuesday the bathroom was gutted down to the studs and joists. Needed a new subfloor, shower, walls, ceiling, plumbing and fixtures. I know FA about plumbing, so I had a laptop in one hand and a blowtorch in the other, trying to figure out pipe runs, sweat joints, and solder techniques. So that took a while. Then my knee flared up and I was down for 2 days. Then it was all about drain plumbing. Fortunately the soil line was ABS instead of cast iron as I originally feared, so the nightmare of how to set up the offset toilet flange kind of disappeard. The shower drain required a reconfiguring of floor joists, but that got done eventually. After that, we got all the drywall, cement board, and plywood and we put in the floor and the big piece of ceiling drywall. Bathrooms are good because they’re small, you don’t need a lot of material.. The flipside is that it’s tough to maneuver a 4×6 piece of drywall in close quarters. Sliding it past shower fittings and other obstacles is a big pain, but we got it. So now we have to finish the ceiling, then do the cement board for the floor and shower walls, then finish the walls. After that, it’s tape, mud, sand, then tile. And install the shower kit somewhere in there. So this will probably suck up all the time I have available for building for a while. What also needs to happen is to replace the lower foot of drywall around the perimeter of pretty much the whole place. Once that’s done, I can start moving tools and airplane parts in there.