Don’t leave tape on aluminum for multiple years. The glue becomes permanent.
Wings Closed, part 2
4 hours.
Wing skins are done! I reinstalled the flaps and got a strip of UHMW tape along the back of one, and I’ll do the other tomorrow. The other thing I have to do is find or refabricate the flap hinge pin fasteners. After that, I just have some minor wire tidying to do and the wings are done, done, done.
Almost done with wing skins
2 hours.
3 more rows to go and the wings are closed up. Other than stopping to drill out the occasional bad rivet, it’s going well.
My helper for today has the right idea, but he’s not much help.
Testing iPhone posting
So here we go. Finally the iPhone and its apps have caught up with my needs and skills. I give you… The direct post!
Anyway, this is me, riveting the left bottom wing skin on. I’m doing the row just outboard of the autopilot, which you can see in the lower left of frame in that dark compartment.
Going Social
I’ve decided to patch the connection between this site and Facebook, and you can follow the progress (such as it is) on Facebook by liking the Stjohn’s Airplane page.
Wings closed, part 1
7 hours.
Yesterday, my friend Derek came by for a few hours and helped me rivet the bottom wing skins on. Derek is peripherally responsible for me being where I am today with regard to aviation: Flying leads to skydiving, skydiving leads back to flying and flying lessons, rental airplanes lead to homebuilts. Before he arrived, I did some pondering about the best way to rivet the wing skins on, and the first two things that needed to happen were the removal of the aileron push tubes and the flaps, so I did that.
Riveting the skins on the wings would have been really tough without help, especially the inboard rows near the bellcrank. As it was, I really had to stretch to get the bucking bar up in there far enough to reach the rivets closest to the aft wing spar. But it gets easier as you move outboard, and we finished off the left wing yesterday afternoon. Derek had to leave at around 3-ish: newborns really don’t care all that much about Daddy’s friends’ projects, but I kept going.
Before he left, Derek helped me get the double row of rivets on the right wing, then I got going on the rest. To say that riveting those big bastards by yourself is awkward would be like saying Stephen King sells a lot of books. Fortunately, the skins do bend quite a bit, and I wish I had a photo to show you how I did it, but the general gist of it this:
With the double row riveted, cleco the spar side and leading edge side holes together. Then climb in between the skin and the ribs, which will allow you to get a hand and a bucking bar in through the lightening holes to just about anywhere you need to go. And it should go without saying, remove the blue stuff from the inside of the skin before it gets riveted on, or you’re going to have a lot of fun later. Good thing I remembered this before we got too far along, but if you’re reading this, I hope it reminds you before you buy yourself a long night of failure-drinking.
I thought the autopilot servo was going to cause a lot of problems, but with the push tubes out of the way, it was really a non-issue. By myself, I got another row done, up to the access panel for the bellcrank, then quit for the day. I was sore and tired. Even with help, riveting wing skins on is like yoga for gearheads.
Left to do: the remaining skin rivets, and some minor wiring cleanup, since I replaced the puny 14-ga wire intended for the landing lights with a much beefier 10-ga flavor.
Hangar!
1 hour.
This weekend we drove up to Menlo Park to visit family and unload some large paintings we’d taken with us a year or so ago when my brother-in-law’s mom passed away. We took the 101 because I needed to stop at the Oxnard airport to check out a hangar.
Looks like I’ll be sharing a space with an RV6 project a really cool old Luscombe, a couple of motorcycles, and a vintage Mini Cooper. It’s got a blacktop floor, which I’m not thrilled about, and no wireless, which I’m really not thrilled about, but it does have electricity and I can do first flight and Phase 1 out of OXR. Oxnard’s about another 10 minutes away from Camarillo and not as close to the freeway, but it’ll be fine. I’m looking to move the project probably about the end of this month!
I was hoping to get a spot at Camarillo, but I can’t count on that, and it’s close enough that I can still go there and borrow tools and stuff.
More odds and ends
4 hours.
A few things here and there. I installed the MAP tubing and put a couple of heat shields on the pipes to protect the throttle and mixture cables. I also installed the canopy seal, which is going to need some assistance from some RTV or proseal. I do think firewall forward is just about done, though. The cabin heat SCAT tube rubs on the engine mount a little, but some UHMW tape should fix that. The two things I did that were of major importance were the autopilot test and getting that ridiculous piece of lead off the flange of the left elevator counterweight rib.
A while back, I’d balanced out my elevators, or so I thought. You’re supposed to put the elevator tips on, then drill holes in the lead weight until the elevator balances. Well, guess what? You’re not supposed to have the elevators connected when you do this. I discovered this, freaked out, then riveted a flat piece of lead (cut from an extra counterweight) to the outboard rib.
When I put that away, thinking I was just about the smartest cat in the whole barn, I started imagining the kind of beating a control surface takes in flight. So what happens to a little piece of lead riveted to this structure with a couple of Cherry countersunk blind rivets? The piece of lead comes off and somehow jams the elevator in the dive position and I go screaming downward like a holed Stuka, straight into a busload of orphans on the 405. This has bothered me for months, but I could never find a good opportunity to fix it until Saturday. I drilled out the rivets and put the lead back in a drawer. I also read about a neat trick you can do when balancing your elevators: Pour some lead shot into the tip through the tooling hole in the rib until th elevator balances out, then stick it in place with epoxy resin. Even if it’s not perfect, bias it a little heavy, because paint will change the balance.
I also mounted the MGL GPS antenna on the top side of the glare shield. It works; I get an intermittent GPS position while still inside the guest house.
Oh and one other thing: I dragged the wing cradle over to the shop and tested out the bank servo of the autopilot. Since I actually followed a wiring plan and wired the fuselage-side and the wing side according to it, I was able to test out both servos simultaneously. I do need to make a new ground connection though. The ground from the servo bracket sucks and I was only able to get a good ground by cleco-clamping the ground terminal to a wing rib.
Skin and canopy on!
2 hours.
I managed to get home for an hour yesterday from work (yes, still working the occasional weekend) and Dave came over to help me finish riveting the top skin. We got that done, and today, I think I blew my back out trying to get the canopy back on. It wouldn’t slide into the blocks, no matter what, and I couldn’t figure out why. That’s when I had one of those dark moments and issued forth curses and bile.
This is the MGL IO eXtender. It is placed on the subpanel between the instrument panel and the firewall. It is also directly in the path of the canopy frame. In retrospect, I probably should have marked out the 1 3/4″ zone in which nothing should be placed. But I didn’t. At this point, I’m like, whatever. I can move that. I think. Actually, not really. Not too many other places I can put that thing without some rewiring and I wanted the canopy on TODAY. So I came up with this:
Originally, I had a backing plate on the IOX because of the way the mounting tabs worked. Since this thing weighs basically nothing, I’m pretty confident that the arrangement here will be just fine. Now the canopy frame clears.
All that aside, I will be paying dearly for the amount of crouching and wrestling I had to do to get the canopy back on the aircraft. It’s not terribly heavy, but it’s awkward, and fragile, and it took quite a bit of work to get it into place with the hinge pin holes lined up. But it’s now on. When I get back from Seattle, I’ll put the struts back on, and then it’s hurry up and wait for some hangar space.
More skinning.
3 hours.
Dave came over to help me for a bit, and we riveted half the top forward skin on. He had to go and I picked it up after lunch. I managed to get all but the last row, the row along the longeron, and I’ll need some help for that, since it’s inside the plane and I can’t reach it no matter what I try. But it’s almost ready to have the canopy put back on, which is truly exciting.