Finally moved in back at the real house and classes are done for the Spring semester. Three more semesters left before I can be a real boy again.
I finished the other half of the stabilizer I started covering 4 weeks ago, so now I just need to cover the elevators and then I can start working on the tapes and the patches. I don’t mind tapes and patches since they seem to go much quicker than covering entire pieces.
(Everything above this was written a month ago when I thought I was ready to push out an update. Everything below is a collection of stuff I have done since then.)
Today is the culmination of a task that has taken us nearly 1.5 years. The actual time from the cracking the first bottle of glue open to getting everything ready to get to the paint shop was one year, five months, and twenty-one days. I started in December 2015 and finished today, June 2017. I never envisioned it taking this long, but When I started I was still at home, taking classes at the local community college. No more than 3 weeks after I started covering is when I went back to the big university to begin the Aerospace Engineering journey. It was hard to work on it during the school months since covering takes quite a bit of set-up and clean-up. It’s hard to just do an hour of covering because not a lot really gets done.
So, this past week my wife and I had a week off from work and my busy intern life to relax and catch up on everything we have been putting off for the past nine months. We thankfully got to work a lot on the plane and put in probably 50 man hours over the week to get the covering finished. It was a long process, but it was awesome to get that chapter closed this past week. It has been an open task for so long that I thought we would never get done with it. I enjoy covering and there is an artistic aspect to it which is nice, but I think I will need to space out my covering projects by at least a couple of years :-).
On to the details. Most of the work we had to do was putting patches and tapes onto pieces we had already covered. The only pieces that weren’t completely covered were the elevators. I ran short of fabric again and had to order another two yards. In the end I had to order an additional eight yards of fabric on top of the fabric I received from RANS. Come of this I know I would have needed regardless, but some of the extra fabric probably would’ve been avoided with more careful planning and layout of the parts. On the flip side, the fabric is relatively cheap and probably a lot less stress than coming up short after thinking you laid out the piece properly.
I’ll list a few things I noticed while covering that may be of some interest to others embarking on this journey.
Since it is what we did last, I’ll start with the elevators. These weren’t hard, they just had a lot of sides and two curved edges that made things a little interesting. For the curved edges, my only advice is when laying down the fabric, make sure you have a decent bit of excess so you have enough to shrink the fabric to make the curve look pretty without and wrinkles. Mine are pretty ragged because it took me a while to get my technique down, but I wasn’t planning on winning any show awards. I started shrinking at the middle of the curve and then worked my way outwards. For the tapes in these areas, I tacked the tape down on one side of the curve and the pulled the tape from the other end to get the tape to follow the curve better and it helped to get the tape to lay down along the curve. I then tacked the middle of the tape down along the entire curve. After that, I started shrinking the tape from the outside of the curve and worked my way to the middle while alternating on each side of the curve. This is what seemed to work best for me, but maybe you’ve got a better idea on how to do it?
The last trick to the elevators is the stitching. It’s all straight forward except the stitch that is only on one side of the elevator since the bottom side has a plastic exit ring for the trim servo. I put the bottom fabric piece on and then the top piece of fabric on so the top would look better. If you do that, the stitch becomes a little difficult. The problem is that the tube you are stitching around is about the total amount of space between the 2 layers of fabric. I didn’t have a fancy curved needle that could make that bend, so we improvised. I did put a slight bend in my needle for the process to help aid it. First I went through the top of the fabric and out the bottom inside the trim servo exit ring. Then after I pulled the needle out of the bottom, I went back through the same hole and then out the other side of the plastic ext ring still on the bottom side. Then I pulled the needle completely through that hole and then sent the needle back through that hole to pierce through the top layer of fabric in line with the other top side hole but on the opposite side of the tube we are trying to stitch. I didn’t care about the hole inside the exit ring since we will cut that out. The other hole I made in the bottom part of the fabric wasn’t bad, but I put a tiny circular patch over it anyway to feel good. It worked great even though it was sort of round-a-bout. If anyone has another way they did it, I’d like to hear it.
The other pieces didn’t prove to be too much of an issue. I didn’t shrink the door fabric much past 250 (except where I had wrinkles), but ironing the tape edges and patch edges did shrink it a little more than I initially did, so we will see soon enough if that means I get the opportunity to make new door trim pieces (YAY!).
If anyone has any questions about the covering process, feel free to reach out to me. I’m not an expert, but I probably have made most of the mistakes you could make for a first-time covering. In case anyone is only reading this post, we used the Stewart Systems covering products. I’ve enjoyed them and I haven’t had to wear a respirator and I did a lot of covering on the kitchen table during the winter.
So what’s next? I’ll kick off the painting process this coming week and if I don’t slack off and don’t upset the person helping me paint, I hope to have them done by the end of June (that’s my hope 🙂 ).
I need to definitely get them done before July as we will be moving and I’ll lose access to the folks who have been helping me a lot with the plane over the past two years. I did find a hangar after a few hiccups with the local airport. It’ll be an hour drive away, but it was better than the storage unit alternative.
I probably won’t have too much to report on the next month since I’ll be focused on trying to get the paint on, but I’ll try to get some pictures and a quick update on what they look like throughout the process.
Hope to see some folks at Oshkosh this year!
(80 h)
