tailwheels

Unintended Adventures

Long time no update

By

On January 7, 2018

In S-20

The Spring 2018 semester is almost ready to start. This weekend I will be wrapping up some painting for my rudder, doors, and a few fairings around the tail area.

Not much work was done over the Fall mainly because of me taking on quite a few projects at school. Sort of depressing, but projects are good and they provide me with things to talk about during interviews when I’m not talking about the RANS :-).

The big task going on since the last update is painting. Although it has only taken place over two weekends, that is the big project for the last 4 months. I finally painted the landing gear and as mentioned above will have completed the rudder and doors. The bigger task before that was completing the door trim. That was a fussy task, but as with all other things, it has passed. If you have questions or want some tips, get in touch with me. I would like to write a detailed process, but it was messy haha.

Other little things were getting the tail brace wires installed, some hardware installed on the ailerons, attaching some interior fabric, and starting to fit up the wing tips.

In other big kit news, I ordered the firewall forward kit back in mid-November. I’m hoping that will keep me busy for a while. I will be out of town for 3 months over the summer, so I won’t have any airplane work going on although I do plan on working with some of my electronic projects.

On the electronics side, the Engine Monitor software is pretty much where I’d like it. It is really ready for some higher level testing. I’m preparing for this by working on some circuits to help protect the electronics from voltage surges and other things.

For some new ideas, I am beginning to toy with some components that would provide a means for an electronic circuit breaker and provide current monitoring for individual loads. My idea is to somewhat emulate other commercial offerings that provide electronic circuit breakers. I’m going to go slow with this one and test as much as I can. Even if I do put it in the airplane, I am planning on some standard fail safe circuit protection devices.

Here is an example of the circuit that I am going to play around with for the circuit breaker. The green line in the graph shows a simulated current draw. The system senses a voltage drop across a resistor. By changing the value of that resistor, the device will trip at the specified current. This example is using a resistor that should trip at 2A. The simulation shows it being tripped at 1.8A, which is caused by an additional resistor on on of the sensing pins of the chip. I need to do some researching on why they have used a resistor in that location.

Example current trip.PNG

Plane Stuff

By

On October 22, 2017

In S-20

It’s been almost 3 months since the last update. I’d like to say I’ve gotten a lot done, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Lots of school obligations that I didn’t entirely plan for manifested and here we are almost to November.

I have gone to work on the plane, but just nothing ground breaking to report. We did head out to the hangar yesterday though and got the horizontal stabilizers mounted and all of the tasks required to get to that point. It’s always fun to start something and be able to finish it in the same day. Getting the bolts to go through the stabilizer and fuselage bushings was an exciting activity, but just needed a loving tap from a small hammer to coerce the correct behavior. 🙂

I brought home some steel parts to get powder coated before I completely install the stabilizers since there are some tabs where the tail wheel spring mounts to. I’d like to get them to the powder coat place this week and have them ready to go for the next time I go down.

Since the last update we have also worked on the mounting brackets for both the flaps and ailerons and they are complete and ready to be installed.

We started to also fit the wingtips up and still have some work to do on that front.

The engine monitor has been neglected somewhat as well. In the beginning of the semester I acquired a few more components for it, but I need time to get some soldering done so I can start testing and integrating them. The new stuff will be a power supply/regulator so it can be hooked up to a 12V supply. In addition, there is a small battery that will provide power after the plane’s power is turned off so that the engine monitor can shutdown properly and avoid corrupting the file system.

(30 h)

Whirlwind

By

On July 26, 2017

In S-20

Summer is slowly coming to an end and things are getting crazier for us. Moving to a new place in a week so I can finish my engineer transformation, finishing an internship, starting classes again, and going to Oshkosh all in the next month.

The plane is painted (mostly)! There are still all the exit covers, inspection plates, boot cowl, and some trim colors on the doors and rudder, but all the major assemblies are painted. Covering and painting is about all we did on the plane this summer and it was a busy task. I don’t care for painting and am glad that it is mostly finished. The rest of it will be an exercise in finding the space and equipment to do so, but it shouldn’t be insurmountable.

The plane has also been moved. After 2.5 years of half living in a garage and the other half in storage, all the airplane parts are finally together again in a hangar. It looks much cooler in a hangar and it’s even neater to see everything together. The only annoying part is that there are no hangars available nearby where we are moving to, so it’s about 50 minutes away from the house. There is an airport 10 minutes from the house, but even after a year and a half on the wait list, I haven’t risen to the top. Looking forward to getting some things actually assembled this coming year and making it look more like an airplane finally.

That’s about all the airplane stuff for the past two months. I could write a small essay on painting issues, but nothing has to do with the paint I used. A lot of operator learning/error. If you want to hear more, let me know and we can discuss a few things.

As this is posted, we have completed the move. I’m still busy being an intern for another week and a half and then I’ll join back up to start the new semester.

Oshkosh was great. We saw a lot of cool things, got to play with some avionics, and visited with friends.

(80 h)

School’s out for summer

By

On June 4, 2017

In S-20

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)

 

So much covering

By

On March 11, 2017

In S-20

I enjoy covering, but it is very tedious and takes a long time to accomplish simple tasks.

In my journey to finish the covering of the airplane I have successfully gotten the rudder and doors ready for patches and tapes. This leaves me with two flaps, two elevators, and a horizontal stabilizer left before I can start on the tapes and patches.

It’s getting closer. I wish there was more to say, but as with the other covering stuff it’s really just a time intensive job.

I’m making good progress n my engine monitor project and I suggest you check out my updates on ransclan.com.

(10 h)

 

Hooray for airplanes!

By

On February 13, 2017

In S-20

Lots to cover in this update since I’ve been busy and haven’t written one in almost a month.

We’ve been steadily accomplishing fuselage tasks and it’s really taking shape.

All of the cabin flight controls have now been installed. I still need to tighten down the control stick nuts, but the cables and pullies are in as well as the elevator push pull tube assembly.

The rudder pedals are installed and temporarily attached to the rudder cables. The brakes have been installed with the hose fittings and I need to install a few more cotter pins. I also need to add the nut to the brake/toe pedal U-bracket. I’m not sure how much spacing needs to be on the brake cylinder rod, so I’m figuring that out this week. Once I get that done, I’ll install the brake lines and get my landing gear situation figured out. Maria built and installed all the pulley assemblies and installed the control stick torque tube.

On the topic of my landing gear, I’ve gone through a few phases on what I want to do to them. At first it was an obvious spray painting with the Stewart System’s paint. Then when that didn’t get done in time I moved to polishing them up and leaving them just bare aluminum. That has seemed somewhat of an elusive target and I haven’t tried it very much. I then cleaned up the landing gear legs with some steel wool and solvent/polishing compound and they looks pretty nice like that. So I decided that I will just clean them up and not polish them to a mirror like shine, but still leave them bare aluminum. In the middle of all of this I also thought about trying to roll on the Stewart System’s paint on the gear legs, which is where I’m at now. I want to get them final installed on the plane, so I’d like to decide and act on something soon, but I’ve said that for about 2 months now and I haven’t done anything. Stay tuned!

In other brake news, I had some friends over and we installed the bulkhead tee, reservoir, and the parking brake to the firewall, so the firewall is also now installed. I still have a few residual tasks to accomplish on the boot cowl, so I’ll probably do that once I’ve got my landing gear and brake line situation situated. Getting other people to work on the plane is always fun.

A fun task this past weekend was applying the vinyl N-numbers a local shop made for me. They look great and it really looks like an airplane with them on there. We had a lot of bubbles on one side which mainly happened because we didn’t really seek out the correct way to apply it until after we did the first one. The second one turned out much better after we watched a YouTube video :-). Really cool stuff!

My immediate plans for the upcoming 3 weekends is to take care of the final covering tasks. I still have flaps, elevators, rudder, and doors to cover so I can be ready for painting by the time it warms up. Hopefully it will go quicker with my now vast experience in aircraft covering haha. It’s been fun to use tools again though.

Lots of stuff still to go, but it is definitely an airplane now and the parts board is becoming a plain piece of plywood again.

For the Spring million-mile overview update, I hope to get the rest of the major painting done by the end of the summer (wings, control surfaces, doors) ad then start installing all of them in the fall in the hopes of having a proper looking airplane by the end of the year. We’ve got a move at the end of the summer, so we’ll see how this all plays out.

(25 h)

​[wpvideo z3cFQ9Bg]​ 

The work continues…

By

On January 17, 2017

In S-20

This past weekend I was able to get a few little tings done on the fuselage to keep checking tasks off my list.

The first thing was to finish installing the sliding seat protection bars that are attached to the fuselage tubes. This completed the sliding seat track update that I started last January or February before I started covering the fuselage. I’m happy with how it came out and it looks clean and professional.

We had family over this weekend, so my father-in-law helped construction. He removed all the over spray on the fuselage tubes that will be visible once the plane is finished. I was very impressed with how it turned out. To remove the over spray we used 0000 steel wool and also used some automotive polish/scratch remover on the steel wool. I can’t even tell that we ever did anything to the tubes and it looks as good as new. I think you may get more scratching if you are more aggressive in pressure, so maybe it’s something to experiment with on a hidden tube before going full speed.

The next bit we accomplished was installing the rudder cable guides and pulleys. I still need to install the pulleys that are located with the elevator push-pull tube. That brings me to the fact that we got the elevator push pull tube assembly finished and ready to go as well. I installed the elevator horn and torqued it down and then started to install the shorter push pull tube but realized that it would not fit inside the large tube and needed to be profiled to fit. That will be next weekend.

We also fabricated parts and assembled the flap handle assembly. One thing we did have to do on the flap side plate was drill a new mounting hole. The original hole from the factory was about 1/4″ off. We chose to drill a new hole in the rear of the side plate, but I later saw that RANS had drilled a new one in the front. RANS didn’t say if one was better or not, but that we would be ok with what we had.

To drill the new hole, we put a bolt in the front hole and then made a small mark with an awl through the fuselage bushing. We then used a center punch to make a better indentation on the work bench. After drilling the two holes in one side plate, we bolted the two plates together and transfer drilled through the the plates to make sure the holes lined up correctly. This worked perfect.

I am going to go along with what RANS does and use Sunbrella fabric for my interior. I bought a few yards of it a couple weeks ago and started laying it out on some of my interior pieces. I am going to also use it on my floor board and I’m now deciding on what to do for a rub plate of some sort for where your heels will be while flying.

Also, check out my Engine Monitor thread on www.ransclan.com in the Avionics section. I just got my screen in from China so I can continue to move forward on that project. I hope to have an update written about that in the next week or so.

It’s all coming together nicely!

(7 h)

Wings are covered!

By

On January 4, 2017

In S-20

I’ve been meaning to push out an update for a while, but decided to wait till I had the wings done.

The wings are now out of the garage and waiting for paint. They have the brushed in EkoFill, so all that will be left to do is sand and paint.

That meant that we got to move the fuselage back into the garage and think about putting stuff together. I still need to cover all the control surfaces except for ailerons and one stabilizer, but I wanted a break from all the covering.

The fuselage looks pretty awesome sitting in the garage and it makes it feel like progress is being made.

A few of the things on my list are:

  • Installing the header tank
  • Removing overspray on powdercoat (so far 0000 steel wool is working great. It scratches the powder coat, but I’m going to try some polishing compounds and see what happens. Either way it looks better than with the overspray on it)
  • Painting the interior (going to be rolling on Stewart System’s paint and see how we make out.)
  • Painting the gear legs and tailwheel spring
  • Install gear legs once painted
  • Finish up some seat work (I have a few things left to do since I went with the new style seat rails)
  • Start working on the floorboard
  • Maybe something else

I’ve got quite a bit to keep me occupied and at least give me something else to do while I work up the desire to cover some more. 🙂

I also get to use something other than brushes and scissors for the first time in 8 months!

(20 h)
 

I am still building an airplane

By

On December 5, 2016

In S-20

It’s always sad when I don’t get a lot of updates posted about progress to the airplane. This semester has been pretty busy.

This is a catch all for all the work we’ve put into the plane since the last update (sometime in October). (Later realized I had a draft from Nov 18, so there may be some overlap here, but I’ll post both of them.)

The right wing has been covered, taped, and patched. It is now ready for paint.

Nothing too exciting else to report there. The process is similar to all the other covering with the exceptions of a few spots that I mentioned in a previous post. I did have the same issues around the tip bow, but this time I only had to use one patch to cover my mess!

The right wing is now covered and riveted. It is ready for tapes, exit rings, and patches. I applied a few things I learned on the right wing to help myself out a bit. The biggest one was the light coat of glue applied to all the sheet metal. This time I thinned down the EkoBond a good bit and brushed it on with a foam brush. This eliminated the bubbles completely and was thin enough not to leave any ridges. As a note, I did babysit it while it was drying since it would tend to get some ridges in it. I would just go back over it and brush it down again and by the time everything had dried I had successfully avoided any problems.

These differences in the wings are annoying, but I figure it’s a good teaching moment if anyone ever call me out on it. Of course I will vehemently deny any sub par covering for a few weeks and then I will give up and discuss it. Maybe EAA can give out awards for the most improvement shown over an airplane build at Oshkosh. Maybe an aluminum, copper, or tin Lindy?

One thing that I really wanted to reiterate is how awesome covering is with a second person. This wing went smoother and it was a lot less of a headache with some extra hands. Placing the plastic strips and tape on the ribs was much faster when I wasn’t trying to hold everything, cut things, and not drop scissor onto my nice fabric while I was working by myself.

(30 h)

Busy Fall

By

On December 5, 2016

In S-20

The airplane is still progressing. I voted to work on the plane vs. write an update after each work period.

Since the last plane update, the right wing has had all patches, tapes, and exit rings attached. In addition, the brushed on coat of EkoFill was applied.

The next step is to get the left wing mounted and prepped to cover. This will entail cleaning all the dust and bugs off the frame, applying anti-chafe tape to sharp edges, and getting the fuel cap screws sealed up. Then we will get it mounted into the rotating stand and get to covering.

A few things that I found from last time will hopefully make this wing go better. First is the coat of glue applied to the root skins and the leading edge skin. On the right wing I used a normal brush and I got a lot of bubbles and streaks. This will definitely show through the paint, but I wasn’t too concerned with it since I think it will not detract from the look overall. My options for the left wing are thinning the EkoBond down, using a different brush, or forgoing the coat of glue all together (need to call Stewart’s on this one). Hopefully that will eliminate the bubbles.

The engine monitor project is coming along pretty well. Not much to show at the moment since I’m just coding (very slowly due to a lot of work and school), but I’ve started adapting a configuration file so the limits of the gauges will be configurable. My coding as of now is geared towards the Rotax 912ULS, but I’m trying to keep it as configurable as I can where it is somewhat simple. If this thing keeps moving on and someone else wants to use it with another engine, then I figure we can cross that bridge then. I did find a new source for a lot of bright, industrial screens. They are pricier than the other outlets I found and the smallest screen seems to be 8.4″. Not a deal breaker overall, but I don’t know if an engine monitor needs to be 8″. I found a 6.5″ screen for around $140. It’s not the brightest, but it is close to the requirements I had decided on and some of the soaring community are using it with apparently good results.

(12 h)

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