tailwheels

Unintended Adventures

Tag: Elevators

Time marches on

By

On October 27, 2018

In S-20

Lots of good stuff in this update. No major steps completed, but a lot has been done to support some big tasks soon.

Since the last update I have been mainly wiring the panel and installing avionics. I am using fuses in my plane, so the first thing to do was located the position of the fuse blocks. I located them on the firewall. After that was done, I began to install switches and wire them to the fuse blocks. I also began making the radio and transponder rack connectors. My setup is pretty simple, but the G5 acts as an altitude encoder for the Appareo Stratus ESG, so they had to be tied in. The radio was the most involved device as it has headset jacks and some external audio jacks. I wired the left and right ears backwards, but that is an easy fix.

The hardest thing about the wiring for me is trying to keep it neat and functional. It’s hard to see where things are going without all the wires and then it’s hard to route the wires when they are a mess. It has taken a lot of time to try and get them routed sufficiently, but it is getting there.

Another issue I had was a switch I have on the copilot side to actuate the trim servo. I am using a momentary SPDT switch and I had to buy relays to make that switch work because the trim servo works by changing the polarity of the wires depending on which way you want to go. This is an ongoing issue. I just haven’t sat down to fix it.

Mounting a heater in the plane has been a battle I finally found a place that is decent, but it definitely is biased towards one side of the cockpit. An idea I have is to maybe create some ducting to help with that, but that will be after it flies. I need to keep moving and not spend a ton of time on stuff that is good enough to fly.

I’ve also got a beta version of the front half of the case for my engine monitor, so I have temporarily installed it to get some wiring done. I am working on finalizing the back half of the case this weekend and I hope to have it printed sometime next week. It looks great in the panel. My software work on it at the moment is just changes to fix any issues with the computer talking to the engine sensor data acquisition box.

I wanted to put the magnetometer in the wing, but I didn’t make any provision for this prior to covering. To solve this problem, I designed a mount to hold the magnetometer on a tube inside the wing that is accessible from an inspection panel. This was a cool solution and it seems to work great. I ran all the associated wires for the magnetometer and the G5 rewarded me by saying it was connected and everything was working great.

Onto the aircraft structure work. I have installed and rigged the elevators. It wasn’t as hard as I thought in the beginning. The big issue I found was stick interference with the interior cover panel that is forward of the seat. That will be easily fixed by just trimming that panel since it isn’t a structural part of the aircraft. Myself and another builder elected to replaced the riveted aluminum tube on the elevator push pull tube with aluminum split collars. This will allow me to change the elevator travel limits if I find that I have rigged it incorrectly. They work great as far as we can tell and seem to be a good solution. Another change was to exchange the bolts that attach the elevator control horn to the elevator with drilled head bolts. This allows them to be safety wired since the original bolts are relying on a nut plate for the locking feature of the bolt.

I got the wingtips fitted and trimmed. The only thing left is to add the aft rib to the wingtip which I will do when the wing is installed and the ailerons are rigged for neutral. I also drilled the holes in the wingtip to mount the wingtip lights.

An issue I had when I first worked on installing the engine was routing the coolant hoses to the cylinders. In order to clear the engine mount RANS has you exchange two hoses for a hose with an S bend. On the left side RANS instructions worked great, which are to install the S bend hos from the lower coolant pump fitting to the aft cylinder. On the right side, there wasn’t enough clearance. By making the S bend hose go from the lower coolant pump fitting to the forward cylinder, I was able to get decent clearance from the engine mount. I then final installed the bolts that hold the engine onto the engine mount.

I hope the wiring will be really done soon. I want to be finished. This coming weekend I will be installing the wings and checking a big box off. I’m excited to finally get them out of the wing stand. Today I finished assembling the lift struts and getting everything ready to mount the wings. Another upcoming task is routing the heater hoses from the heater to the engine coolant hoses on the forward side of the firewall. This has been a puzzle mainly because I’m trying to use 1/2″ hoses everywhere when it seems 5/8″ hose is much more common. It will be possible, but it’s just taking a little more time.

Stay tuned for more in Ryan’s quest to have a flying airplane!

(80 h)

 

Assembly

By

On March 20, 2018

In S-20

Airplane building took a big hit this school year. The plane is in a hangar 50 minutes away now and the Fall semester was full of the usual projects and assignments to appease the professors.

Since the last update I’ve been working on mostly assembly tasks. The one thing that has kept me from positing an update is that I haven’t really finished any of those tasks. Sometimes due to a lack of time to finish and other times because I couldn’t find the right parts or I ran out of some of the more consumable parts (rivets and nylon lock nuts specifically).

But, things are still being accomplished. I’ll start from the present and work back to the last update.

I finally got the gear legs finished how I wanted them and installed onto to the plane. This involved installing the brake lines and fittings for the gear as well. I ended up buying new tubes with 90 degree stems on them because I could never manage to install the straight stem tubes in a way that would not interfere with the axle. I know it was a problem on my side, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. Another exciting part of assembling the main gear was not realizing I installed the brake caliper mounting plate in an incorrect orientation until after I had installed both wheels and installed the cotter pin. This was because I also failed to understand that I needed to install the brake caliper before installing the wheel since I no longer would have access to the back side of the mounting plate once the wheel was installed. Fixing that mess will take an hour or two I’m sure and I’ll be doing that on my next workday (Hopefully this coming Saturday).

I also managed to final install the tailwheel assembly and the horizontal stabilizers. The tailwheel assembly wasn’t hard, but my bushings between the blocks around the tail spring were too long and needed to be shortened slightly. Once that was done, I set to tightening the tail brace wires and rigging the stabilizer. I tried my best to complicate matters and be engineer-y about it to find a specific value that the tension in the wires needed. After bugging RANS and some A&P friends it was determined that there is not a specific value called for and “feels right” was the needed tension. Oh well… They seem to be tight enough and fall in line with what other similar brace wires I’ve dealt with before (Cub, Champ).

I managed to bolt on the left elevator and it is ready to be connected to the elevator push pull tube. One of my hinges was tweaked, but I put a wash in between the hinge and the stabilizer and it does not seem to be causing any excess friction. I’ll continue to monitor that hinge and check for any indications of excess stress since tightening the nut did apply what I consider more than normal force onto the hinge. The right side elevator is awaiting some more rivets to arrive so I can finish up the trim tab.

Onto the trim tab. I completed the assembly onto the elevator and had few issues. My assembly wasn’t perfectly straight and I needed to force one side of the tab maybe a 1/16″ forward in order for it to capture the bolt from the elevator. I also had to shave some material off of the most forward rivet on one side of the tab because it was interfering with the elevator. If any other builders read this and had a problem similar to this or no problem at all I’d be interested in hearing from you. I don’t have a ton of paint on my parts, but that and the fabric could definitely be contributing factors. The rivets are on order, so hopefully the right elevator can be mounted this weekend.

My list of things to do for the next work day are installing the brakes, get the control sticks mostly installed, and drill the stops on the elevator push-pull tube. Looking forward, once I have the push pull tube stops in place, I can place the aft baggage compartment and finally get it back off the ground.

Till next time…

(25 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)

 

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