tailwheels

Unintended Adventures

Tag: Flaps

Jan-Feb

By

On February 5, 2019

In S-20

It’s been cold and I live far away from the airplane, but progress continues. After 4 years I have also apparently run out of clever titles. Maybe next time.

So here is the update blast.

The wing is rigged. I need to verify that the rigging is still correct once I torque the wing connections. Rigging the flaps was relatively easy and all that is left in that system is painting the exit covers after trimming them for the jury strut. I started to rig the ailerons, but I haven’t adjusted the cable tension and therefore have to wait on that. Once I get the ailerons rigged, the plane as a whole can be considered rigged unless something makes itself known during flight test.


In other wing news, I trimmed and fitted the flap gap seals that bridge the gap between the wing trailing edge and the flap leading edge. I moved them to be about 1/16″ higher than the top of the flap hinge to allow easier access to the flap hinge bolts and avoid trimming the entire length of the gap seal. It was a little sad to drill holes into the aft spar, but progress waits for no one (it only waits on complicated ideas from my brain that take time away from actually building).

For the lubrication system I finally figured out some hose routing that I was satisfied with and I seem to have avoided buying any other hoses. I did use two 45 degree adapters at the oil pump housing to allow a better route for the hose. So the oil hoses are installed now and the bolts have been safety wired. I will have to remove one hose to add some oil to the cooler initially, but no big deal. All that is left for this is to add oil and pressurize it to make sure it gets where it needs to go. I also installed a cooling fan to the oil cooler to increase the cooling capability. Some other S-20 builders have had oil temp issues and they have solved them in various ways, so we shall see if my install is any good shortly. 🙂

I redid the coolant hoses this past weekend, because I didn’t like all the worm gear hose clamps I used. I changed most of them to Oetiker stepless clamps and then used self tensioning Oetiker spring clamps for the removable sections. It looks much better. I also used the stepless ear clamps on some of the fuel lines I had not already assembled.

On the fuel side, I am waiting on some new hose clamps to secure the header tank. Once this is done I just need to do a final check of all the fittings. I am also installing some aluminum heat shielding to the fuel hose that goes from the gascolator to the fuel pump. It passes awfully close to the muffler and I don’t want the fuel getting too hot.

I have added some header wrap and aluminum heat shield to various parts of the exhaust system to try and help protect some components in the cowling. Time will tell how that works. The exhaust system is completely installed and the exhaust nuts have been torqued.

I have some minor wiring left to do. This involves the wires to the starter. I hope to complete this in the next few weeks.

I installed the throttle and choke cables. The only control cable not installed is the parking brake, which I am planning to do this weekend.

Looking ahead to this weekend, I am planning to install the jury struts, final install the fuel system, finalize hose positions forward of the firewall, start to fit the interior, bleed the brakes, and maybe start some fuel system tests.

(30 h)

Enter a caption

Fuel shutoff valve offset mount

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)

 

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