Tag: Fuselage Page 1 of 3

Jan-Feb

On February 5, 2019

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

Time marches on

By Ryan

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)

Mad dash to the finish

By Ryan

On September 5, 2018

In S-20

The summer for students has come to an end and I’m back in Iowa. Summer job was fun, I learned a lot, and met some great people. Alas, it is now time for airplane building once again. A lot happened since the last update in March, so I’ll try to cover all of it.

I made a crazy work week before leaving for Denver in May to get a lot of stuff done. I accomplsihed most of what I wanted to do. I mounted the ailerons/flaps, fitted up the windshield, completed the second seat (that had been waiting since Thanksgiving of 2016), and prepped the hangar in case I got a hangar spot closer to home. The last bit did happen which was great. The plane now resides a mere 15 minutes from home compared to the 55 minutes it was for the last year. Still not quite as good as just being in the garage, but it’s too big now anyways. This should allow me to get a lot done on the plane these next 4-6 months (or until I convince someone to give me a job 🙂 ). I only have one class to finish up my fancy-pants degree and I will be doing some flight instruction, but I should be able to go full airplane build mode for most of the time.

The second great news is that we finally committed to finish the project and have purchased the avionics and the engine. The plane will use a Rotax 912ULS (100HP) engine. I started to become nervous about this before the decision since there was and still may be a chance we will move to higher elevations. The Rotax 914 would be the safest bet and make an awesome airplane, but in the end I couldn’t find any reason at this point in our lives to drop another $11k-13k on an engine to get a turbocharger. Maybe the next plane or when this 912 gives up.

The avionics are pretty bare bones. I’ll go into more depth when I get to wiring stuff, but I’ll have a Garmin G5 for primary flight information, a Appareo ESG transponder (RST Engineering has a great deal for EAA/AOPA), a Garming GTR200 radio, and my homegrown engine monitor (also looking at purchasing something from MGL as a backup and to reduce the risk that my engine monitor doesn’t want to work; I don’t want to delay flight testing for an engine monitor). The wingtip lights are the AeroLEDs Pulsar NSP variety. The other big (maybe controversial) decision was to forgo circuit breakers for most of the electronics. I will be using fuses for all of the equipment in the plane and then circuit breakers for the master and generator circuits. With my desire to fiddle with electronics, I couldn’t devise a plan that would let me hack the electrical system as easy as having banks of fuses with available slots. More to come as I get into wiring.

As I get further into the build, I find I have less and less to say about the specific tasks I’m doing. I wish I had more to say to help others, but I have been putting off writing these for too long after doing the tasks. I hope to change that moving forward.

One thing I will say about the boot cowl sides. For us tailwheel builders, you have a choice. You can either install the boot cowl sides with the gear off or you can trim the boot cowl sides to go around the gear blocks. I did the latter and ended up trimming off too much of the boot cowl and now I have a gap. I plan on getting some thin aluminum to extend the area I trimmed and make it a more flush finish with the fuselage. So if you’re tailwheel and don’t want to remove the gear to install the boot cowl, go very slow and check often. I think it would have gone better with another person to help me hold the boot cowl up and check interference. With only two hands, it gets difficult to check and trim quickly.

Some other small items being completed are on the firewall. This includes the battery box build up, and mounting the coolant overflow bottle. I had a very annoying spat with some stainless steel rivets on the battery box. The stem would pull completely out of the rivet on most of my attempts. I took a break, ordered some more rivets, and used some rivet backing washers. That solved the issue. Not sure what was wrong, but my casual internet reading (very dangerous) leads me to believe it may have been the rivets themselves, but I don’t know enough to say how much belief to put into that thought.

In general shop news, after 3.5 years of building I finally bought some shelves and a work table to supplement a small workbench. Not sure why I didn’t do it sooner, but I was younger then 🙂

The panel is off to the laser cutter in town and some more orders to Spruce and Digikey are inbound. I’ve attached a picture of the cutouts I’m making for the panel. Hopefully it works well. I think I could do much better from a human factors stand point, but we shall find out when it is flying.

I’ve been adding to this for a few weeks, so I’m pushing it out and I’ll be getting some more updates in the coming few days.

Assembly

By Ryan

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)

Plane Stuff

By Ryan

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)

So much covering

By Ryan

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 Ryan

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 Ryan

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 Ryan

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)

Plane’s new clothes

By Ryan

On September 19, 2016

In S-20

I never posted this draft of a post from a month ago, so here it is.

Finally it appears that the painting on the fuselage is mostly completely save for some touching up. We’ve learned a lot and it looks pretty awesome.

The colors are Insignia White, Battleship Gray, and Firethorn Red from Stewart Systems. The scheme came from RANS.

Few things from spraying EkoPoly Premium we found. The biggest one is make sure the booth is dry. It seems humidity played a large part in some of our more frustrating sessions. So make sure the air is dry in the line and in the booth. The nasty picture of a light coat of red below was what we ended up with in the beginning of putting the red on. A combination of drying the booth out more and increasing the tip pressure on the gun seemed to do the trick.

Next time I think I’ll try removing the tapes prior to the paint drying. Maybe that will allow me clean up the lines and make them better.

Either way, I’m a happy guy.

(10 h)