Tag: Wings 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

So Close

By Ryan

On December 31, 2018

In S-20

Not much exciting things to show since the wings went on. It has been a lot of wiring to wrap up the avionics and also to get the engine wired up. But, that is coming to a potential end and I wanted to get something written down before the end of the year.

(If you’re reading this on the 31st of December 2018, there are no pictures because my iPhone doesn’t like to be below 30% battery when it is 32 deg F or below. I’ll get some photos tomorrow and add them to the post.)

The avionics wiring is complete. I will make the wire runs a little prettier, but all the wires go to what they need to go to and nothing exploded. The wiring for the engine is almost complete. Currently I am working on finishing the wiring for the ignition/mag switch which will complete my engine wiring.

Hoses on the engine have been a not so fun endeavor. The hoses that are giving me problems are the oil hoses and specifically the hose from the oil pump housing to the oil cooler. The provided hose does not lend itself to any sort of acceptable routing and I fussed with it over the course of a few weeks before giving it up. I will have to make my own hose for that run, but I have put it off to accomplish some other tasks I had put off previously. I’m not sure if it was in a previous update, but I fabricated a hose to go from the firewall bulkhead fuel fitting to the gascolator and installed the Rotax fuel hose to the gascolator. I still need to install the return line fuel hose and the fuel pump vent hose. I also will make a vent tube similar to the oil tank breather vent for the fuel pump vent.

I was fitting up the radiator duct a while ago and realized I needed to install the oil hoses which led to me figuring out the fun in the paragraph above, so it is currently waiting for me to finalize the hoses. Something that came up with another builder is making an access panel in the radiator duct so the oil hose at the bottom of the engine can be accessed without removing the duct. It sounds like a good idea and I need to get some aluminum to accomplish that.

Probably should have put this sooner, but I installed the oil tank mount brackets. These are what sort of cradle the oil tank and get riveted to the engine mount. I hope to never have to remove those rivets. The manual calls for the use of pan head screws, but I had a hard time tightening the nut on and replaced them with some hex head bolts which worked fine. One thing spotted by someone else was that the heads of the screws or bolts will touch the oil tank. By using some plastic edging material on the aluminum angles, the tank is offset enough to avoid this.

Another big item was finally diving into the header tank. I had put it off for a year and then bought an updated version from RANS and then put if off for another few months. I installed all the fittings into the tank, installed the mount for the new header tank. I also added a piece of aluminum angle to the read of the mount for added strength since the forward attach locations didn’t do much for the aft part of the tank and it will be relatively heavy with fuel in it. I also had to relocate the tank sump location. I marked it and then cut through the fabric. What I should have done is fabricated a new exit ring, glued it where I wanted the hole, and then cut the hole. Now I will fabricate the ring and glue it, but I probably could have gotten a better finish by doing it differently. I patched over the old opening with some extra fabric from cutting out some inspection cover holes. I still need to run the fuel lines from the wing tanks and to the firewall.

I final installed the flap lever. This was frustrating because somethings are off center and require some odd washer placement. There are also bushings to be fabricated and I don’t have a great way for getting those cut perfect, so I end up putting them on and taking them off a lot. In the end I added some washers as well because the right rod end would hit the fuselage frame when I tried to move it to the last detent. I added washers to center the cables better and avoided this. It is still close, so I may file some of it away to provide better clearance. The material that would be filed away is not a structural tube, so I think it will be safe to do.

Things that are up on the list are installing the jury struts, installing flap gap seal, rigging the wing (and control surfaces), finalizing the oil hose issue, installing fuel return/pump vent hoses, and finalizing the routing of wiring on the firewall forward side.

My engine monitor has also progressed quite a bit. I had thought my software was in a pretty good place and then I installed it into the panel and found some bugs in the data acquisition and sensor conversion code. I fixed those and now my only issue is not understanding how to auto start the application after booting and I need to integrate a real time clock into the board so it actually keeps track of the date and time. The latter should be the easier one to fix and I just placed an order for an updated PCB.

In related aerospace news, I am finally graduated from Iowa State with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering! It was a crazy 3.5 years to get to this point and it took lot of hard work. A lot of thanks goes to Maria for agreeing and supporting more school. I also owe a lot to all the friends who shared the misery of engineering school and the large group projects that accompany it. It was a ton of fun to go back to school and intern with some exciting companies. I’m looking forward to a fun career.

I learned a lot of new stuff that has guided me toward some neat projects that I am hoping will turn into big things. I am really interested in manufacturing composites and hopefully some structural composites as well in addition to making parts from metals and plastics. I’d like to think I could make a business out of it at some point, but there is a lot of learning and tool acquisition required before that point. I have some neat ideas for upgrades to the RANS and also some standalone ideas, but they will have to wait till the RANS is actually flying.

(40 h)

This is an airplane

By Ryan

On November 3, 2018

In S-20

Friday was a fun day. We were able to get the wings and struts installed to the airplane.

We learned a lot about putting them on. The main hold up was fitting the struts to the strut attach plate on the wing. I had filed them prior to installing the wings, but they were still too tight to easily work with when the blocks/cubes were installed into the strut.

As with most airplane building tasks, patience is definitely the key. There were times y mind jumped to solutions for issues that would have worked, but they would have not worked nearly as well as the solution that came from having multiple people think about the best way to overcome it.

Fitting the forward strut to the fuselage was a lot less painful than I had imagined it. We went at it with a Dremel with a cutoff wheel to get it close and then used files to go the rest of the way and radius the edges so the spar could slide onto the fuselage. We did this all with the wing attached at the aft spar and resting on 6 ft ladders with some foam. This allowed us to quickly test fit the spar and then move it out of the way to continue to remove material from the fuselage.

I highly recommend making a bushing to drill an initial hole through the forward spar. I had bought some 3/8″ steel tube with an ID of 1/4″. This pinned the spar into place as it should be. Then we removed it and slid a 3/8″ bit through the spar and fuselage. Once it was in place, we put the drill chuck onto it and drilled the 1/4″ hole out to 3/8″. It worked great.

If anyone has questions, let me know. I don’t have a ton of detailed photos for this unfortunately. It was about a 7.5 hour job for us which included lunch and spending a lot of time slowly filing the strut attach blocks so they would fit onto the wing. Another area we had to lightly file was the block that attaches the forward strut to the fuselage. We had to take material off of the bottom curved section in order to get a bolt through it and the fuselage.

It’s getting closer.

(9 hr – An extra 2 hours because I went to the hangar early to try and make sure everything was ready 🙂 )

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c825K8wJKU]

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)

Whirlwind

By Ryan

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)

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)

I am still building an airplane

By Ryan

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 Ryan

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)

Riveting

By Ryan

On October 13, 2016

In S-20

Little late, but wanted to get a short note written to just stay on top of the log.

Last weekend was devoted to getting the fabric on the right wing riveted down. I thought it would be fairly quick, but as usual it was not. Nothing hard for this part, but just a lot of repetition. The plastic strips all laid down nicely and seemed to go better than when I was using the strips on the horizontal stabilizer.

Maria helped out with the riveting and we got it done pretty quick. It was a quick work day, but now we’re all set to start adding exit rings, patches, and tapes.

On an aside, I have started on a side project to attempt some simple avionics. I really like the systems produced by Dynon and Garmin, but I’m haven’t been able to fully commit myself to one for this airplane. The information that I really am interested in is engine data and specifically temperatures. My idea is to use a popular micro controller (Arduino) to interface with the thermocouples and then display this data on a small screen. The end goal would be then to use the power of 3D printing to make a case for the system and be able to mount it in the panel.

I’ve looked into also using a small Linux computer (Raspberry Pi) in order to get access to nicer displays and graphics, but my lack of GUI programming has limited that area. I have a Raspberry Pi, so I may try to figure something out, but the Arduino is a relatively simple platform with a lot of community support for sensor applications.

If anyone reads this and has questions or has done this sort of thing shoot me an email. Should be a fun project and lower my desire for a full-blown glass cockpit. I’m going to add this stuff to the avionics page on the blog and try and track some progress there.

(5 h)

Covering the wings

By Ryan

On September 19, 2016

In S-20

My original plan was to start covering my wings in early August after Oshkosh and some other traveling. What that means is that I started covering the wings this past weekend.

Everything was pretty straight forward and it seemed easier to do than the fuselage. There was a lot less trimming around things.

The one thing I messed up and didn’t like was the top fabric. I tackled this alone which probably led to the problem. I had laid out the fabric in what looked like a nice, straight, and somewhat tight layout. I went ahead and attached the fabric to the trailing edge spar and then began on the leading edge. The problem showed itself when I got closer to the wing tip. I had a decent bunch of fabric on that end and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I tried some creative cuts, but I probably did more harm than good. In the end after I shrunk everything, there is one spot that I don’t like and it is on the aft side of the wing and maybe a foot inboard of the tip bow. It’s just a big wrinkle that I don’t find pleasing, so I’m planning on making a small patch to put over it and tidy it up before laying the tapes down.

Other than that one misstep, I think it went pretty good. Between going away during the week for school and some weekend activities for the next two weekends, it will sit untouched till the second weekend of October. Next on the agenda is to get all the riveting done on the fabric before laying out patches and tapes.

(11 h)