Schmetterling Aviation

Pitot: French for PITA

2012-01-29T11:28:00.007-05:00

I think it has been more than two weeks now, maybe longer, that I have been deluding myself into thinking that I am just [this] far from hanging the propeller on the engine. I can see it, right there on the next page of the plans; all I have to do is get the pitot tube installed.

"The what?" you ask? Well, to put it simply....

A pitot ( /ˈpiːtoʊ/) tube is a pressure measurement instrument used to measure fluid flow velocity. The pitot tube was invented by the French engineer Henri Pitot in the early 18th century and was modified to its modern form in the mid-19th century by French scientist Henry Darcy. It is widely used to determine the airspeed of an aircraft and to measure air and gas velocities in industrial applications. The pitot tube is used to measure the local velocity at a given point in the flow stream and not the average velocity in the pipe or conduit.
The basic pitot tube consists of a tube pointing directly into the fluid flow. As this tube contains fluid, a pressure can be measured; the moving fluid is brought to rest (stagnates) as there is no outlet to allow flow to continue. This pressure is the stagnation pressure of the fluid, also known as the total pressure or (particularly in aviation) the pitot pressure.

Theory of operation
The measured stagnation pressure cannot of itself be used to determine the fluid velocity (airspeed in aviation). However, Bernoulli's equation states:
Stagnation pressure = static pressure + dynamic pressure
Which can also be written
Solving that for velocity we get:
Note: The above equation applies only to incompressible fluid.
where:
$V$ is fluid velocity;
$p t$ is stagnation or total pressure;
$p s$ is static pressure;
and $ρ$ is fluid density.
The value for the pressure drop $p 2$ – $p 1$ or Δp due to Δh, the reading on the manometer:
Δp = $ρ$ g Δh
Where:
$ρ$ is the density of the fluid in the manometer
Δh is the manometer reading
The dynamic pressure, then, is the difference between the stagnation pressure and the static pressure. The static pressure is generally measured using the static ports on the side of the fuselage. The dynamic pressure is then determined using a diaphragm inside an enclosed container. If the air on one side of the diaphragm is at the static pressure, and the other at the stagnation pressure, then the deflection of the diaphragm is proportional to the dynamic pressure, which can then be used to determine the indicated airspeed of the aircraft. The diaphragm arrangement is typically contained within the airspeed indicator, which converts the dynamic pressure to an airspeed reading by means of mechanical levers.

Meh, those people get paid by the word (with bonuses paid for using quad-syllable or more words). To put it more simply, the pitot tube collects the air that is used to drive the speedometer.

I've mentioned the changes from traditional configurations that were made in the RV-12 to provide for the removable wings, and the location of the pitot tube is yet another of those. Most small planes have the pitot tube under one of the wings. Having the pitot on the RV-12 wing would require a fitting at the wing root to allow for the connection and disconnection of the air tube that runs from the pitot to the airspeed indicator, or in the case of the RV-12, the air data computer. That would be just one more thing to forget when re-attching the wings, so Van's moved the pitot tube to a rather exotic location: it protrudes from the very front tip of the propeller spinner. This is somewhat similar to the cannon mounted in the WWII P-39 Airacobra.

The net effect for the builder is that the installation of the pitot is a PITA.

pita
	1) Acronym for Pain In The Ass, a major annoyance. 2) Flat bread of Mediterranean origin, eaten as is or filled with small pieces of roasted meat, veggies, condiments, etc. 1) Reinstalling everything after a virus was a true PITA. 2) Greek-style pita is round and thickish, while Cypriot-style pita is elongated and thin.

It's definition #1 that best fits the occasion.

The first step was the preparation of the tube. Van's provides a somewhat convoluted procedure involving masking tape, a collection of washers, and a few paragraphs of obfuscatory text to keep things interesting. The end result is a dimple that will assist a locking screw in the critical job pf keeping the pitot tube attached to the airplane and correctly oriented to the preferred airflow direction.

When drilling this hole, it is strongly preferred that the hole, which is not really a hole per se, not become an actual hole. Rather, the idea is to drill it just deep enough that a small bump becomes visible inside the tube. For this job, I chose the eminently controllable hand drill that worked so very well when drilling the delicate canopy glass.

I paused after every few twists to take a look to see if the bump was showing yet. As it turned out, Pete saw it first. It really looked just like a piece of dirt that had gotten into the tube. It was a small bump indeed.

I found out later that it was actually on the wrong side of the tube, so we got to do this part twice.

Then we installed the plastic-ish block that holds the tube. This is where the PITA-factor came in. First, the plans referred to the "threaded" side of the block, but I was unable to find any threads. The tube fit tightly enough that I think it tapped some threads on the way in, though. The bottom aft edge of the block also had to be chamfered a little bit to give clearance from the cooling shroud. This would be the least of the difficulties with the shroud. Do you see the bolt that's only partially screwed in? That would be because the cooling shroud obstructed any kind of tool from working on the bolt.

I tried using fingers, but it put up too much resistance.

I enlisted the aid of pliers.

Getting the thing tightened was difficult. Getting it safety wired was even more so.

The pitot line had to be attached to the pitot tube using a small length of plastic, cleverly sized by the engineers at Van's to be precisely one nanometer too small. It took one of Pete's innovative ideas (using an open end wrench to fork over the smaller pitot tube and put pressure against the larger tube with the sides of the wrench "fork") to get the tubes installed. That was difficult, but again it was the safety wiring that was worse.

All in all, this took almost three hours out in the cold, after which I had no appetite for the cutting/fitting work that will have to be done on the spinner before the propeller can be installed. I've given up on trying to guess when that will be.

Drainage

2012-01-22T15:52:00.003-05:00

It was another long week of long hours in the salt mine followed by construction-impeded commuting this week, and although it was only four days, it felt much longer. Besides being too tired to brave the bitter cold temps in the hangar, I had to re-visit one of my recent home repairs. I came to notice that the dishwasher wasn't draining as it ought, a determination that was fairly easy to make when I opened the door and saw nasty old water just a smidgen of an inch away from overrunning the edge.

My first thought was that I'd soon be forking over a few hundred bucks to an appliance repairman, but the coincidental timing of it, coming right on the heels of my having replaced the garbage disposal as it did, made we wonder... could these events be related? Wouldn't that be more likely? Yes, yes it would.

I thought I'd review the installation instructions to see if maybe I had missed something having to do with the tube that the dishwasher drain hose attaches to. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I might be on the right track. After all, not everyone would use that pipe and those that didn't probably wouldn't appreciate the messy water that would pour out of it if the disposal became backed up. Surely there was some form of plug that I was supposed to have removed. This would all be answered once I retrieved the installation directions from whatever safe place that I had had stored them in to prevent their loss.

Yeah, it's a good thing I was able to find a PDF version of them on the internet.

Sure enough, right in the middle of the preparatory steps that I had ignored because all of the parts installed in those steps were already installed in my sink was a step that showed how to knock out the dishwasher drain plug.

It was an easy fix, but I'm becoming more than a little concerned over my propensity for requiring multiple attempts to get something right. I'm building an airplane, you know. Think about that...

Today's airplane work also involved tubes and hoses and drainage. The first hose to be installed is the hose that will provide manifold pressure information to the flight management computers. Manifold pressure is typically used as an engine power reference in more complex airplanes than the RV-12, but having access to more engine performance information than I'm used to having is just fine with me, besides which, the installation of the hose took about five minutes. Most of that was spent tracking down which hose to use.

First step: cut off a 15" length of this stuff.

Then remove one of those Rotax plugs from the manifold pressure nipple. It's plugged by default because Rotax, just like the folks at Badger Garbage Disposals, doesn't know if the final installation will use the manifold pressure or not.

Finally, attach point A to point B with the hose, then tie it into place.

Then it was on to something brand new. Apparently there have been a lot of problems with the fuel pumps on some of the older RV-12s that involved a lot of fuel leaking from the pump. Fuel leaks are not good, but they are even worse if the leaked fuel doesn't have a safe path out of the engine compartment. I have one of the new fuel pumps, as can be determined by the existence of a fuel drain nipple built into the pump. Just letting the fuel drip out of that nipple wouldn't do any good; it needs to be chauffeured overboard. This involves rubber hose, clamps, and aluminum tubing. All of the parts and materials required come in a single bag. I suspect this packaging will allow retrofit kits to be sent to owners of the older RV-12s.

The hose is cut into two lengths: a 2" piece, and a 19" piece. That leaves a short piece of left over hose - that came in handy a few steps later.

The 2" piece gets attached to the fuel pump with a clamp. A 1/4" nut driver worked best for securing the clamp; I tried a number of different screw drivers, but the slots in the clamps were kind of weird - they rejected the screw drivers. There's probably some special tool for that, or I'm just clumsy. I'm right around 50-50 on which it is.

There will eventually be an aluminum hose that runs underneath the cylinders, but for now we just install two cushion clamps that will make up half of an assembly that will secure the hose.

These cushion clamps are notoriously difficult to work with. Van's suggests using safety wire to hold them closed while getting the screw in place.

The one at the back of the engine was much harder to get at. It took some clever coordination of locking tools to get the safety wire on.

The 1/4" aluminum tube comes rolled up, so the next step is to roll it flat, then cut it to length. Both ends then get flared.

The standard flare is too big to fit in the hose, so it needs to be filed down. The ScotchBrite wheel made short work of that. With the two pieces of hose already on the airplane, the extra left over length came in handy for testing the fit.

The aluminum line then gets bent to fit, which is simply a matter of bending it to match the full size template provided in the plans. By "simply," of course, I mean it was somewhat complicated. The problem is that the line gets bent in three dimensions, but the flat pages of the plan can only show two at a time. It takes some skill at visually imagining a 3D part based on 2D drawings, a skill that I do not have in anything approaching sufficient quantity. I muddled through, though.

The aluminum line fit well enough, so it was on to the final task: getting the line secured with the remaining cushion clamps. The first was difficult, but it turned out well enough.

The second was horrible. I had to resort to using the surgical clamps that I had picked up in the neurological surgical tools aisle at Harbor Freight (Harbor Freight: The Home of the "No More Than 75% Post-Operative Mental Acuity Loss" guarantee!) to hold things in place while I tried to get the fasteners installed.

Finally, just a couple of tie wraps are used to hold the hose in place. I don't know if there are any steps coming later than do a better job of securing the loose end of the rubber hose in place, but if not I will just figure out a way to do it myself.

The dog days of.... Winter?

2012-01-17T19:23:00.002-05:00

When it's only 25 degrees in the hangar, I don't spend too much time out there. For the last few days it's been no more than an hour or so of wiring before my finger tips start to get too cold to do intricate work. I'm not alone; even Mr. Cabot Bennett is finding current conditions to be a little on the cold side, and that's in the house!

As far as the wiring goes, at least the wires are getting bigger. Oddly enough, despite its prominent size and the verbose description of it in the plans, I had trouble finding this one:

The problem turned out to be that I had snugged it up in between the cylinders to keep it from getting hung up on anything when we were moving the engine out to the hangar.

I also had a little trouble finding the Rotax-supplied connector that it will mate to. It wasn't in the Van's baggies - it was sitting in the little cardboard box that came with the engine, which in retrospect makes perfect sense, considering that it was, well, Rotax-supplied.

There's a lot more wire than needed, so the excess gets folded back against itself and tie-wrapped into place. There's another wire whose purpose escapes me at the moment that gets coiled up and tie-wrapped in the same neighborhood. Given that it leads to the trigger coil, it might be used to provide RPM info to the tachometer.

The next wires were the two big white ones that attach to the starter motor. The first comes off of the starter relay and gets attached to the least accessible starter motor lug that I've ever seen. I had to reach down through the engine mount and past the big ignition modules to delicately place a washer on the stud. Well, that's what was supposed to happen, anyway. What actually happened is... I dropped the washer. And it was just the right size to have enough momentum to roll away, but not quite heavy enough to make any noise while doing it. I finally found it four or five feet away from where it first hit the hangar floor.

That was enough fun for the day.

Hello, Winter, where ya been?

2012-01-14T18:41:00.001-05:00

That which is unsustainable cannot last, so we all knew that we were living on borrowed time with the last few weeks of unseasonably warm 40+ degree temperatures. Perfect airplane working weather, it was, but no airplane work got done. Ten hour hour days at the paying, with an hour long commute home at the end of it, have left me a little too tuckered to head out to the hangar in the evenings. I had hopes for the long weekend, though....

Eighteen degrees this morning.

Well, those grapes were probably sour and there were errands to do today anyway. My new (as of today) Saturday morning errand is to go to the butcher shop, as long as I can get there early. I gotta say that as much as I love my K-cup coffee maker, the best gift I received this Christmas was the discovery of a nearby butcher shop. The place gets crazy busy, but as it turns out you can be pretty much the only customer in the store if you get there just after 8am on Saturday mornings.

My list of must-gets read: ground chuck, Colby cheese, and sandwich spread.

This place is like Sams Club or Harbor Freight to me, though, in the way that it triggers my impulse-buy gene. I left with, in addition to aforementioned staples, beef short ribs, philly steak, two hot italian brats, super-hot pepper jack cheese, hot colby/pepper jack cheese, sliced deli roast beef, goetta, and a bag of sub buns for the philly steak and deli roast beef.

I like hot, spicy cheese, but it's hard to find in the big-box grocery stores. Their selection is like a Chinese food buffet: they have to keep it bland to appeal to the masses. I didn't know that the butcher shop had any hot cheese, but when I asked the Meat Dude for "Two hot Italian brats," I jokingly added, "and I mean a count of 'two', not that I want the brats that are too hot." Once he got the joke, he replied that they only had one kind of 'hot' in the Italian brat genre, but if I "wanted to talk cheese, I have this super-hot...."

After gathering up $46 worth of impulse buys, I had to swing through the big grocery to pick up a few things for the braised beef short ribs that were planned for tonight's dinner. (they're currently in the oven as I write this) including some fresh vegetables and a sprig of thyme. I have dried thyme. but I use only the finest and freshest herbs for butcher shop meat!

Before I could start on the ribs, I had to run another errand with Co-pilot Egg. I have been struggling to figure out what to do about her damaged car with regards to figuring how much she is owed in damages. I took it to a local body shop and got a repair estimate of roughly $2,300, but that's more than we'd get for it when we eventually trade it in, so there's no chance that we will get that work done. I finally realized that what I really needed to know is the difference between today's trade-in value and the old value. I figured I could just go get a quote from CarMax ("We Will Buy You Car Today Even If You Don't Buy One From Us!") for what they'd pay for it today and compare that to the Blue Book value to arrive at a fair amount. That took a couple of hours and it wouldn't have been bad at all if we could have walked around shopping for cars, but remember: 18 degrees.

Getting the ribs ready to braise took quite awhile - it's a new and complicated recipe that involves making a coarse puree of vegetables, cooking them in a cast iron skillet until they "develop a crud" (seriously, that's what the recipe says!), adding wine and reducing it (apparently not in the same way that I've been reducing the left over amount in the bottle), and adding water and a bundle of fresh thyme. Once all that's done, it goes in the oven for three hours.

I can tell you right now that I won't be making this recipe again. No matter how good it is, I just can't afford the thyme. [RIM SHOT]

With three hours to spend, I dressed up in my winter work clothes for the first time this year and ran out to the hangar. There were a couple of things that I wanted to get wrapped up. First on the list was to try to organize some of the engine wiring. I had ordered some supplies from Aircraft Spruce in furtherance of this task and the box had arrived while I was at CarMax. The wires that I wanted to do most were the set of three that go to the manifold pressure sensor.

With that job wrapped up (anyone that knows me can tell you that I'm just going to keep that up until you acknowledge the pun!), there were just a few loose ends (yeah, but this is a new one. You'll see.) left on the page. There were three more wires that needed to be winnowed from the pack, routed to various locations on the engine, cut to length, stripped, and fitted with terminals. The terminals to be used are these:

Two of these wires will feed data to the engine management system where it will be displayed as cylinder head temperature (CHT) and the third will send oil temperature. CHT is often gathered by putting a ring-shaped thermal coupler between a spark plug and the cylinder head, but Rotax has a niftier system. They provide a neat little attachment point:

The oil temperature uses the same method:

Van's details an easy way to attach the wires to the engine to keep them from flopping around. They use two tie wraps:

There are a lot of people that don't like to see wire ties used this way because they can cut/chafe the underlying part, so I don't know if I will ultimately leave them like this. I may order more wire wrap and see if I can bundle them into a little cable like I did with the manifold pressure wires and then use smaller cushion clamps to hold the cable, but only if I can find the thyme. [GROAN]

WATDI

2012-01-08T21:25:00.000-05:00

WATDI is another of my home made acronyms, just like classics such as the HVDFP (High Visibility Driving Finger Portal, aka 'sun roof') or VIO (Vacationing In Office, aka 'slacking off at work') - it stands for Work Avoidance Through Demonstrated Incompetence. The concept is simple: don't want to be put in charge of paying bills? Just bounce a couple of checks. Don't want to have to wash dishes? Break a few. Don't want to mow the lawn? Just run over one of the pets. See? It's easy!

I point this out as a warning, though. You see, if you ever want to mess up your hard-earned WATDI rating, build an airplane. Demonstrating sufficient ability to construct something that actually looks like a real airplane to the casual viewer makes it impossible to beg out of repair jobs at home. If you really want exacerbate the problem, fix a furnace. Do that and your Saturday mornings are going to be full of things like "Can you fix that slow draining kitchen sink? If you can fix the furnace, you ought to be able to...."

Well, that's not really how it happened. The right side kitchen sink had been draining slowly for at least a couple of years now, despite my repeated attempts to find and remove whatever obstruction in the pipes was blocking the drainage. Running the disposal would push the water out, though, so I just lived with it. Until Saturday; that's when it started gurgling in a skin-crawling sort of way.

It had to be fixed.

A little troubleshooting (by which I mean "noticing that there was a lot of food still in there") indicated that the inner grinding thingys of the disposal were welded in place with rust. Without the grindy thingys whirling about, food fragments weren't being disposed of, they were just being given a very exciting amusement park ride. After a lengthy period of ineffective grinding, the food bits just about clogged up the whole works. Easy fix: replace the disposal. Off to Lowe's for a replacement disposal, along with an impulse buy that would also need installing. We'd been looking for a new shower head and happened across just what we were looking for while hunting for the disposals.

The disposals Lowe's had were a little different than the one I had removed in that they had no plug-in cord and the fitting for the drain pipe did not have threads to take the fitting on the end of the drain pipe. The very knowledgeable Lowe's guy was able to gather up the extra parts I needed and save me from having to make a return trip. Yay, Lowe's!

Insult was added to the injury of my chore-laden morning when we returned from Lowe's to find the new fuel pressure sensor that had been sent by Van's. It was interesting to see how they're able to come up with small, low-shipping-cost boxes when it's them that's footing the bill:

If I had ordered the thing, it would have come on a cubic foot box and cost $28 to ship.

The disposal job would ultimately take only twenty minutes or so, a stellar performance that I attribute to the expert management of Mr. Cabot Bennett, seen here inspecting the work area for safety and dropped foodstuffs:

The instructions for installing the wire/plug were surprisingly comprehensive, comprehensible, and cogent - it was done in no time, as was the installation of the horizontal drain pipe.

It even turned out to be quite simple to get the new unit installed, the first time.

Unfortunately (and very characteristically), I had forgotten to put the threaded fitting for the drain pipe back onto the horizontal pipe. It all had to come back off to have the fitting re-installed.

The shower head should have been easy in comparison, but it took hours. What should have been a simple twist-off and twist-on operation was derailed by my inability to get the old head off of the pipe. Instead, I ended up accidentally unscrewing the entire pipe. That turned out to be okay - I was able to take it out to the hangar and hold it in a vise while I wrenched it off. The problem turned out to be a massive over-usage of Teflon tape.

Amateurs.

A second problem arose when I screwed the pipe back in, using the normal one or two wraps of Teflon tape. When tightened snugly, the pipe was pointing up at the ceiling, not down towards the routine showering position.

Ah, that's why there was so much Teflon tape! I added a few more turns and tried again. A perfect fit.

This morning I was able to get out to the hangar to get back to work on the engine wiring. The first step was the installation of the fuel pressure sensor. It slips into the bracket on the firewall and gets an elbow fitting screwed into it. It's an odd installation, assuming that I'm doing it correctly, in that it fits fairly loosely into the bracket even when the elbow is tightened as much as I can get it. Perhaps the fuel hose is enough to hold it in place.

The next steps would have been horribly confusing had I not received the following missive from another builder that is working on the same steps I am:

Here’s my conundrum: The plans identify the WH-J48 as colored WHT/BLU, and the J-49 as BLU. Simple enough. However the Firewall Forward wire bundle contains NO blue wires. Nor does it contain any wires identified as “J-48/49”. Curiously, It DOES contain two wires of the same gauge as the wires in the WH-RV12 IGNITION (labeled as J-152/153**), that are the proper length, and come pre-terminated with the correct male pins, but they ain’t BLU – they’re both WHT, and only WHT. The only identifying marking on these white wires is a tag identifying one wire as “J-762” and the other as “J-763”.

Fast forward – through the process of elimination I skipped forward in this section and installed all remaining wires. All were accounted for and correctly identified, except the two WHT wires described above as J-762/763.

So I’m left with:
J-152/153** coming from the Ignition module,
and,
J-762/763 coming from the firewall forward bundle.
but,
No description as to who get connected to whom.

(Logic could dictate that J-152 marries J-762 due to the similarities of their identifying numbers, but I don’t want to take that chance with my ignition system)

**BTW – for what it’s worth J152/153 are also described in the plans as being BLU and WHT/BLU when in reality they too are both WHT. They do however contain an attached label identifying them by number.

I had the exact same problem.

Note that the wires in question are white. White, white, white. Or, in the vernacular, WHT.

BLU is nowhere to be seen.

The wires are pre-stripped to expose some shielding. The bared parts of the wires have to be clamped in along with the ignition wires, and have to have their exposed shielded areas in contact with the bigger wires.

The end of that cable gets routed back around the aft end of the engine and down to the area where the wires that come through the firewall are resting. At first glance, I thought I was supposed to feed the connector through the cushioned clamp that holds the main wire bundle. Does that even look possible?

Nope! Luckily, it's not required. What actually happens is that there are two wires that have already been run through the clamp; the ends of those wires have pins that get inserted into a matching connector. These are the other two wires detailed in the note above. Note the apparent lack of BLU.

I decided that the idea of the wire identifiers ending in '2' being matched together and the wires ending in '3' being put together made perfect sense. I figure I've got better than 50-50 odds of that being right, and if not, it won't be too hard to change to the other configuration.

I then dug out a purple wire that forks at the end. I believe this wire has something to do with some sort of "easy start" functionality. If so, that will be the first easy thing about them.

The difficulty with them is that they have to be inserted in the back end of the A2 and B2 connectors. Do you see the two connectors down under the orange fuel line in the picture below? Those are the A2 and B2 connectors, and the back end of them is the side away from the part you can see in the picture. I remember being offered the opportunity to separate these very connectors a few weeks ago when I first starting working on the engine. The semantics of the directions weren't entirely clear, though, so I did not separate them.

For that, I paid.

Dearly.

Separating the connectors is a delicate operation involving the insertion of the blade of a small screwdriver in exactly the right place and applying exactly the right direction and force to release the locking tab. It's easy once you get the hang of it, but the problem here is that I could not get a screwdriver down below the connectors to use it on the release tab.

There then ensued a good twenty minutes of flailing around trying to find a way to get at those release tabs. I finally came up with the idea of using a screw driver bit from my electric screwdriver collection held tightly in the jaws of a pair of vise grips. It was difficult even with my newly invented tool because I couldn't remember the exact position and pressure required. I eventually gave up trying to figure it out blindly and practiced on the much more accessible A1 connector.

The idea is to insert the purple wires into the unused holes on the connectors. That task is made more difficult (as if it wasn't frustrating enough to even get to this stage) by the presence of a plug placed in each of the holes. The removal of those plugs required the invention of yet another custom tool:

Yep, I just pushed a piece of safety wire down through the top opening of the hole and pushed the plugs out.

All that was left to do was push the purple wires in. Not easy, that. They pins on the wires have to be in exactly the correct rotational position to fit into the connectors. It took a few attempts with the forceps that I picked up in the dental tool aisle at Harbor Freight (Harbor Freight - The Home of Budget Priced Surgical Instruments) to get the pins correctly positioned and pushed into the connectors.

Following that near debacle, it was a relief to next work on a far more accessible piece of wire. This is the wire that runs from the oil pressure sensor back to wherever the aircraft designer needs it to go. Rotax has no idea where that may be, so they give you quite a bit more wire than an RV-12 needs.

I cut off most of that wire and attached what remained to the wires that will connect to the engine management module of the Dynon Skyview, some day.

That was enough for the day, considering that it wasn't nearly as warm in the hangar as I had thought it would be. Here's what it looks like now:

Man, that think is starting to look so much like an airplane that I'm never going to be able to get out of home repair jobs again.

Spring(s)

2012-01-07T10:03:00.000-05:00

Sunny skies and very nearly 60 degrees?? Wow, spring is a little early this year! Usually the weather this time of year adds ten to fifteen percentage points to my overall stress and anxiety level because of the constant threat of ice, sleet, snow, slush, and countless other forms of solid, commute-destroying precipitation. Knowing that the type of benign weather such as we've had so far this year is building up a huge negative balance in our climate karma, a balance that must surely be reconciled in the near future with apocalyptic storms, I decided that I had to get out to the hangar for at least a token amount of airplane work despite being tired, irritated, frustrated, and generally worn out after my first week back in the uranium mines.

Only to be greeted with this:

That pile of processed dinosaur fluid wasn't there when I left after hanging the engine! Lions and tigers and oil leaks -- OH MY!

So, yeah, a moment of panic. Mostly, as it turns out, because I haven't taken the time to read the Rotax engine manual. This engine is different from those that I'm used to in many ways, including the fact that the oil return fitting is down on the bottom where the sump would be on the type of engines I'm used to. The Rotax is a dry sump engine, which is a bit of a misnomer, in my opinion. There is, in fact, so sump at all, dry or otherwise. There will actually be an oil tank mounted on the firewall. The leaking oil is coming from the hose fitting that will provide a path for the oil to route through the oil cooler and thence back to the tank.

Someday, anyway. For now there's just a not-quite-leak-proof plastic cap on the fitting.

One of the problems left over from the engine mounting was that of the not-quite-right cotter pin fit. Part of the problem there was that the team (note how I deflect/amortize the blame across the entire team rather than focus it where it belongs: directly on me, the manager; if I've learned nothing else from my years in Corporate America.... and watching the antics of our gov't....) missed the call out for a washer between the engine mount and the castellated nut. Two washers were provided with the kit for that purpose, but it actually took both of them to correct one side.

Needing a couple more washers, I had to place an order with Aircraft Spruce. The washers only cost $.03 each, but the shipping was $.75 - a small sum indeed, but it automatically triggered that spot in my brain that insists on adding things to the order to reduce the parts-to-shipping cost ratio. And the thing is, there was something I've needed to order for awhile now and haven't done so because of the same cost ratio problem.

Could I remember what that thing was?

Of course not.

I'd have to wait for the washers to show up to finish that job, but I still had time and energy enough to do a little more work. The next steps are the installation of some of the fuel lines. The first attaches to the input of the fuel pump:

The other end gets attached to the output of the gascolator. I still remember installing the gascolator a couple of years ago and being very happy about it - it was the first real "airplane part" of the entire build. My, we've come a long way, haven't we?

The next hose is, I think, the fuel return hose. This hose will return fuel back to the fuel tank. Again, due to my abject laziness and failure to read the engine manual, I don't know what conditions cause fuel to need to be returned to the tank. I suspect it is at least partially the case that a fuel return line helps avoid vapor lock in a hot engine, but I really don't know.

The hose gets attached to the fuel line traffic circle, yet another part of the engine that is a complete mystery to me. Once attached, I grabbed my little tube of Torque Lock to put the mark on the bolt that tells me that I've tightened it to its final torque. Yes, that would be the nearly empty tube of Torque Lock that I needed to replace with my next Aircraft Spruce order....

The other end of that hose gets attached to the fuel pressure sender (which seems odd, and only confuses me more about what all of these hoses do), but because I don't actually have a fuel pressure sender, that job also had to be deferred.

Because the temperature was a full forty degrees warmer than what we had when I tried and failed to get the big hose springs pushed into the radiator hoses, I decided to test my theory that the difficulties I encountered were due to the bitter cold. Sure enough, the springs went in far more easily in the more reasonable environment. The only problem I ran into was with the 30" hose. The spring has to pushed in one inch past the end of the hose, and I couldn't find a way to do that with pliers. I came up with the brilliant idea of using a socket to pound the spring further down into the hose.

Unfortunately, my brilliant idea failed to consider that I was pounding on a spring, and naturally that spring did what springs do: it sprang. While I did make some progress, I was still short of the required inch:

It took nearly the full length of the socket to get the spring pushed far enough into the hose that its recoil would leave it at the requisite depth, which unsurprisingly made it very difficult to get the socket back out.

That was enough work for the day; I finished up by just spending a few minutes soaking in the sights of an airplane with an engine attached basking in the warm glow of a very nice sunset.

Still, at some level my enjoyment was tempered by the fact that I dread the inevitable weather reckoning.

Moments....

2012-01-04T22:08:00.000-05:00

At the end of it all, in reflection the memories of even the longest of lives are comprised mostly of a series of defining, unforgettable moments that are permanently etched in our brains. Sure, things like the years of a lengthy commute to and from work will be remembered as an amorphous blob of irritation and frustration, and thousands of events will be remembered in a general sort of way, but there are only a relative few events that are so etched in our memories that we can remember them as if they happened just minutes ago. These remarkable moments can be happy, sad, or anything in between.

For me, my earliest such memory is from a day when I couldn't have been much older that four. I had wandered over to the neighbors yard somehow and was embroiled in a heated game of Ring Around the Rosie when my very justifiably irate mother found me. It seemed odd to me at the time that a parent could simultaneously be so happy to have found me yet so, so angry. I understand that dichotomy far better today than I ever could have then, of course, what with my now being a parent myself.

Sometimes it isn't even the actual event that I remember with such clarity, but a later point in time when the full import of something that I had done hit me.

I worked my way through the last three scholastic years of my engineering degree using both veterans benefits and whatever money that I could earn through a series of bottom rung jobs. By the time I received my diploma, I was working full time and could only squeeze in one or two classes at a time. All told, it was something like fifteen long years from my first day as a freshman at the University of Cincinnati and my graduation from The Ohio $tate University.

In that time I served five years in the military, had spent three years overseas, gotten married, and established myself in my career. All very important events/accomplishments, but the moment that I remember with the most clarity was when I was driving home from having picked up my diploma from the registrars office and decided on impulse to stop at K-Mart and buy a frame for it. I remember that it was as I was turning left into the K-Mart parking lot that the full realization that I was done, finally done at long, long last, with school hit me. I remember the tears that filled my eyes as the overwhelming sense of accomplishment washed over me.

My most recent accomplishment was nothing like that, but I'm fairly sure it will always be archived somewhere in my memories for easy retrieval. And, when I really think about it, for good reason. A lot of people graduate from college. Even more say "I do," although not all of them really mean it. It is a very small minority indeed, though, that do what I have done.

So, what was it?

I (well, as we'll see, I mean "we") hung the engine onto an airplane that I (okay, in many, many cases, "we") assembled.

That is not something that happens every day, right?

Having fulfilled what I see as my obligation to provide a dramatic lead-in to what are really fairly mundane details, here's how it went.

First, the bottom mount (which doubles as support for the nosewheel) had to be drilled out to 3/8". These are very critical holes since they are going to be used for the large-ish bolts that hold the engine mount. As such, it is desirable to have them straight and tight. To achieve this, Van's wants a small bolt temporarily installed to hold the nosegear mount tightly against the firewall. They suggest pushing a small bolt through the firewall and attaching it with a locknut. Unfortunately, getting a nut on the small bolt would require an uncomfortable reach under the instrument panel, and discomfort is not something I endure willingly. I found it much easier to push the bolt through from under the instrument panel and put the nut on from the firewall side. The mount didn't seem to care one way or the other.

There then transpired a rather difficult drilling operation. Co-pilot Rick had brought along an electric drill that is much beefier than my little Li-Ion Craftsman drill, but the combination of the cold hangar (which had a weakening effect on its battery) and my Harbor Freight (Home of Under Performing Drill Bits) drill bit made for a lengthy operation. Once done, though, the bottom bolts fit in easily.

Having learned the lesson of making sure all holes to be filled with a bolt actually can be, we then went through the process of making sure all of the holes, especially those that are powder-coated, were large enough to allow the bolt to pass. Cadillac Pete also thought it would be a good idea to test the fit of the bushings that go through the rubber mount isolators too, and it's good that he did - they had small burrs that were keeping the bolts from sliding through. A light pass with the 3/8" bit cleared that up.

With all of the holes verified and the bolts/nuts/washers/isolators ready and positioned, it was time to move the engine into place. Co-pilot Rick agreed to stand ready to throw himself under the engine to protect it from damage in the somewhat likely case that I managed to knock it off of the hoist.

We preloaded the top mount holes with the assembled attachment parts:

At this point I adopted my usual management role and guided Rick and Pete's strenuous efforts from afar:

I swear, some day I'm going to form a blues band just so I can name it Three Bolts Easy. There's always one bolt that doesn't want to cooperate. Rick assessed the situation:

A little pushing and prodding finally got the fourth bolt in. The bolts are to be tightened to a torque value of 160 inch-pounds, but can be further tightened to as much as 190 inch-pounds if needed in order to get the cotter pin hole to align with a slot in the castellated nut. At 160 inch-pounds, the hole was actually slightly beyond the nut. I'm going to have to research whether or not that's a problem:

Problem or not, we considered the job done and celebrated the event in the only way possible:

The tears can come later, if for no other reason than that I can finally, after weeks of worrying about it, be assured that I'm not going to drop that engine.

Just count to 10....

2012-01-04T10:45:00.004-05:00

It's one of those old, been-around-forever sayings: when you are getting ready to lose your temper, just count to ten. Well, I've had a couple of instances over the last few days where that has turned out to be good advice. Fortunately the type of units that are to be counted are left to the discretion of the user and I opted for days. It is for that reason that I have yet to talk to the mother of the youngster that vandalized Egg's car, and to a much lesser extent, it is why I had not yet called Van's regarding the need for the new style fuel pressure sensor.

I still haven't done anything about the vandal, but the Van's situation is now resolved.

There I was, sitting at my desk at the paying job noodling over a Gantt chart, trying to figure out how to squeeze three weeks of work into a two week window when I received an instant message from home:

Home: Scott at Van's is on the phone here.

RV6FlierAtWork: About?

Home: Don't know. Should I have him call you at work.

RV6FlierAtWork: no.

Why "no?" Well, think about it. I've been pretty open about my unpleasant interaction with Mr. Ken S., and really, who knows who reads this stuff? That was part of it, anyway, the other part being that I had three days worth of work items on my clipboard and I am absolutely paranoid about losing data on the clipboard! It must be pasted somewhere before I will entertain an interruption.

As soon as my data was securely pasted back into an unreasonably tight schedule, I returned the call. Scott wanted to tell me that he had heard through the grapevine that I was one of the two builders that had received the wrong sensor from Van's and that Dynon was sending over a few of the new units. One will be sent to me as soon as it arrives from Dynon.

Wow!

I thanked him for his "extremely proactive customer service."

He chuckled and said, "Well, we're not always this way."

Hmmm, a hidden meaning there? Probably not. In any event, I told him that "life in Skyview purgatory must be pretty tough on everyone."

Another chuckle, then, "Hey, I like that term!"

So, one problem solved. And as an extra bonus, I now have the direct dial number of someone in Van's tech support that I might find it more pleasant to deal with if I run into any more problems that require their help.

Maybe I'm ready to call that kid's mom now...

Doors, doors, doors

2012-01-03T17:38:00.002-05:00

The Saga of the New Years Doors is growing ever more complex and, quite frankly, irritating. It's a bit of a distraction from more important stuff such as building airplanes and the like. The long and short of it is that there are two potential criminal charges against the Teen Kickboxer: criminal damage (the doors) and some other charge having to do with the fact that the alleged perp also saw fit to shoot paint balls at Egg and some of the other kids. The latter charge is out of my hands and will proceed apace through the court system, but it is within my realm of decision-making to put a stop on the damage charge if I so choose. I was informed of this by the officer that has been assigned to the case; he happened to mention that fact at the same time he informed me that he had given my phone number to young Bruce Lee's mother. Just in case I was desirous of settling this issue out of court, as it were.

Mom Lee called yesterday and we had a twenty minute talk. I'm sympathetic to her plight (which is completely out of character for me, to be honest) and I'm considering trying to work something out with her. The child has apparently been something of a handful for his entire life and has had a number of run-ins with the long arm of the law. Egg has met, and has a favorable impression of, Mom Lee, and as long as the Molester of Doors is still on the hook for the other infraction, she's agreeable to a civil deal for the damage to the car.

However...

Little Bruce Lee is going to find that he is not the only person involved with this that has a temper if he continues to openly brag to his friends that "he ain't got to pay for nuthin, and juvie ain't that bad anyway."

We'll see about that. Yes, we will.

As can be imagined, this whole ordeal has been a very unwelcome cause of stress, especially considering that I returned to the paying job today after a relaxing 17 day rest, only to find that all of the problems I left behind are still there.

Rats. No helpful elves for the likes of me. Cobblers have all the luck.

And tonight I need to accompany young student Egg to a high school basketball game where she hopes to corner a minimum of 33 random samples, having achieved a count of 17 earlier today at the public library but having quit before reaching the requisite count of 50 due to the immense stress of asking a simple question of strangers, all of which is in support of a homework assignment from her Advanced Placement Statistics class.

Oh, bother.

That's time that I could be spending hanging an engine on an airplane.

Or not. It's 22 degrees out in the hangar. I'm thinking a sweaty, smelly gymnasium may not be all that bad after all.

In preparation for The Great Hanging, Co-pilot Rick lent a hand yesterday in finishing up all of the tasks that I wanted to get done before putting the engine in the way, so all I need now is a slightly warmer day...

I started out solo, figuring it would only require my two hands to prepare the radiator hoses. Easy first step: cut a 30" and a 20" length from the provided hose. A hack saw worked great for that:

I imagine everyone but me already knew this, but it seems that a spring has to be put inside a radiator hose to keep it from collapsing/crimping. Knowing that the outer diameter of the relaxed spring is identical to (or slightly larger than) the inner diameter of the hose, Van's suggests grabbing an end of it with a pair of pliers and twisting it to tighten it up and reduce the diameter. That can't be done with two hands, so I enlisted the aid of my trusty third hand:

That worked for awhile, but eventually the end of the spring reached the bend in the hose. I needed to straighten the hose, but the best way I could come up with to do that was to splint it:

That worked for awhile too, but not at all easily. After twenty minutes of effort, the spring was only halfway into the 20" hose. That's right around the time that I realized that I don't really need the hoses yet; I just need to concentrate on the things that get mounted to the firewall behind where the engine will be. I also had the uncomfortable thought that perhaps the 28 degree temperature might be a factor in the very tight fit between the spring and hose, and that isn't likely to change all that much for oh... about three months.

So, I quit.

It was much easier to fabricate this hinge:

The hinge then gets match-drilled to a stainless steel door. This door will sit between the back side of the radiator and a set of holes in the firewall. It will be controlled by a cable leading from the instrument panel. Opening the door will introduce hot air into the cockpit, which will be quite handy in the winter months. This is actually a better system than what I have in the RV-6. The -6 provides heat from a cuff wrapped around an exhaust pipe. There are two problems with that system:

- it can be a wonderful way to pump carbon monoxide into the cockpit, with dire consequences
- it works poorly. When you throttle back, the heat goes away almost instantly.

Match drilling through two pieces of stainless steel was every bit of the pain that I thought it would be, but all in all the hinging of the door was pretty easy.

There's another bracket that gets attached to the firewall. This is the bracket that will actually hold the radiator. It too has to be match drilled to a piece of stainless steel hinge, but this was the dreadful case of drilling though soft and thin and into thick and hard. That nearly always results in the elongation of the holes in the soft and thin. This case was no exception to that rule.

All that done, I ran into another firewall related quandary: the holes in the firewall weren't there. This is apparently due to the advanced age of the firewall that Van's sent me, just as was the spacing issue between the starter relay holes. Reluctant to incur the snippy, snarky cynicism of Mr. Ken S. at Van's tech support by asking him what I should do, I made the obvious decision without consulting with him: I went ahead and drilled the three holes that I needed.

The door needs a gasket to prevent leakage of fumes or unwanted hot air (heh, 'unwanted hot air' - it seems that we're still on the topic of Mr. Ken S.) and the easiest way to make a gasket is with RTV. A coat of wax gets applied to the firewall to keep the RTV from sticking, then a bead of RTV is run around the perimeter of the door. The door gets tightly closed and clamped into place while the RTV sets up:

All I have to do now is run the cable from the instrument panel and attach it to the control horn on the door and it's time to mount the engine!

Once Egg's door problems are solved too, that is.

New Years Day hangover

2012-01-01T15:05:00.003-05:00

Here it is, the first day of 2012. If the Mayans are correct, this will be the last time we all have to endure the fallout from New Years Eve partying. Myself, I'm just fine this morning since I long ago parted ways with the late night partying crowd. I was comfortably settled in for a night of NCAA football last night until about 9:30.

That's when I received a phone call from Co-pilot Egg.

Just to set the stage, Egg just recently had a birthday and is now old enough to be considered an adult for the purposes of voting, fighting a war, or going to prison for knocking over a liquor store, but not yet old enough to (legally) drink alcohol. That's just fine with both of us, frankly. For me it's because I'd prefer to not have to worry about her any more than I already do, and for her it's because she just doesn't seem to have any desire to imbibe.

Or so she says. There's a lot riding on trust here.

In any event, recognizing that she will be out on her own in less than a year, I've begun trying to loosen the leash a little bit with regards to her comings and goings. Sure, I still like to know where she is and when she will be back, but when she said she was going to a friend's house for a New Years Eve get together, I didn't probe too deeply for details regarding which friend, where he lived, the arrest history of his parents, currency of rabies shots, percentage of allowance spent on pornography, or any of the plethora of things I used to try to determine before granting permission. I did refuse her request to drive my car instead of hers, though, since it wasn't supposed to get cold enough for her to really need the heated seats that she likes so much.

That turned out to be a fortuitous refusal.

So, the phone call: "Hey, Dad, I'm at... wait, the sheriff is here. [click]"

Ah, nice. Nothing to worry about then.

The inevitable follow-up call came in soon (not soon enough to keep my nerves from getting seriously frayed, though) and further details were provided, albeit in the breathless, faster-than-light, deeply dramatic narrative style of a teenage girl. Which, to be perfectly honest, I have developed the ability to completely filter out.

At this point, I'm still not yet sure that I have the entire chain of events straightened out, but the gist of it is that her host's younger brother doesn't seem to think much of Ms. Egg and through some series of escalating events took it upon himself to express his displeasure with her through the convenient proxy of her car.

Now, Ms. Egg wants a new car and has for awhile, but that by no means diminishes the affection she has for her current ride. Infuriated with the damage that had been done to her baby, she decided to call 911 to request the assistance of some law enforcement officials. (We will have a little discussion regarding the appropriate nature of 911 usage later.) The net result in this case, however, was the arrival of a pair of Sheriff's deputies. They were out of their jurisdiction, so referred her to the local gendarmes. Rather than have them dispatch a cruiser to the scene, they suggested that she just go to the station to have a criminal damage report filed. As the spouse of the legal owner of the car in question and the only one willing to forgo the pleasures of NCAA football, my attendance was required at the station as well.

The report was completed by a courteous and professional young officer who let the veneer of professionalism slip just a little after speaking to the perpetrator on the phone. I overheard enough of the conversation between the officer and the vandal to fully agree with the officer's observation: "That kid is as dumb as a box of rocks."

So, that was my New Years Eve.

If the Mayans have their way, next year will be only slightly worse.

This morning dawned cloudy, windy, and down right dismal. A perfect day to work out in the hangar! I want to finish up as much wiring as I can before hanging a big obstructing engine in the way. Wiring an RV-12 is about a thousand times easier than any of the other RVs since 98% of the work is already done at the factory, but there are still a few wrinkles now and then.

The first of which is that I still don't have the cushion clamp set-up shown in the drawings.

I've been told that those are provided with the avionics kit which neither I, nor anyone else, have right now. Luckily, I keep a few different sizes of cushion clamps around in the hangar in support of periodic needs on the RV-6, so between that and the big "spare nuts/bolts" order I placed a few months ago to amortize down the shipping cost for some small thing, I was able to put together a solution. I tried different sized clamps until I found one that held onto the engine mount tightly. I guessed that the second one that the wires would pass through would be the same size. I must have been right, considering that it was a tight fit to get all of the wires through.

Oh, and I really need to secure that cotter pin!

The most challenging part of all of this wiring is, as it usually turns out to be, selecting the correct wires out of the bunch. The first couple were easy - those thick white wires branched together were easy to find. They're very stiff, though, so it took a little wiggling around to get both of them into the connector.

We're then supposed to find the yellow and red wires from each of the EGT probe wires. I had no problem with finding the EGT wires, but there were no yellow or red wires in sight. I figured if they're not in sight, they must be inside:

And there they are!

They get stripped and then have male terminals crimped on.

The directions then directed me to "find the EGT probes." Man, those folks at Van's really know me - how else to explain that they knew that "finding" anything is half of where my time gets spent.

The terminals already in place on the EGT probes get cut off ("preserving as much wire as possible," making me think that this is going to be a tight stretch at some point) and the wires stripped for new terminals. Oddly, the stripped wire is the same color on the inside as the outside.

That didn't seem right, so I scraped at the wires with my thumbnail. That exposed the actual wires:

With the extreme close-up photo, I imagine those wires look plenty big to you, but they are, in fact, quite small. Small in the same way the wires to the trim motor are. Small in the way that means a crimped on terminal will not stay on. I had to use my invented method of beefing up really thin wires, which involves using a short length of 22 gauge wire wrapped around the original wire.

That method makes the wire thick enough to provide a good grip for the crimp.

The EGT probes get tossed back into the parts bin for later usage, presumably once there are some exhaust pipes for them to probe. I'll have to find them again, someday.

The next set of wires are easy to separate out because 1) two out of the three have fairly distinctive coloring, and 2) they have these nifty little green collars on them:

In a separate bag, there is an orange shell that will hold the wires. In the same bag, there were three more pins and collars, leading me to believe that Van's (or Stein, the outsource for the wiring harness, I think) put those connectors on the harness for us. That was nice! The pins just click into the back of the shell:

The shell snaps shut and the finished connector plugs into the manifold pressure computer mounted just below the antenna shelf:

This is followed by one of those occasions where Van's provides too much instruction and muddies the mental waters a little bit:

"Locate the ES 24115 Master Relay. (Hint: it's right where you left it after you bolted it to the firewall - DG) Remove the outer nut and washers from each of the three studs on the relay. Do not remove the nut that lies against the relay body."

I spent a lot of time looking for "the nut that lies against the relay body."

There isn't one. What they really mean is "Remove the outer nut and washers from each of the three studs on the relay." That's all they needed to say. Their over-explanation just confused me; I would not have tried to remove the three nuts left behind after the outer nuts were removed:

"Locate the ES DIODE MASTER Master Relay Diode." Say that three times fast!

It gets paired up with another wire in one of the pesky wire condoms:

The pair of them get attached to the master relay:

Now we encounter two steps that would have been easier if reversed. I followed the provided step order and found the correct wire, stripped it, and crimped on a terminal. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have reversed the steps and fed the wire into the wire condom first, rather than encountering an all too familiar problem from my distant past: the item to be protected was too large for the protective device:

Wait! It gets better! In the unicorn-populated world that Van's lives in, it looks to be a simple matter to take the loose end of the ES DIODE MASTER Master Relay Diode and pair it up with the newly terminated wire and attach them both to the center post of the master relay:

Yeah, right. Remember that too small condom? Well, it really complicates matters:

A rather uncomfortable arrangement, eh?

But wait! I gets even better! Remember the starter relay adapter plate that caused such a rift between me and the snarky Mr. Ken S. at Van's and how it moved the started relay a little bit lower on the firewall? Well, as it turns out there is a precisely sized wire that is somewhat, well, inconvenienced by the new distance:

A slight tug was enough to get it to fit. It doesn't seem to be overly strained, either, so I guess it's okay.

There is another wire that goes on that post, but it needs to have a terminal attached to it. This resulted in a quandary: which of these terminals is the ES 324082? Both fit on the post, and both fit the wire, although the red one fits it very loosely and the blue one fits it very tightly.

I opted for the red one for the most critical of reasons: the blue would have clashed with all of the other red terminals.

There it is, all attached and ready to go:

Well, not quite. There's another odd combination that gets separated out:

It plugs into the almost-hidden spade at the bottom of the starter relay:

Done? Not quite. There's one more, and it requires that a bolt be removed and replaced on the starter relay:

There! All done and ready to mount the engine.

Well.... no. A wise man shared with me that it is much easier to install the oil cooler assembly and the cockpit heater cable before the engine gets mounted. "Easier" doesn't mean "easy," as we all know, but we still take "easier" whenever we can get it!

The relay race

2011-12-31T17:29:00.004-05:00

On the plus side, I have a borrowed engine hoist in the shop, delivered courtesy of a fine gentlemen who lives in the next county over. Brought it right to the hangar door, by golly, and unloaded it too. You meet the nicest class of people in the flying game... usually. More on that later.

The hoist is on loan for an indefinite period, but as it is a vital tool in the donor's work, I don't want to have it around any longer than I need to. Unfortunately, I'm still not sure how long I'll need it given the two steps forward, two steps back nature of the jobs I'm slogging through.

You may remember that I was in need of an adapter plate to adjust for a change in the spacing in the firewall holes that the starter relay mounts to, and after (not) convincing the doubtful Mr. Ken S. at Van's that I had not, in fact, already received said adapter in the past, one was sent.

I waited more than a week for its arrival.

In the intervening days I heard from a number of other builders that told me that they too had to run the Gauntlet of Cynical Doubt in order to acquire the part, and that the part in question presented other difficulties in the area of fit. In other words, "I have the new version firewall also and had the same issue. The Vans transfer plate pushed the starter contactor into the rudder support bracket, about a 1/4 inch lower then the position in your photo."

Well, the part arrived via US Turtle Express this afternoon and, with the clock ticking on the hoist rental, I wasted no time in getting out to the hangar to get it installed. And sure enough, the positioning of it put the relay solidly in metal-to-metal contact with the brace beneath it:

A situation like this could lead to no end of future problems such as electrical noise being generated as the relay rubs against the brace or damage to the relay as it wears its protective case away against the more rigid brace. The solution to this problem was the same as the solution to nearly all of life's little problems: if duct tape can't fix it, a Dremel tool can.

Now there's a nice little gap where there used to be inappropriate contact.

With the relay mounted, I was able to move onto the next step: remove the panel cover. Not easy, that, since it was still covered with obdurate duct tape that insisted on leaving a nasty residue when removed, right up until the moment when Cadillac Pete, expert in all manner of adhesive recalcitrance problems, suggested heating the tape with a heat gun. That worked like a charm! Once removed, I was unsure where to store the screws so that (brace yourselves!) I wouldn't lose them. Pete had another fine suggestion: take a picture of where they're stowed.

The reason that the cover had to be removed is that Van's assumes that the avionics are installed by this time. However, as we're still firmly stuck in Skyview purgatory, no avionics have been installed in my, or anyone else's for that matter, RV-12 since spring of last year. Still, there's nothing stopping me from getting the wiring harnesses in place.

Then it was time to install the fuel pressure sensor. See if you can find the problem here:

That's right: I have the plans and hardware for the new Skyview sensor, but when it comes to the sensor itself, I have the older model. That will require another call to Van's to rectify. I swear, if that guy accuses me of losing the new one that they already sent me....

I decided that I'd move onto the next step which was to draw another set of wires through the firewall. These wires were supposed to go through a pair of cushion clamps mounted to the engine mount standoff. The only problem was that I did not have those clamps installed, nor could I find the step in the plans where I was supposed to install them.

As I was puzzling over that, Pete stepped to the hangar door to see what type of aircraft was taxiing by. It turned out to be the big Piper Aztec that hangars next door to me. That was bad news as my hangar door was hanging wide open and the pilot of that particular airplane uses a lot of throttle on the left engine to get the plane to turn in front of his hangar. This causes a hurricane of sand, gravel, dead worms, and anything else laying on the taxiway to blow into my hangar. It also causes everything in my hangar to blow around. I ran to the door to bring it down. As it was just five seconds from being closed, I thought I had it made.

Wrong.

Too impatient to wait those last five seconds, Hurricane Jack(ass) hit us with nearly full throttle.

I was not happy.

I figured that was as good of a time as any to call it a day.

Not that it will do any good, but on my way out I reminded Windy that the way he makes his turn "makes a hell of a mess in my hangar, and if he could just wait a few seconds for me to finish getting the door down..."

I didn't bother mentioning how little I enjoy it when he sandblasts my car; I suspect he knows and simply doesn't care.

Usually you meet the nicest class of people in the flying game...

I HATE banjos...

2011-12-30T13:50:00.005-05:00

I didn't used to, though. Dueling Banjos? Loved it. That was then, this is now - I'll never be able to listen to it again.

Why? Well, it's all because someone, possibly at Rotax, possibly at Van's, decided that the bolts that act as some kind of fuel line crossing guard look like banjos and should be referred to as Banjo bolts. That in and of itself would not be sufficient to induce my ire; no, I find them rebarbative solely because of the nature of the work on them that I did today.

I'm getting ahead of the narrative, though, so let's start at the beginning. I've spent the last couple of days making repeated trips to the hangar and to Harbor Freight (The Home of Un-Pawnable Tools*) in order to gather up the tools required for the installation of the carburetor drip trays. These seemed easy enough but I underestimated the dependency that I have on the tools that are normally available to me at the hangar, and just how many different metric sized tools that would be required.

Finally ready to go, I started on them this morning after one final trip to the hangar for a #40 drill bit (the pre-drilled rivet holes on the trays didn't align very well at all) and a handful of clecos. As it turns out, I grabbed the wrong size clecos, but fortunately I didn't really need them. The trays get four AN4263-3 rivets each, but none of that size are supplied with the engine kit. AN4263-3.5 worked fine. The trays also require a little filling in the corners to prevent any fuel that may drip onto them from leaking out - that was easily accomplished.

That was the easy part. The next steps involve removing the carburetors (one at a time; I started with the left side) and the rubber flanges that hold them onto the engine. This is all started by removing a spring that apparently keeps the carbs from moving around too much given they they are housed in flexible rubber flanges. It was somewhat hard to get the spring off of the little clamp it was attached to, but I consoled myself with the hard-earned knowledge that it would be even harder to put back on. That's just the way these things work, I've learned.

The next step is easy (no, really!) - it's just a phillips head screw that needs to be loosened. You can (and should) loosen it up quite a bit - the screw is captive in the clamp so you don't have to worry about it coming all the way out.

Once the screw/clamp is loose, it's just a matter of rotating and rocking the carb around to get it loose enough to pull out of the flange.

Next, Van's suggests removing the retaining nut behind the cushion clamp that holds the fuel line. If this looks impossible, that would be because it is impossible.

I found it easier to just wiggle a wrench (11mm) back in there to get as much grip on it as possible and use a 14mm socket to remove the bolt. The bolt comes out in the next step anyway, so you might as well just do it now.

When the flange is off, check to make sure that the O-rings are still in place on the engine and in the flange.

The drip trays fit right in. Replacing the clamp was easy; I just used the indentations in the sides where the bolts pass through to align the clamp appropriately.

It all went back together pretty much in way it came apart: the nut was hard to get at and the spring was a real stretch (heh!) to get back on. And, believe it or not, the other side was actually harder. The big ignition module black box gets in the way. Still, I think it was an hour or so to finish both sides.

Then it was on to the banjo bolts. The goal here is to remove the thingy on the top with the black rubber cover over it, remove some kind of restrictor thingy inside the top bolt, and turn the whole remaining mess upside down. Of the three tasks, it is the third that set me against banjos forever.

The assembly is mounted on an aluminum tube, so any torque applied to the banjo bolts needs a countervailing torque applied too in order to keep from bending/crimping/cracking the aluminum tube. So, armed with two metric wrenches working in opposition, I loosened the first bolt.

I removed the black-covered nipple thingy and set it aside. I finger tightened the bolt back in just to keep track of it and the two washers that had sandwiched the nipple thingy.

The bottom bolt holds two hoses. Here's one of them:

The other hose supported by the bottom bolt doesn't move very much - it's still staying in position under the banjo assembly. There is an allen head bolt on top that gets loosened in order to rotate the assembly upside-down. I loosened it and turned everything over, trying to keep it in the same relative position on the aluminum tube.

Before putting it all back together, I had to take the top bolt back out and remove the little restrictor device.

It was in there pretty tight, so I had to hold the bolt with a wrench while I used a small screwdriver to remove the brass restrictor.

When I tried to put it all back together, I followed Van's order of business, which was to tighten the allen head bolt first. That didn't work out. Van's kind of subtly warns that the fuel lines might not line up very well anymore; this, as it turns out, isn't a possibility; it is a certainty. As such, I found it worked better to leave the allen head bolt loose while trying to get the fuel lines back in place. Because...

Remember how I said that one of the hoses doesn't move very far away from where it was when the bottom bolt was removed? Well, that's because it doesn't want to. It very much doesn't want to. Getting the two hoses lined up with the newly located bolt hole while not dropping any of the washers or cross-threading the bolt was enormously difficult, and it would have been more so had I not been able to move the mounting block easily along the aluminum tube. My advice: get the bolt started, then go back and tighten the allen head bolt. Even done in that order, you'll find it hard to get good tool access to both the allen head and the other bolt. How you're expected to use a torque wrench is beyond me.

The only way I could get the allen head tightened up was to use the allen head socket and a wrench:

It took quite awhile to get it all back together, but it was a perfect opportunity to re-learn a couple of valuable lessons:

- coffee will help you think more clearly, but any benefit from that is lost to nervous, twitchy hands.
- it is better that I write about this stuff than record it on video; the language used to encourage hardware to comply with my wishes would result in an R rating.

* We stopped in at a local pawn shop yesterday on impulse, what with our being somewhat curious as to what we'd find after watching numerous episodes of Pawn Stars on the History Channel (oddly enough, unless you consider that a lot of the items they get are of historical significance). While we were there, a guy came in wanting to pawn a bunch of Harbor Freight tools and the pawn guy didn't even want to look at them.

"We don't buy those," he said.

Two steps forward, one step back

2011-12-29T09:37:00.001-05:00

It's a truism in building an airplane that the harder something is to fit/fabricate/install, the sooner it will have to be removed. Normally that's quite a downer, but in the case of the cooling shroud it wasn't so bad since I needed to remove it and patch it. Because of that, "Now remove the cooling shroud and set it aside" was just fine by me, albeit while being fully aware that there would be no immediate setting aside.

The patching job was straightforward and, other than the typical hassles that come with messing around with smelly, sticky resin and fiberglass cloth that's ever eager to shed threads, it went well. It required a half dozen more round trips on and off of the engine to get it trimmed properly, but the result looks okay.

The reasons that the shroud needed to be temporarily removed were primarily to mark its location on the top of the engine to show where the RTV (high temp tolerent goop to seal the edge of the shroud to the engine surface) needed to go, and to make plenty of room for the installation of the engine mount that will mate the engine to the firewall.

For that mount mounting to happen, a few other things had to be moved out of the way, starting with the four coolant hoses. The clown at Van's that was responsible for such comedy gold as "metric Crescent wrench" and some of the meaner little practical jokes (the longerons in general come to mind, metric Crescent wrench included) must have been on vacation the day that these particular instructions were written because the plans clearly warn us that there might just be some coolant left in the hoses from when the factory did the test run of the engine. It must have killed him to let an opportunity like this slide past....

Forewarned, I put a catch tray under the hoses before starting the removal of the clamps.

It's good that I did!

As I worked on these clamps, I soon realized that The Van's Joker hadn't taken a vacation after all. Rather, knowing what a royal pain these clamps are to deal with, he came up with an even more diabolical joke: "Remove the clamps and push them forward off of the hoses to allow the hoses to be removed.". Or something like that; I'm paraphrasing from memory. In any event, those clamps are very difficult to work with, at least without the special tool that surely must exist. Even on the rare occasions when I could get a decent enough grip on one of them to loosen it enough to move it, the area between the end of the hose and an inconvenient bend in the pipe was too small for the clamp to move completely into, leaving a corner of the hose still clamped. In one case, I had to remove the far end of the hose too in order to get enough slack in the hose to remove it from the pump end.

It was later, when I was trying to put the hoses back on, that I realized for sure (I already strongly suspected) that the whole thing would have been much easier if I had slid the clamps back onto the hoses rather than forward onto the pipes.

Ha ha, Van's, you got me on this one!

Literally got me, that is: it is possible (likely, even) that at least once when a clamp snaps loose from the inferior tool in use, the ostensible fancy purpose-built tool probably not available to us mere mortals, it will catch a small fold if your fingertip, resulting in a nice, livid blood blister on your finger.

Here at home, we now call that "the 'OUCH' heard around the block!"

It was the upper left hose (looking at it from behind the engine) that needed both ends removed:

With the hoses finally off, it was back to safer work like removing a big, long, seriously important looking bolt. Van's, perhaps realizing that we wouldn't be in the greatest mood at this point, uncharacteristically tells us why this bolt is being removed: it will be used to hold the engine mount.

Here's a hint: you know something is going to be a frustratingly tight fit when an entire step is devoted to applying a protective layer of tape to the part first:

Further foreshadowing of the difficulty ahead: another entire step that has us removing the powder coat from the areas that will need to fit in a tight space. Although, I suppose, this could also be required to provide a firmer fit or a better electrical ground. Either way, it turns out that my fancy new sander was up to the task.

And, for any remaining optimists, step-by-step instructions for getting the part to fit, complete with a "it will fit if you do it like we tell you to" admonishment.

Like so:

Start at the lower left, fitting the mount around the lower coolant hoses:

Fit the upper right around the ignition module:

And it will now align with the bolt holes.

Unless....

...like me, you found the packing braces to be a good way to support the engine while its sitting on the work bench, so didn't remove them:

Which will now be hard to do without an awkwardly positioned allen head wrench slipping as the bolt breaks loose, leading to a nasty cut on your inside wrist. Trust me on this one.

Once the braces are gone (and the bleeding stopped), the mount does, in fact, slide into place nicely.

There are four bolts that mount the mount to the engine. I remember reading about these bolts a couple of years ago; there was a big problem with people finding that they had worked loose, in many cases with all four having backed significantly out of the holes. That justifiably scared the beans out of those involved; an engine separating in flight is no different than the airframe falling apart in flight: 100% fatal. So, extra caution required here, over and above the routine high degree of care one uses when building a contrivance such as an airplane that one intends to fly in his very own self.

The plans don't include the all-important torque value, instead having you go try to find them yourself in the Rotax documentation. I'll save you the prolonged search: 26 - 30 foot-pounds. The upshot of the lengthy discussion around how to keep these bolts in place came down to two camps: use some blue LocTite, or buy some fancy wedged lock washers. I used LocTite.

I also marked each bolt with torque lock; this will show at a glance whether or not a bolt has moved.

Once the mount is bolted in, the RTV can be squeezed along the marked lines and the cooling shroud can be re-installed for the final time.

Once the RTV has set up, the coolant hoses can be replaced on the pump. Remember, it is easier to put the clamp on the hose, get a good tight grip on it to open it as much as possible, then slide the hose and clamp over the pipe together. Also note that, as always, 'easier' does not mean 'easy.'

A Fitting Result

2011-12-25T09:27:00.005-05:00

It's just after 8:30 am Christmas morning and, very unlike the years when Co-pilot Egg couldn't sleep because she was so wound up over the thought of a passel of gifts under the tree, I am the only one up. Even the dogs who, in the vernacular of the household have "been and had" (been outside, had their morning Milkbones), are curled up and sleeping.

There are no presents under the tree for me, what with my having started utilizing my new K-cup coffee maker more than a month ago, but I still eagerly await the gift opening. I'm not sure why; it's not as if young Egg will be surprised by anything. The only thing we got for her that we thought would be completely unexpected is a new set of beads to hang in front of her bedroom door (her only nod to any form of impending teenage hippy-tude) which she correctly guessed within two seconds of picking up and shaking the wrapped package. Why she can't be that deeply intuitive about something important like, say, statistics is beyond me.

The CEO of Schmetterling Aviation will be visiting today, along with the corporate office's CFO and it is always nice to have progress to show on The Project. I thought having the Shroud of Culin fitted and mounted would be, well, a fitting tribute.

But first.... I had to excise the superfluous grounding lug from the starter motor. I had spent a little time wondering if the removal of the lug was one of those silly weight saving things Van's does now and then, but those are typically called out as being optional. This job was not. I finally realized that the lug has to go because it might interfere with the fit of the motor mount. I'll find out for sure soon enough, but for now it doesn't really matter. Van's says "amputate," I say "Gimme a saw."

Or, as in this case, "Where's that Dremel?"

The cutting disk on the Dremel wasn't beefy enough to do it in one cut; I ended up making multiple passes at it, each pass cutting slightly deeper than the one before. When the trench got too deep for the ever-decreasing diameter of the apparently ablative cutting disk, I resorted to finishing it off with a hacksaw.

The starting step of fitting the Shroud of Culin (just in case you still don't get the pun, read here) is to mark it in a way that will show that the fitting is done.

This process involves two disjointed hands. Well, it requires three, actually, but two is what I have.

The horizontal line on the top is the measurement line. When the shroud is correctly fitted, it will be flush with the top fins of the cylinders. The line inside is traced along the almost invisible scribe lines molded into the shroud. No mention is made of them in the plans, but I thought that it might be helpful to see where they are, just in case they might end up being useful.

I took a swag at where the first cuts should be.

After the first cut, it was apparent that I'd have to do a lot more cutting. In fact, it looked like the scribe lines might be a useful place to start.

I didn't go straight to the scribe lines, but after a few tentative approaches I found that the scribe lines were pretty accurate. There were a few spots where the lines didn't show - for those I used trial and error. Quite a few times, as it turns out. Test positioning the shroud on the engine before I got the trimming done resulted in the shroud getting well and truly stuck in place more than a few times. Eventually, though, I got it to fit.

There was one corner of the raw, unmolested shroud that was just resin with no underlying fiberglass. I managed to cut too deeply into that area (without the cloth, it looked like an area that should be cut out) and it will need to be repaired. The tolerance provided in the plans only allows for a 3/16" gap and I created one that's more like a half inch. I need to mix up another batch of epoxy for another smoothing coat on the canopy, so I'll just add a little piece of fiberglass cloth back over the spot that I cut too deeply. That's the thing about fiberglass: you can always add some back!

A short day

2011-12-23T12:12:00.030-05:00

I was skipping ahead when I started into the deconstruction and (ostensible) reconstruction of the engine - there's actually some on-airplane work to do before that. This on-airplane work involves the installation of the electrical and electronic components that support the engine. The complexity of the components runs a century-wide gamut, from the stone-age starter relay all the way up to the solid state manifold pressure sensor for the Dynon computerized engine management display.

Today, though, it matters not how complex the innards of the components are; they all get bolted to the firewall the same way. How hard could that be? [Ominous foreshadowing organ music here...]

The weather was in the low 40's, which is cold in my current pre-acclimated state, but will soon be considered balmy. Once we spend a few months in the 20's, the 40's are going to feel great! I figured I'd have Pete come down and we'd get all of these pieces/parts installed before the weather realizes that it's officially winter now.

The electrical cycle starts at the power source which in this case is an Odyssey gel cell. Put it in the box and bolt it down:

Then the master relay gets bolted in. Two bolts, two washers, done. Nothing instills what will ultimately be proven to be a false sense of confidence like a part that fits right in, no pushing, shoving, trimming, tweaking, or swearing required.

The starter relay looked at first glance to be just as easy, albeit with slightly smaller bolts. Such was not the case: the holes don't align. The hole spacing on the relay is 1 11/16", the hole spacing on the firewall (mine, anyway) firewall is 1 7/16":

This was a real poser, but fortunately Van's tech support was open - I made my first ever call to them to get this resolved. This turns out to be a well-known problem. So well-known, in fact, that the tech person at Van's was shocked, shocked that I was just now tripping over it. Solved years ago, it was, through the expedient of mailing out an adapter plate and a sheet of instructions for everyone that they determined needed it.

I don't think I ever received one. I told him that, but I get the feeling that he didn't believe me. He could be right, of course, given my propensity for losing things that I sock away in the interest of "not losing them." Either way, there's one in the mail now. One of the things Van's is really good about is sending replacement stuff quickly (and at their cost!) when things like this come up.

Not that there's any rush; the lack of the adapter plate didn't really require that we stop work, but I was already getting cold, having failed to dress appropriately to the season, and was quite happy to call it a day after only an hour. I did go ahead and install the engine ground wires. I was more than a little surprised to see a wire this critical to the operation of, well, just about everything attached with a tiny little bolt and an even tinier nut, hidden well behind what will soon be a large oil tank. I was very surprised that a nutplate wasn't used, given the inaccessibility of the location. I hope I never have to remove this thing! It's possible (or likely, even) that a nutplate wouldn't provide a good enough ground.

Here is the instruction page for the adapter:

The Shroud of Culin

2011-12-22T13:02:00.003-05:00

Or "The Shroud of Cooling," to be precise.

So, what's the first thing that you expect to do when you receive a brand new, $20-some thousand dollar engine? Well, "tear it apart" probably wasn't your first thought.

Mine either.

But when it comes to this, Van's gets to decide 'if', I only have a say on 'when.'

It starts out easily enough: check the 'clocking' on the water inlet fitting at the rear/bottom of the engine and re-position it if needed.

It needed. But it was a piece of cake.

Then a small harness retaining clamp behind a black box called "the ignition module" is removed and the connectors that attach the wire harness to the module are separated.

The first part of this separation involves disjoining the connectors from a metal bracket. It took me awhile to figure out where to apply the blade of the small screwdriver that I was using and in which direction to pry, but once I figured it out the connectors came off easily.

Then the halves of the connectors are separated. Again, once I figured out how to position the blade, it only took a somewhat-more-than-light tug to part them. I wasn't sure if all four of the connectors needed to be parted, so I stopped after the most obvious two. Those are the connectors that Van's had me mark as A1 and B1. So far it seems as if I made the right decision.

The eight spark plug leads are then removed from the spark plugs. They aren't screwed on like they are on a traditional aircraft engine - just tug them off. I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to get them back to their correct spark plugs later, but it turns out that they are plainly marked.

Once they were off, I was instructed to "Pull the lower harness (it should say 'harnesses') as far up between the cylinders as possible." A reason wasn't given, but it becomes apparent later. A combination of pulling on them from above and pushing on them from below got them snugged up into the gap between the cylinders.

Jumping back to the back of the engine, the next step was to remove two cushioned clamps and a spacer, throw away the smaller clamp, the spacer, and the allen screw that was holding them in and replace just the larger clamp using a new spacer and screw. The original lock washer is kept too.

Once that's done, we have to check the gap between "the trigger coil and the trigger cam."

Yeah, I don't know what that means either. For the curious, Van's suggests searching through the Rotax manuals for more info; I decided to just do it. The triggers in question reside behind a plastic cover held in place with three (metric, of course, much to the chagrin of your xenophobic correspondent) bolts.

As luck would have it, the trigger cam was not aligned with the trigger coil.

Putting them in alignment requires turning the crankshaft, and said turning is made easier by removing a spark plug from each cylinder. The ~~fancy~~ looks-like-something-Harbor Freight-wouldn't-even-give-away-free spark plug removal tool provided by Rotax makes this possible, but not easy.

The crankshaft is turned by placing a couple of bolts in the prop hub and using leverage applied via a BFS to turn the crank.

At which point it's easy to ensure the minimum .012" gap (odd that the measurement was provided in inches rather then millimeters - I haven't looked to see if Van's translated for me) and that a .017" feeler won't fit, proving that the gap meets the .012" - .016" tolerance.

I checked the other one too, but I'm not sure that was required. Van's was a little slopped in their pluralities in this instance.

After that brief diversion, it's back to removing the ignition module. This time there are two bolts to be removed. The first is up on top and easy to find/get at. The second is a little trickier - the bolt is impossible to get at, so we remove the retaining nut (only slightly less hard to get at) instead.

Before:

After:

This is when it really started getting scary. The eight screws that attach the intake manifolds had to be removed.

The Harbor Freight allen wrenches came in handy for this. One of the screws was in pretty tight (and there some that weren't tight at all - odd, that) so I used the 'Oomphh' setting on the wrench.

You have to keep a keen eye on these O-rings! One stayed in place, one went with the manifold, and two of them split the difference.

Van's suggests using a cardboard box to support everything as the detached manifold and its pair of carburetors gets lifted forward over the top of the gearbox:

I couldn't get it to even go that far.

The problem was that it was tie-wrapped to the water hoses underneath:

Tie wraps are cheap and easy to replace, so I thought about cutting them, but a glance ahead showed that the problem would soon be mooted by the removal of eight screws, two of which are shown here:

This was made easier by the 'finesse' setting on the allen wrench:

The ball-end lets the wrench work from an angle:

Once the entire top-of-engine assembly was loose, I was able to clear off the top of the engine.

All that was left to do was put a locator mark on this bracket so that it can be returned to the same position:

Use the 'Oomphh' setting to loosen the bolt, then turn the bracket 180 degrees:

Damn! I marked the wrong spot!!

At this point, it seemed that the scary stuff was done.

Ha, not by half!!

The next step was to mark one of the grounding lugs on the starter motor to that it could be cut off!!! I spent a looonnngggg time looking at the drawing:

The superfluous lower mark was just the mark I made to identify the correct appendage for amputation, having not forgotten the incident that resulted in the end of my career in Sports Medicine:

There, now the top of the engine is completely bared:

"Why," you ask? Why does all of that stuff have to be removed?

Well, look back to the title of this post. For our next trick, we're going to fit and attach a cooling shroud!

Well, that's not entirely true; first I need to work up the nerve to cut that grounding lug off of the starter motor.

Karmic Malfeasance

2011-12-20T12:13:00.003-05:00

Everything was going so well, too.

That's why I was worried.

The furnace is chugging right along and my concerns over another relapse were waning. I'm banking the $300 or so that a professional would have charged. I'm off of the paying job for another fourteen days, and as of yesterday I have an RV-12 powerplant kit in my basement, willing and ready for the lengthy installation process to begin. The timing of the delivery couldn't have been better, and the assistance from Cadillac Pete and his son Warthog made the normally onerous task of breaking down the package and moving all of the pieces/parts to the subterranean assembly shop almost enjoyable. The pizza and beer that followed put the whole thing over the top, well into "truly enjoyable" range.

With things going that well, it came as no surprise when co-pilot Egg came to be with a problem. Her laptop computer, her pride and joy, her non-sentient yet well-loved baby, her very reason to exist (yeah, teenage girl = drama) had rolled over and died. Bought the farm. Met its maker. Gone to its final resting place. Her laptop, sad to say, is now pushing up daisies. And only 366 days into its one year warranty, too. What are the odds??

For some reason, she thought that I could fix it. What an amazing reversal from the girl that was convinced that not only could I not fix the furnace, but was also more than likely going to blow the entire neighborhood to smithereens in the effort.

Still, I am an IT Director, and people may be forgiven for thinking that a lofty title like that makes me all-powerful in the ways of computers. That, and a nerdy demeanor. And there are a few things that can be tried, after all. The most common cause of the type of mid-flight death she had experienced is droppage, but in this case I thought that it was more likely the second most common cause: a dead hard drive.

One of the nice things about laptops is how accessible the parts are, so I went through the normal routine of removing and re-seating the memory cards and hard drive. No luck. I invoked the built-in 'restore' function, which completely lived down to all previous experiences I've had with those, which is to say, it failed.

The next reasonable step is to start replacing parts, but without knowing the exact cause of the premature demise, it quickly can get expensive to troubleshoot via Visa card. Still, BestBuy.com listed a $69 replacement hard drive, and furthermore assured me that the local retail outlet had one in stock if I was willing to brave the just-a-few-days-before-Christmas retail frenzy. It was early in the day, though, so I thought it might be worth a try.

There were none of the $69 drives to be found.

A recent run on them from other people that bought the same laptop 366 days ago, I presume.

They did have a $100 variant that I could try, but to do so would be placing a 25% wager (of the cost of a brand new laptop) that the new drive would actually fix the problem. That's a steep bet. I decided to just bite the bullet and buy a new laptop, albeit one of a different brand.

Ah, just the thing! A nice Samsung, marked down from $579 to $429. Good enough!

I waved down one of the plentiful PFBS (pimple-faced blue shirts) to make the sale. "Nice choice, Sir!" he gushed. And then came the up-sell.

"You know, these manufacturers put all kinds of stuff on there that you don't need and it just slows them down. We'll open it up, test it, and remove all of that stuff for just $159."

Uh, no. Not interested. In my defense, I was still a little testy over the non-existent hard drive and the impending re-balancing of my Karmic (and literal, for that matter) bank account(s), so I wasn't really in the mood for the hard sell.

"Listen, I'm an IT Director. I bought my first computer thirty-five years ago. I know how to remove extraneous crap from computers. No thanks."

I don't often play the IT Director card, and for good reason. No one cares. But in this case, I think it short-circuited what surely would have been five more minutes of trying to sell me on this "valuable service."

The reason for the obdurate failure to take no for an answer soon became apparent.

I grabbed one of the two boxes underneath the display model.

"Oh, those have already had it done," he told me.

"Ah, I see. Well, I'll wait here while you go find an unmolested one for me," I replied.

"Well, there's a problem with that. These are the last two we have."

This is when I put on my best IT Director face and said, "Well, I want this laptop, and I want it at this advertised price. Feel free to put all of the stuff that you removed back on there, if it helps." The finger that thirty years ago would have been poking him in his sternum was instead forcefully poking at the advertised price card on the shelf.

A pause ensued.

"I'll check with my manager, but I think we can give you one of these at that price."

"You damn betcha you can!" I didn't say, but it was a near thing.

So, a holiday disaster averted (poor little Egg would have been devastated at the loss of her trusted Japanese companion - I hope she can accept a Korean replacement) and Karmic balance restored, for whatever that's worth. Now I can (hopefully) shift my attention to the engine waiting patiently in my basement.

Which came in a big box:

Which contained another big box:

And a cardboard box full of all kinds of interesting things:

I let Pete deal with the precision Austrian-engineered box in his inimitably precise manner:

Our first glance at the treasure within:

There she is, proud and tall:

The propeller blades are works of art:

This is the cooling shroud. I've been reading ahead in the plans; the entire top of the engine has to be removed to install it:

Hoses!

Throttle and choke cables:

A ludicrous tool kit:

This is the P36-esque spinner. The hole in the middle is for the pitot tube, not a cannon as it was on the P39:

The muffler:

The mount:

Wiring?? No one said there was going to be more wiring!

The oil tank:

Two radiators - one for water/glycol, the other for oil:

And, as always, plenty of little metal bits.

First step: inventory.

Warm and snug

2011-12-17T09:25:00.001-05:00

I'm currently sitting warm and snug here in my La-Z-Boy(tm) recliner, basking in the glow emanating from the fireplace at my side. I don't really need the fire, but young Cabot Bennett, himself being a rather thin-haired dog, seems to appreciate it. As he is the only family member willing to get up this early in the morning to provide me with familial companionship, I'm more than happy to provide him with a fire. Really, since it's as simple as pressing a button to light off the propane-fueled fire, why not? If only our other propane-fueled heating device was as easy and reliable....

Yes, I'm still embroiled in a heated (heh!) battle with the furnace, although I think I may finally have won. You may remember that I needed to replace the igniter. Well, that was one of those odd and frustrating situations I seem to get into a lot where more than one thing will break within a brief enough time period to make it look like said breakages are related. The failure of the igniter actually occurred during the time that I was trying to figure out why the furnace was starting only reluctantly. We would hear the flames light off, but the furnace would shut itself down soon thereafter. Then it got to the point where it wouldn't light at all unless I went down to the basement and used a lighter to get it going. That resulted in the aforementioned replacement of the igniter.

While still strutting around like the cock of the roost, all puffed up over having fixed the furnace all by my lonesome, there was a nagging thought at the back of my mind (having been put there by the co-owner, who was not blinded to the possibility that the original problem might still exist in the way I was by virtue of a pocket load of self-satisfaction) that perhaps all was still not well with the heater. Once I got over my inebriating (yet inappropriate as it turns out) buzz of self-congratulation, I was able to see for myself that the job was not quite done.

Fortunately (well, in a way) I have seen a similar problem before. We once paid a repairman to come fix our hot water heater which was exhibiting the same symptoms. When he had made the repair in something like 13 seconds, I was naturally as curious as I was irked, considering that his amortized hourly rate for the repair worked out to the same rate charged by a mediocre neurosurgeon. When queried, we found that all that needed to be done was the cleaning of the thermocouple that tells the computer that the flame is lit. It apparently gets gunked up with some residue from the burning propane. The computer can't tell that the flame is lit, and in an exercise of appropriate caution, it assumes that gas is simply flowing unabated into the room, thereby creating a rather large bomb.

Good thinking, that.

So, all I needed to do was to determine if there is a similar functionality built into the furnace. My steadfast pal Google knew that, and was also immediately forthcoming with an answer as to how to find the probe. "Look to the flame jet furthest away from the igniter," he said, "and there you should see a single electrical wire. Attached to that will be the part you seek.". And true to the word of the Amazing Mr. Google, there it was! It took awhile to figure out how to remove it for cleaning, but as with many magic tricks, it's easy once you figure out how it's done. A quick cleaning with a Scotchbrite pad and voila, the flames remained lit when the furnace was restarted. Self-confidence restored, and another couple of hundred dollars saved!

Except...

It seems that the problem remained. Not as often as before, but it still seemed that there were times when the furnace would not be able to get a good, solid start. "Well," thought I, "clearly I was in the right church but simply occupying the wrong pew. The thermocouple must be worn out. Tired. Over the hill. One foot in the grave, and all that. It should be replaced!"

Well, it's been getting quite chilly in our neck of the continent, so time was again of the essence. I needed to get a new flame sensor installed, post haste. Patience, in this case, would not be scored as a virtue if we all ended up shivering under blankets, huddled around the biggest burner on the cooktop because the furnace was defunct. So, there I was at work, perched painfully upon the sharp horns of a dilemma: how could I order the replacement part without knowing the exact model number of the furnace? Eh, let's be perfectly honest: I didn't know any of the model number. I knew only that the manufacturer was Goodman. The model number, as it turns out, is safely ensconced inside the furnace itself so as to protect it from being seen by mere mortals or DIY furnace repairmen. Or, for that matter, the eyes of the co-owner who, while more than happy to go down and take a look at my request, simply hadn't the time to disassemble the furnace in search of the requisite identifiers. Pressing engagements elsewhere, unfortunately.

Not to worry, for Mr. Google is available to me wherever I may be, thanks be to The Cloud. And how hard could it be to pick the right part from a list, really, what with my having just recently laid hands upon the part in question and theoretically therefore be capable of identifying it on sight?

Google returned the location of an online purveyor who would be thrilled to send me the $15 part overnight for the princely sum of $39.99. And we all know how much I enjoy paying nearly 300% of the cost of a part for shipping. You know, like I have to do now and then when ordering from Van's. Nothing for it, though, so I figured I'd identify the part and get it ordered early enough in the day to meet the overnight-shipping deadline.

It turned out that there were only two choices:

The first choice only listed a handful of matching model numbers, while the second choice had a list a mile long. That was moot, though, since the first choice showed some kind of double-probe configuration, while the second choice showed the single-probe style that I remembered from my few brief moments of cleaning the part. No brainer: it must be the latter part. As painful as it was to spend $51 on a $15 part, I placed the order.

A few hours later, I received a message from the co-owner who, having returned from her errands, had gone down to the basement, removed the front panel of the furnace (no mean feat, that!) and recorded the model number. Figuring that it may be better to be safe than sorry, I returned to the web site only to find the model number listed under the first part, which seemed more than a little unlikely to me given the extra probe included with that particular part. It was then that I decided to look a little more closely and clicked on the image in the time-honored way of making it larger.

Imagine, if you can, my chagrin:

It wasn't a second probe after all!! It was just a dimension line.

Sigh.

I leapt to the phone to call the vendor to see if it was too late to change my order.

"Hi," I started, figuring that such a warm salutation might engender a feeling of helpfulness,
"I have a bit of a problem with a part that I ordered online this morning. I've ordered the wrong part and I'm hoping that I can get it corrected before you ship it out."

I gave the guy the order number, to which he replied, "Ah, it says here that it's been picked and shipped."

"Oh, drat," I replied. "I don't mind so much the cost of the part - it's wasting the shipping cost that bugs me. The wife's going to be irked - this could mean a night on the couch."

I've found that sharing the threat of spousal disapproval often builds a temporary, yet meaningful bond in situations like this.

"Hold on a minute," he said. There ensued a few moments of delay. When he came back on the line, he told me that he "had caught it was it was going out the door." If I was at the computer, he said I could cancel the order and order the correct part and he'd get it out immediately.

I thanked him profusely to which, in the spirit of the healthy badinage that usually accompanies the spousal disapproval gambit, he asked me precisely how much a night not on the couch was worth to me.

"Well," I told him, "not as much as you'd think; the dog cuddles up real nice."

We shared a laugh, and the new flame sensor arrived early the next day. At this point the furnace has been "fixed" more times than a Chicago election, so it only took a few minutes to install the new part and light off the furnace.

Success!!

For a little while, anyway.

Unlike the Chicago Elections Board, we were now as tightly wound as a golf ball when it came to verifying results. Sure enough, it wasn't long before we heard the three failed attempts to ignite that are the hallmark of a flame sensor problem. At a loss, I was, and ready to call in some professional help. For real, this time, not as a back-up to my attempts. But then I got to thinking....

It seems that the reason that the flame sensor is situated in the jet furthest from the igniter is so that the system can be assured that all of the jets are lit. Perhaps only a few of the jets were lighting off and the flame sensor was not getting any flame at all. What could cause that??

I went and looked at the jets. Each is fed by a brass nipple with a small hole drilled in its center. What if......

I found a suitably sized piece of copper wire left over from when I built the stitch & glue kayak. I used the wire to poke thorough each of the holes, thinking that maybe they were grimed up enough to slow down the initial release of gas.

That seems to have helped. We have had a good 24 hours of solid furnace ignition.

Part of me is sure that won't last.

Hopefully it does, though, because the RV-12 engine is to be delivered Monday. I had considered having it delivered to the hangar given how heavy at least one of the parts is, but I couldn't stand the idea of tearing down the engine (as is required for the installation of a cooling shroud and some carburetor drip trays) out there in the cold, dark hangar when I could just as easily do it in my (ostensibly) warm and well-lit basement. Time will tell if I will someday regret that decision, of course, but for now I look forward to a warm and snug work environment.

Regarding corners

2011-12-10T12:01:00.004-05:00

My discovery of high-end online auto racing came at a very opportune time as I find myself inexorably drifting towards the hostile shores of Boredom Island as I impatiently await the arrival of the RV-12 engine kit. It helps too that I've had some measure of success at it, with the most recent victory surpassing the first in terms of both excitement and satisfaction. The satisfaction comes not only from winning the race but also in no small measure from the fact that this is the first race I've won that didn't require cars in front of me on the track to wreck or spin out. In other words, this was the first race that I won completely on my own merits.

I am the 1%.

The excitement came in the last six laps of the twenty-five lap race. I qualified second, but the pole winner was positioned on the outside of turn one. All I needed was a good enough start to get up next to him and I'd beat him into the first turn and grab the lead. And that is exactly what happened. The next nineteen laps were simply a matter of keeping him a second or so behind me, and as pulse-pounding as those laps were, they were nothing as compared to the finish of the race.

On the nineteenth lap, the guy that had been pushing me from the start must have had a momentary bobble because he was suddenly more than four seconds behind me. Having held him off for more than a dozen laps with him as close as a tenth of a second behind me, I figured it should be a simple matter to cruise through the final six laps to an easy win. I figured that the only things that could derail my victory would be a horrible choke on my part, or an unfortunate encounter with a back marker.

And, as we've all come to expect, merely thinking it was enough to instantiate it. I believe it was only one lap later when a back marker spun right at the apex of a hairpin turn. I can around the turn and plowed right into him. With my nearest competitor only four seconds behind me, there was no time for niceties - I just kept banging on his car until I moved it out of my way. That took just long enough for a car to get caught up with me and pass me as I pushed too hard into the next turn. I resigned myself to a second place finish, but within a lap I had found a weakness in his lap; he was slow into the last turn before the long straight. I leveraged that weakness on the very next lap, but he aggressively moved to block me. Rather than simply fall in line behind him, I braked late and remained on the outside line into the turn at the end of the straight, which allowed me to get up next to him on the inside of the next turn.

All went well for one lap, but on the next lap he got his nose inside of my left rear quarter panel. I couldn't see him there, and by rights he should have dropped back as we entered the turn, but he didn't do so. As I entered the turn, he clipped me and spun me at the apex of the same turn the back marker had balked me in. Luckily, as I spun right in front of him, he tagged me on my left front and turned my car back to the direction I needed to go. Perhaps self-servingly, I took his aggression as a tacit permission to race him a little more roughly than I might normally have done. This amounted to nothing more than a couple bumps against him as I passed him two laps later. After that, it was just a matter of surviving the last two laps.

There. Now that I've provided the narrative, you can see it for yourself in the recording that I made of the race. Note that eighteen of the first nineteen laps have been excised - they'd be pretty boring to watch.

I haven't been completely remiss in my RV-12 work. Here too I concentrated on curves: I sanded down the curved areas on the canopy fairing.

Racing

2011-12-04T20:19:00.000-05:00

I can't honestly say that I have always known that I have racer's blood in the same way that I can quite forthrightly say that I've always known that I was destined to fly, but the memories of the symptoms are still available as I reflect back on what I can recall of my long ago pre-teen years. In the summer, it was home made carts based on scrap wood and retired roller skates. In the winter is was sleds and anything else that would slide on ice or snow. That was all good, clean fun, but I shudder when I reflect on my first years behind the steering wheel of a real car!

I even went through the karting stage when a track opened in Circleville, just a few miles south of Columbus. I learned a few things about racing over the three year period when I was racing karts:

- I'm a middle-of-the pack guy.
- It's a lot of work and very time consuming.
- It can be very frustrating.
- Money matters, and there is no shortage of people that either have more or are able to apportion a large percentage of their disposable to it. And those are not mutually exclusive, either. There were plenty with both.
- Patience is critical, and I hadn't developed it yet.
- If you don't go home tired and bruised, you aren't doing it right.

What finally got me out of kart racing was fear. There is no roll-over protection in a kart, nor are there any restraints to hold the driver into the seat. Frankly, when speaking of the risk elements, kart racing is closer to motorcycle racing than it is to car racing. Fear made me quit racing, but it didn't cure the itch. Every now and then, I'd go off on one of my research binges where I would dig into a particular marque, thinking that just maybe I could get into racing a real car. There are a number of (what appear to be) relatively low cost options:

- Spec Racer Ford

Spec Racer Ford is a class of racing car used in Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) and other series road racing events. The Spec Racer Ford, manufactured and marketed by SCCA Enterprises (a subsidiary of SCCA, Inc.), is a high performance, closed wheel, open cockpit, purpose-built race car intended for paved road courses, such as Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, Buttonwillow Raceway Park, Road America, Watkins Glen, and many other tracks throughout North America. With more than 871 cars manufactured, it is the most successful purpose built road racing car in the United States.

The Spec Racer Ford would be raced at a racetrack like Mid-Ohio, which is only a little more than an hour from home. Cost for a ready-to-race used car would be right around $20,000.

- Legends cars

Legends car racing is a style of race car, designed primarily to promote exciting racing and to keep costs down. The bodyshells are 5/8-scale replicas of American automobiles from the 1930s and 1940s, powered by a Yamaha motorcycle engine. The sanctioning body for Legends car racing is called INEX.
Legends Cars are a "spec" series, meaning all cars are mechanically identical, with the exception of 3 styles of car (Standard coupe, 34 Coupe, and Sedan) available with 10 types of body styles. (New cars are currently offered with only 7 body styles, however many used cars exist with the "older" styles)

Legends cars are raced at the Columbus Motor Speedway, right here in town, and at the Kil-Kare track in Xenia (where the Schmetterling Aviation sponsored NASCAR modified driven by my brother races) about 45 minutes away. A brand new Legends car would cost less than $15,000.

- Formula Vee

Formula Vee is a popular open wheel, single seater junior motor racing formula, with relatively low costs in comparison to Formula Ford or Formula BMW.

On the international stage, Niki Lauda, Emerson Fittipaldi and Keke Rosberg, all Formula 1 champions, raced Formula Vees in Europe or America at the beginning of their careers. In Australia, V8 Supercar drivers Larry Perkins, Colin Bond, John Blanchard, John Bowe, Jason Bargwanna and Paul Stokell were also graduates of Formula Vee.

The class is based on a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, utilizing a collection of the stock parts to form a competitive race car around a purpose-built tube frame and racing tires. The VW engine, transmission, front suspension, brakes and wheels are stock or modified stock parts. The chassis is a tube frame design and the body is fiberglass or carbon fiber. The intention of this class is for the average person to build and maintain the car.

Primarily a class in the Sports Car Club of America many other organizations have adopted the Formula Vee as a class. Over the years, the rules have evolved to improve performance, lower cost, or to allow replacement of discontinued parts.

The Formula Vee would be raced at the same tracks as the Spec Racer Ford. That would mean either racing exclusively at Mid-Ohio, or travelling hundreds of miles for each race. The cost for a Formula Vee car would depend on the vintage - they've been around for a long, long time. A reasonably competitive car would be between $10,000 - $15,000.

So, what's stopping me? Well, it's fear of injury, but not, as you might think, a fear of injuries resulting from racing accidents. No, it's the fear of what the CFO would do to me if I suggested the adoption of another expensive and time-consuming passion. When you factor in the truck and trailer needed to haul the car, storage for the hauler and race car, tools, maintenance costs, safety equipment, tires, and a nearly endless host of other things, the costs would end up exceeding what it costs for me to fly.

Interestingly, with regards to racing this puts me in the exact same position as the thousands of people that lust for flight but are unable to attain it. It is no secret to software developers such as Microsoft that these people will "settle" for a virtual equivalent in large (and profitable) numbers. With more than 10 million copies of Microsoft Flight Simulator sold, an entire industry has sprung up around what is essentially a computer game, albeit an extremely sophisticated one. There are even groups of hobbyists that act as a global air traffic control system, groups that have organized and manage virtual scheduled airlines, and as many physical accouterments to support the simulator as there are for that most gadget-hungry of breeds, golfers.

The (relatively microscopic) equivalent of the Microsoft flight simulator for the Walter Mitty auto racing crowd is iRacing.

iRacing.com is an online, subscription-based racing simulation service for Microsoft Windows created by iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations. In addition to accurately modeled vehicles and tracks, iRacing provides servers on which to race and practice and a sanctioning body to organize and oversee competition within the service.

From the start, iRacing has been marketed as both an entertainment service and a training tool for real life racers. They have established numerous partnerships with real-world racing organizations and series, including NASCAR, GRAND-AM, IndyCar, V8 supercars, the SCCA, the Skip Barber Racing School, the Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup, the Star Mazda Championship and Williams F1 among others.

The service was launched to the public on August 26, 2008. As of December 2010, 40,000 individual member accounts had been created.

The iRacing company aims to cater both to real-world racers and racing simulation enthusiasts by offering a realistic simulation of motorsport with accurate track, vehicle and physics modeling, and with all of the cars and tracks officially licensed. iRacing can only be driven online on servers run by iRacing.com, and participation requires a subscription to the service. The subscription package includes a basic set of 10 tracks and six cars with which to practice and race. Additional cars and tracks are subject to additional one-time charges. Vehicles in iRacing are divided into classes which correspond to the identically named driver license classes, except for the two different Rookie car classes which can both be driven with the same Rookie driver license. iRacing creates each track using proprietary Exactrac laser mapping technology to replicate the tracks with millimeter precision.

It is primarily the subscription model that elevates iRacing from 'game' to 'simulation.' There is no shortage of racing games that have an online component that allows for head-to-head racing mano a mano, but the low acquisition cost of those games and the lack of a sanctioning (managerial) body leads to nothing but anarchy on the tracks. Also, games need to sell in large volume to create a return on investment for the developer, and large numbers of people are not going to be attracted to a high-fidelity racing model because the learning curve is far too steep. There are developers that come close, such as Simbin, but none can afford to dedicate the resources to attaining nearly absolute reality in the way that a well-funded subscription-based organization can.

With iRacing, racers have money on the line even to get into a race. That alone tends to influence good behavior on the track, but iRacing goes a few steps further. Because they know who you are (you pay via Visa or other easily identifiable mechanism), they are able to track your behavior by attaching different categories of 'performance points' to your account. These points display to the world whether you are a dangerous jerk or a safety-minded and/or clean racer. A driver's overall safety rating is used as a measure of ability, and this measure determines which of the racing licenses a driver will hold. Everyone starts in the Rookie class, and (hopefully) progresses through the D, C, B licenses on their way to the coveted A license. The license a driver holds determines which racing series he can enter.

Misbehavior in races results in point penalties. Getting too many penalties can cause a driver to lose his license and be returned to the next lower license. It is very, very easy to get negative points, but much more difficult to get positive points. Negative points are assessed for something as simple as getting a couple of tires off track, and progressively more points can be taken for spinning out or having contact with another car. Note that in the latter case, iRacing makes no attempt to determine blame; it doesn't matter if you hit another car or get hit by another car; all cars in any contact incident get penalized equally. The net result of this kind of value rating is similar to the very polite crowd behavior one sees at a gun show: everyone behaves well because the penalties of not doing so are painful.

Positive points are awarded for finishing well in races, and by "well" I mean "better than someone with a lower handicap." Beating higher handicapped racers doesn't do the trick. The license and points held by a racer are often used to ensure that the racer is entered in races against racers with similar rankings. This is smart in a number of ways. First, it encourages newer, less skilled racers to keep racing since they won't be continually demoralized by losing to vastly more experienced drivers. Conversely, it gets the less experienced drivers out of the way of the veterans who would soon become frustrated at tripping over rookies while in a heated race with peers.

Note that I said "often," though. It is not guaranteed. Races are typically started at top of each hour and, despite the international nature of the participants, there can be times when a starting field is too small to allow for a good balancing of participants. For example, consider a race that has only twenty entrants. I don't know the exact algorithm used, but in this hypothetical case, the iRacing system may throw all twenty cars into the same race which could put A license drivers in the same field as rookies, and every skill level in between. Conversely, if there were sixty or so entrants, iRacing could create six 10-driver fields with each group being more closely aligned in skill and ability.

Pricing starts at $12/month, although generous discounts are available for longer subscription terms. No matter the length of the subscription, all services are available. The subscription cost is just the beginning, though. While the entry-level racer has a garage of six cars and nine available tracks to race on, iRacing's financial goal is to sell access to more cars and tracks. This is accomplished by the formation of racing series that use faster, more advanced cars and race on multiple tracks for each scheduled series season.

The six cars included in the base price are:

Note that three of those should look familiar: the Legends car and the Spec Racer Ford (SRF) are in my bullet list of dream cars detailed above. More importantly, note the presence of the Miata. The Miata is a recent entry to the stable and that, combined with this year's Black Friday price reduction of 50% off of a one year subscription, was enough to entice me to sign up for a year. Also, two of the nine included tracks are Lime Rock Park in Connecticut and the world-renowned Laguna Seca track in California. These two tracks are in my list of top five tracks I would love to race at. The remaining three are Mid-Ohio, Watkins Glen, and Elkhart Lake. Those are available for purchase at $14.95 each, and someday I may consider buying them. For now I am still racing with a D license in the rookie series and the tracks required for those series are all included in the base set.

I started with the Spec Racer Ford at Lime Rock Park, partially because that was the car that was scheduled at Lime Rock first. The other reason was because, of the available tracks, Lime Rock is the one I know best, having driven hundreds upon hundreds of laps there in other racing games. The SRF is a purpose-designed race car so it has a multitude of adjustments that can be made to it, but I thought that given my rookie status it would be best to race with the default settings. It's a well-balanced car, which eventually will be a good thing, but it means that it will also be somewhat unforgiving for people used to the forgiving nature of street cars. In other words, it will spin easily.

In the following video, you will be able to see this propensity for rookies to spin the car. You should also note the following:

- Note that I start 4th, make a pass in the first turn to get to 3rd, then relinquish ten positions rather than lose the points that would have been taken for hitting the car that spun in front of me.
- Note that the guy behind my while going into the first turn in lap three was not as careful.
- See how the steering wheel responds to bumps in the track? I have a force feedback steering wheel that uses electric motors to mimic those forces in the physical world. in other words, I can feel every bump and sway in the track.
- Watch how the shadows shift as I go around the track. Also note the reflections in the glass of the tachometer. Cool!!

What the video can't show you is the affect these realistic elements have on me. For the first lap or two, my pulse is well into the hundreds, my hands are sweaty and shaky, and I'm as twitchy as a Chihuahua on an Espresso binge. By the third or fourth lap I start to settle into a slightly more relaxed posture, but that is not to be confused with "calm." The level of concentration required to just keep the car on the rack is intense; get into a bumper-to-bumper race with another car (or group of cars), and the pulse shoots right back up into the triple digits. The races are lengthy, typically running close to thirty minutes.

It feels like five.

Frankly, this online racing, which to the casual observer would look completely sedentary, is the best cardio workout that I get these days.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for my regular readers, having found the SRF to be too stressful I am now almost exclusively racing the Miata. As I was going through various wild scenarios of ways that I could keep my beloved (yet airbag-less) Miata, I briefly considered re-purposing as a race car because the first step in such a conversion is to remove the air bag. That idea didn't even last as long as the discovery of the leaking head gasket but even if it had, the head gasket problem would have spelled doom to that plan. Anyway, the Miata is much more forgiving than the SRF, but it is certainly still possible to spin it. I find it more common now that I've had a few weeks to practice to not spin out of races, but to just lose positions by not hitting the apexes of the turns correctly and thereby losing enough speed to give an advantage to the guy behind me. That, and slowing down to avoid the shenanigans on the rookies that have yet to learn that you need to slow down to go faster.

Another neat thing is that you can customize your paint job.

This scheme has the red of my old Miata and the blue of my soon-to-be new Mustang.

The concept of slowing down to go faster seems odd, doesn't it? It took me awhile to figure it out. I would look at other driver's lap times at Lime Rock and figure that my average 1:02 would leave me distantly behind those guys doing a minute flat. Such has not turned out to be the case. It seems that they are attaining one fast lap for the record books at the cost of dozens of spins and crashes. It's a tortoise versus the hare kind of thing to a respectable degree. In my most recent race, I qualified sixth in a pack of ten. It was a prime time race, so the entry list was long enough to allow me to be paired with nine other drivers in the D and Rookie classes. Those gridded ahead of me had qualifying time in the 1.00.xxx range, while my mid-pack time was something like 1:02.xxx. I figured on starting and finishing mid-pack based on the qualifying times of those in front of me. As can be seen by this results graph, that was not the case.

I got a good start and was able to pass two or three cars going into the first turn as they failed to slow sufficiently to account for cold tires. I worked my way up to the lead, mostly through mistakes made by the impatient cars in front of me. I eventually made a mistake of my own by ignoring one of my personal rules, which is to not try to improve my racing line while in a race - that's what practice is for. I got a couple of tires in the dirt on the outside of turn one and that caused enough loss of traction to get me all the way off the track and into the dirt. While tenderly working my way back to the track (it takes a deft hand to avoid spinning in the grass), I lost four positions, putting me back to 5th. I worked my way back up to 3rd, but couldn't make up the four seconds that separated me from the car in 3rd. Having re-learned the lesson of patience, I was loath to throw away a pretty good finish by trying to drive beyond my normal pace.

I had resigned myself to a respectable third place finish, but as I came around the fastest turn on the track, I saw my opponent sliding through the grass and impacting a wall at a high enough speed to completely flip his car. I never saw what happened to the car that was in the lead, but he must have spun out too; with two laps to go I was back in the lead. This is when the nerves took over again and I had to really work to remain calm. I actually slowed down a little bit, but as the car behind me started getting bigger in my mirrors, I had to step back up to my previous pace. Despite the sweaty hands of a teenager on his first date, I managed to hold on for the win!!

My nerves can only stand one of those a day, so once sufficiently unwound I proceeded on to working on the canopy. Having marked the fiberglass for cutting, I thought it would only be a few minutes work. Unfortunately, I broke the Dremal cutting wheel (again!!) before I was even a tenth of the way done. I decided on a trip to Lowes for new cutting wheels and to see if I could figure out why I keep breaking them. It turns out that I have been using the wrong mandrel. Easily fixed for less than $4.00.

While we were out, Co-pilot Egg had me take her to the thrift store where she hoped to find a suitable garment for "Wear an Ugly Christmas Sweater Day" at school. As I was wandering around the store waiting for her, I came across a beautiful leather jacket in my size for an astoundingly low $30. I snapped that up in a hurry - I've always wanted to have a leather fighter jacket with a cool picture painted on the back, but I never wanted to risk ruining an expensive jacket. For $30, I can roll the dice. Now I just need to come up with a good RV-12 related design, and find someone to paint it for me.

I've done fiber glass work in my basement before, as can be seen by the beautiful kayak that I built as a "Yes I CAN Finish Things" prover project:

This is why I knew that even simple cuts were going to create a lot of dust

See?

Fortunately, I've also learned to never bring that dust upstairs!

Cool, man!

2011-11-28T20:51:00.008-05:00

What's cool? Well, we'll see.

First possibility: I've crossed a line in the arena of marital infidelities: I am now sneaking around with a car dealer. Yes, my unbridled lust has led me astray. I have to cleanse my conscience with a full confession: I test drove a Mustang. As thousands (if not millions) of men that have gone before me have rationalized, how can something that feels that good really be wrong?? So what's "cool" about that? Well, this: that car goes like stink! The dealership I went to is so large that you don't have to test drive on public roads; rather, you go to their test track where, in the words of a very naive salesman, you are "free to drive it any way you like." I'm not sure he knew who he was talking to... 85 mph down the straight and hard on the brakes into the hairpin turn, the smell of a brand new engine baking off whatever anti-corrosion gunk they put on there pungent in my adrenalin-flared nostrils, Co-pilot Egg screaming in fear as her woefully short life flashes before her eyes... now that's a test drive. And the best thing about it? That would have to be that I was not driving the car that I will eventually buy! I'll be ordering mine from the factory.

But that's not what's cool. Here's another possibility: I ordered the powerplant kit and it should be here in no more than three weeks! All I have to do is finish up the fiberglass work on the canopy and I'm ready to go!

Cool, yes, but still not what I'm referring to in the title. As it turns out, I'm referring to "cool" in a thermal sense, as in "it sure has gotten cool outside." So cool, in fact, that I've run into a problem with the fiberglass work. I discovered the problem a few days ago when I went out to the hangar to sand off the umpteenth filler coat and found that rather than generating a fine white clinging powder, the sander was actually just moving goopy epoxy/microballoon mush around. The epoxy hadn't cured fully after two days! Too cold, it would appear. I gave it another day, but to no avail. I failed to get this job done before the end of the fiberglassing season.

Truly unfortunate, that, and by no means cool.

In the hippy sense, not the thermal sense.

There was nothing to do but remove the canopy and take it back to the subterranean lair for further work. I had thought getting it broken loose from the airframe might be the hard part of the job, but the liberal coating of wax did the trick. The real difficulty was drilling through the fiberglass to get at the pivot bolts. The problem there was Van's instructions regarding the method for doing so: drill a 3/8" hole centered over the bolt. This is, of course, impossible because as soon as the pointy end of the bit breaks through the fiberglass it runs into the unyielding head of the underlying bolt. What I had to do instead was to use a #40 bit to drill holes around the bolt head and then use a pointy sharp grindy thing on the Dremel tool to finish cutting off the resulting cap.

After that it was an easy job to load the canopy up in the trusty Vera Cruz and haul it to the basement where it sat for a couple days while the fiberglass steadfastly refused to set. Why? because it's too damn cold. Why? because the furnace picked that very day to stop working. Because of that, the last couple days have been filled with my ham-handed attempts to wrestle the furnace back into compliance. The problem appears to be with the ignitor, the replacement of which in a customer-friendly world would be as easy as replacing a light bulb. After all, they know that these things wear out every 3-5 years, so why put a bunch of steel pipe and some kind of electronic valve right smack in the way of removing that stupid ignitor?

I eventually managed to get the thing out of there and a replacement ordered, but even with $40 of Next Day shipping charges I won't have it until tomorrow, at which point the furnace will either be fixed or will have to wait until Plan B a day later, which the confidence-depleting Co-owner scheduled in advance with a professional repair outfit. Actually, I think that was a great idea - if I manage to fix it, she'll just cancel the appointment. If not, we will get to test the theory that I used to talk myself into attempting this repair in the first place: no matter how badly I mess up this furnace, I can't do any damage that sufficient money can't repair.

Hey, it's just a theory!

And when you get right down to it, the indoor shop isn't a bad place to work, really.

Except for being in the shadow of this %$#@* piece of *#^!

Why I Didn't Build a Glasair

2011-11-20T09:25:00.003-05:00

Nice looking plane, right?

I might even say "gorgeous." Wonder why I didn't choose one of those to build?

I'll tell you later.

One of my weirder personal traits, at least on the topic of my ill fit into the world of Corporate America, is my tendency to forget to use my vacation time. Before I know it, it's the end of the year and I have a bunch of vacation days left. In the new "use it or lose it" world that many employers have adopted, this causes me to bundle up my remaining days around the holidays, thereby using the holidays as a kind of multiplier. So, over the next couple of months I will have a total of 29 days off. Still without an engine to install, I'm soon going to run out of work on the -12.

But....

Not soon enough.

You may have noticed that the time between work sessions has notably grown longer - this is mostly because I'm not super enthusiastic about the current job. To put in bluntly, I am not enjoying the drudgery of "filling sanding filling sanding filling sanding.... repeat as required" on the canopy fairings. And this is why I didn't build a Glasair: the entire airplane is fiberglass.

Still, it needs done and with the next nine days yawning emptily in front of my like a great chasm of potential boredom, it's time to get back to serious effort. Pete has missed the work too, near as I can tell, so we arranged for a Saturday morning session. He arrived at the house bright and early and ready for action. Just not exactly the kind of action I was expecting. He suggested that we swing by Edwards Meats on the way to the hangar to pick up some of their wonderful smoked beef sticks. I had no objection to this in general, of course, but I did have to note that the airport is only slightly more than a mile from my house and Edward's is, well, more than a little out of the way:

There also the question of whether or not Mr. Edwards will deign to show up and open the shop on any given day, but the unique nature of freshly smoked beef sticks and, if you're lucky, freshly smoked bacon too, justifies the risk of a wasted trip. Well, "wasted" is too strong of a word; the scenery down in the southeast corner of the state makes for a nice morning ride either way.

We were in luck - the store was open!

This is the Bring Your Own Cow entrance:

They had no bacon, but I was able to get a pound of BBQ and a pound of Pepper Jack Cheese beef sticks, along with a pound of sliced jalapeno trail bologna. Yummy!

As we were headed back, I was inspired by the fact that one of the biggest Ford dealerships on the planet actually was on the way to the hangar. And I kind of wanted another cup of coffee. Hmmmm.... Do you think this place might have a Mustang on the lot?

Yep! They had a dozen of them. None, unfortunately, were convertibles, but they did have a coupe in the model and color that I'm after.

The miraculous new V6: 50% more horsepower and 25% better gas mileage than the old V6:

I suspect that the airspeed indicator is somewhat optimistic for the V6:

It's probably the same indicator that comes with the beautiful V8:

The salesman, who I had hoped to avoid because I'm not a serious shopper at this point, turned out to be quite a bit of help. You have to appreciate just how big this dealership is - they actually have two stop lights on the premises to control the traffic. Had the salesman not intercepted us, we would have trudged around for miles looking for the Mustangs. He was able to whisk us directly to them in a golf cart. That's pretty good service! He was very low pressure and seemed to enjoy just standing there jawing about Mustangs, and he was far more knowledgeable than the lackadaisical dinosaur I had encountered at the first dealership that I had tried.

It's good that I liked the salesman because I actually don't like the guy that owns the place. I used to race against him back when I raced karts and he is a rather unpleasant fellow on the race track. Far too aggressive for what was supposed to be fun, gentlemanly racing. Still... if they will cut me a good deal, I have no problem with buying from his dealership.

We finally did make it to the hangar where I sanded off the rough edges from the last filling session. It's actually starting to look pretty good. All it needed after this session was some light filler. Next time I sand, it will be with a finer grit paper. I'm pretty close to the point where I can put on a few coats of thin epoxy and call it done.

Buying, Not Buying, Selling, Not Selling

2011-11-16T21:50:00.003-05:00

Fair warning: there is no real progress on the airplane to report. I'm still sanding the canopy fairing whenever the mood strikes me, and the mood has not struck for more than a week now. So if you don't care about the rest of my day-to-day stuff, you might want to just skip the rest of this post.

It's not as if there haven't been plenty of other ways to fill my time, though. As do nature and that buffer between you and the car in front of you on the highway, discretionary time abhors a vacuum. It's amazing how much time can be spent doing what at the end of the day appears to be a whole bunch of nothing. Case in point: Saturday was spent going to Sams Club to buy dog food. $800+ dollars later, we not only had dog food but a mountain of impulse buys as well, the most notable of which was a brand new caffeine delivery system for myself.

I've been intrigued by these fancy new Keurig K-cup coffee makers for awhile now. The appealing aspect of them is that they brew a single cup of vacuum-fresh coffee at a time. As the only coffee drinker in the house, and even then only on one or two days of the week, a machine that can solve the problems of keeping the coffee fresh, making only as much as I need, and doing it without the hassles of grinding the beans and dealing with the resulting mess is very compelling. But...

I had heard mixed reviews of these things. On one hand, there were plenty of positive testimonials from neighbors and co-workers that love them. On the other hand, there were those that said that the coffee was horrible; it was stated that the little brew cups do not contain actual "raw" coffee but instead were over-priced delivery mechanisms for what amounted to instant coffee. I've had instant coffee before, and there's a reason that I don't choose it over fresh brewed. So, I was at an impasse. Even internet research was unable to provide a definitive answer since there is a lot of noise about a class action suit that seems to indicate that Keurig is being sued for false advertising by saying "fresh brewed" when it's really using instant coffee, but after reading enough standard press releases I finally found a better researched article that provided the detail that the case was actually against a single K-cup provider that was marketing a low-cost alternative.

Sams Club finally solved the dilemma by having a machine set up to dispense free samples. Unfortunately they didn't think to provide any sugar so I had to drink it black ("This tastes like mud! Well of course it does - it was just ground this morning!") which is not my preference, but even so it tasted just like real coffee to me. At that point, I decided that I didn't care how they achieved the taste, as long as it tasted good. I bought one.

Once at home, I immediately brewed up one of the sample K-cups that had been included with the machine. With over 200 varieties available, I look forward to years of being able to sample new brands and roasts. Anyway, it was a fine cup of coffee. Once I had finished it, I satisfied my curiosity through the simple expedient of cutting open the used K-cup. Drum roll......

It was full of used coffee grounds. In other words, "real" coffee.

One of the interesting things about the machine that I bought is that it can brew three different sizes, one of which is about the size of what I would brew when making Espresso. I drink Espresso on those days when I need the caffeine jolt to satiate my addiction, but I don't want a lot of fluid volume because I'm going to be somewhere where rest rooms aren't available. Think flying, for example. With the small liquid volume of the lowest K-cup setting, I no longer needed my Espresso maker - it was just going to eat up valuable HCS (Horizontal Clutter Space, aka "counter space") if I didn't get rid of it.

I didn't want to just throw it away and we've sworn off garage sales, so I decided to bring it to work and just give it away. I thought I'd just anonymously place it in the break room with a little "Free to a Good Home" tag on it, but as is my wont, I got too clever about it:

After the fifth person came to my office asking if I was the one giving away the Espresso maker, I realized that putting together a clever sales flier had been pretty much self-defeating on the anonymity front.

One of my other little projects has been to sneak out of the house with Co-pilot Egg under the auspices of various plausible excuses ("we're going shopping for clothes," etc.) to try to test drive a new Mustang. The first effort fell victim to a very shoddily run Ford dealership. Their web site said that they had five on the lot; they had none. When I was finally able to wake a lethargic salesman sufficiently to ask when they thought they might be getting more, I got a non-committal grunt and the question, "Would you consider pre-owned?" Well, yes, yes I would, but only a 2011 or newer. To which I received a stumped look that said "Why so picky about the model year?" Which was just sad; I don't think I should have to educate a salesperson about the product he is (lackadaisically) trying to sell. He really ought to have known about the new V6 that arrived with the 2011 model year. After all, a 50% horsepower boost combined with a 25% better fuel efficiency is a pretty important change.

I won't be going back.

The most recent effort was last Sunday when Egg and I hit upon the brilliant idea of going to the Columbus zoo, which just happens to be more or less in the neighborhood of another Ford dealer. This one had three Mustangs on the lot, but the dealership was closed. On a Sunday. Which I have to say is astoundingly customer unfriendly. It's really all moot, of course, because I'm not buying anything of that magnitude until the RV-6 is sold. Which it is not.

The zoo was fun, though.

Unfortunately, budget cuts at the zoo have been devastating. Just look at how thin the animals are:

New to the zoo is the nearly extinct American Crane, notable for being both flightless and featherless. They were roaming around free on the paths:

Look at all of the facts about bears, but they still don't answer the most common question about bears:

"What question?" you ask? Seriously?? No one has ever asked you if bears sh@t in the woods? Huh. People ask me that all the time!

Speaking of bears, I had to wonder just where this bear's paw was and what it was doing:

I thought that this had to be the stupidest zoo exhibit ever, but Egg was fascinated enough with it to go back twice!

Egg has always liked the flamingos. Back when she was a stroller baby, she stood up in the stroller to get a better look and fell forward, right on her face:

This one remembered and was hoping for a repeat performance:

See if you can pick out the newest baby gorilla:

Finally, something remotely airplane oriented in this post:

The polar bears were engaging in some horse play (so to speak). It was nice to see some activity; most of the other animals were spending their day in animal activities that I could have seen at home, by which I mean laying around licking themselves.

Easier than I thought

2011-11-03T20:15:00.008-04:00

I had thought that it would be emotionally difficult to sell the Miata, but as it turned out in the event it was something of a relief. In fact, I think I dodged a bullet. It started when I received a notification that I had an interested buyer responding to my ad on cars.com after only a few days running. The first email was pretty much along the lines of "Hey, glad you still have it, is there anything horribly wrong with it, and by the way your asking price is about $600 over blue book." That last part came as no surprise; I had pulled the $3,850 asking price out of thin air. I'm surprised it was even that close, to be honest.

After a reply that all of the major deficiencies had already been disclosed in the ad and the inclusion of an internet link to a few more pictures, I received a missive that positively exuded enthusiasm for buying the car. All that remained to be accomplished was the securing of a loan and a test drive. A visit was scheduled for a couple of evenings hence. On the eve of the test drive, I decided that a better impression would be made if I brought the car back home (it's been stored in the hangar with the RV-6 - its corpse wasn't even cold before an opportunistic Co-pilot Egg laid claim to its bay in the garage) and washed it up. After a good scrubbing and a drive around the block, I arrived back at the hangar and was surprised at being greeted with the smell of antifreeze. It's never exhibited that particular odorous trait before, so I was concerned. Things that I'm trying to sell have a long and sordid history of breaking at the last minute and I was afraid that the unfortunate trend was to continue. Story of my life, in glorious 3D and Dolby surround.

I didn't have time to diagnose the problem at the time, so I decided to contact the presumptive buyer and ask him to try to come a little earlier than we had arranged. I figured I'd tell him that there might be a problem, then drive around for fifteen minutes or so to get the fluids hot and pressurized; surely if there was a leak we'd be able to find it. I was hoping for a loose hose. After a nice drive through the country, we arrived back at the airport and popped the hood. I looked all around the radiator and the various hoses running to and from it, but was unable to find the leak.

"Here it is," said the buyer. "It's leaking at the head gasket."

"Ohhhhh, nooooooooo!" I thought. Having recently spent something on the order of $1,500 having a head gasket replaced on one of my other cars, I figured this was the end of the deal. With blue book at $3,200, I figured I'd be lucky to see $2,500 in light of this revelation. He hadn't walked away yet, though, and he wanted to talk price, so I steeled my nerves prior to hearing how bad it was going to be. I figured whatever he offered, no matter how low, I was going to take it.

"So," he said, "what with the air bag being broken and the head gasket leaking, I don't think I'm going to be too close to your asking price. How does $3,300 sound?"

At which point I opened the trunk, pulled out my sombrero, and did the Mexican hat dance.

Well, not really, but I was having a hard time adopting a stern, pensive face while I pretended to be reluctantly deciding whether or not I could live with such a ludicrously low offer.

"Well," I said thoughtfully, "I guess that's fair."

So, it's on to the replacement. There's been a rather interesting development on that front as well. I had been planning on finding another relatively low budget convertible, as you may recall, and had briefly considered an eight year old Ford Mustang. I wasn't thrilled about the comparatively high fuel costs of a heavy car being dragged around by an anemic V6, though. A discussion with the Co-owner on the topic has shifted my viewpoint.

Having used the Miata to keep 44,000 miles off of our "good" car, it is in great condition and has far less that the 101,000 miles on it than it would have had without the Miata bearing the brunt of my daily commute over the last four or five years. Having recently bought a nice, comfortable SUV, we no longer really need the four door car in the way we did before. The upshot is that she suggested trading it in the low-mileage sedan and getting a new sporty car rather than another old beater that would inevitably face the same end-of-life issues that claimed the Miata. With that in mind I started researching newer cars. As it turns out, Ford replaced the old V6 engine in the base model Mustang for the 2011 model year. The new engine puts out 50% more horsepower, yet improves the EPA mileage from a measly 24 mpg to a respectable 31 mpg.

Wow!! Mexican hat dance! Where do I sign??

So here's what I'm thinking about now:

Of course, I'm not going to do anything until 1) after winter, and 2) the RV-6 is sold. But it sure is nice to have a plan!

With all of that going on, plus being weeks overdue on a couple of game reviews for Gaming Nexus, I haven't done much on the airplane. As you may recall, I had slathered on a bunch of cake icing around the canopy to fill in the low areas of the fiberglass. I also mentioned that I'm not very good at icing cakes. That was no false modesty:

Well. That's really going to take some sanding, isn't it. Good thing I have a machine for that!

Even as I was sanding I could see that I'm going to need at least two more filler coats of icing. I did manage to scrape up a spare half hour to get a batch mixed up (thicker!) and spread on. I hope to get out again soon to give the new batch a light sanding prior to applying yet another batch. For as long as this is taking, I'm glad I decided to hold off on ordering the engine. I had thought this would only take a couple of weeks; it's shaping up to be harder that I had expected.

That kind of outcome was bound to come around again, eventually. Story of my life.

Icing the cake

2011-10-30T10:18:00.002-04:00

It's not that the Ohio weather was any great shakes when I departed for southern climes on a business trip early last week, but the weather that I returned to is worse yet. Not worse in the sense that inconvenient forms or precipitation are covering the roads and making things slippery, but that isn't for want of sufficiently low temperatures. Let's see.... a quick glance at the internet thermometer shows 28F on the other side of the walls. Brrr!

Having suffered the indignities inherent in modern air travel (up to and including a seat-kicker behind me and a top-of-lung non-stop screaming diaper-filler right next to her, both accompanied by the type of negligent parent that ensures no improvement in their behavior in the foreseeable future) and the inconveniences of hotel living for nearly a week, I needed a couple of days to recuperate and regain momentum on the sundry initiatives that laid fallow in my absence. It could have been worse, I suppose. As I was sitting at the gate in Atlanta waiting for my flight to depart (three hours!!), a pilot walked by who was seemingly engaged in some form of remote-parenting, more than likely of a teenager. What caught my attention was that he had a cell phone up to his ear and he was yelling, "Look at me! LOOK AT ME!!" into it. I was not alone in breathing a sigh of relief when he continued on past our gate; none of us were thrilled with the idea of our lives being in the hands of a pissed-off pilot that doesn't know that he can't be seen through a cell phone.

Having rested, recuperated, and re-engaged in routine requirements/recreations, I resolutely returned to the regrettably repetitive work of filling the gaps in the canopy fiberglass. This requires the mixing of a filler called "micro balloons" into a cup of epoxy.

MICRO BALLOONS
Glass and quartz bubbles also called micro balloons used to add to mixed epoxy and hardener. Totally non-structural and very light, with a texture and color approaching talcum powder they are used to thicken epoxy.

The 'talcum powder' comparison is spot-on. The powder is so fine that it behaves almost like a liquid when you're stirring it, with one critical difference being that it also likes to blow out of the cup as a fine dust. Considering that this dust is comprised of such lung-unfriendly materials as glass and quartz, you can imagine the pains I went to in order to avoid inhaling it.

When thickened enough to resist against the unwavering pull of gravity, the mix takes on the consistency of cake icing.

Unfortunately, I am not very good at all at icing a cake. I ended up just smearing on as much as I thought it would take to level out the transitions from one area of fiberglass to another. Sanding will have to smooth it all out.

The stuff is reportedly very easy to sand, but I suspect that it is going to generate copious amounts of the very unpleasant dust that was floating around as I was mixing the batch. So there's something to look forward to!

A strange coincidence

2011-10-23T21:00:00.001-04:00

As I'm sure we all know, fathers are put on this planet for one, and only one, primary purpose which is, of course, to embarrass our children whenever and wherever possible. This is a ~~function~~ calling that I answer with the utmost dedication and diligence. Opportunities have arisen far less often as Egg has grown to an age where she pretty much has a life of her own and doesn't accompany her old man with the frequency of past years, but events transpired this week such that we found ourselves doing some shopping at my favorite bulk food warehouse, Gordon's Food Service. As we were making our way to the checkout, Egg grabbed a little plastic cup containing a free sample of some form of candy product. Happily munching away as I took care of the purchases, she started chatting with an idle cashier who shared that it had been her that had to manually fill all of those little cups with candy.

"Don't worry," she assured young Egg, "I'm sanitary."

To which I replied, "What a coincidence! I'm sterile!"

Perhaps you can imagine the mortified look plastered on young Egg's face, but I tend to doubt it.

Now, you may be tssking in disapproval this very moment, but you have to know that Egg will not rest until she gets even. In fact, I'm pretty sure she did that every evening. As we were driving home, I heard the unmistakable tacky tacky tacky of her exchanging text messages with someone. I asked her what was going on and she told me that she was telling one of her girl friends about the manner in which I had ensured that she could never again shop at GFS.

"I don't get it; she thinks you're funny," she said with a confused tone.

"Well, I've always felt that she is mature beyond her years."

A brief pause.... two hands cupped over an area in which young women seem to have great deal of concern about physical development....

"You mean here?"

Me, every bit as mortified as Egg had been just a few minutes before, "NO!! I meant her sense of humor!!"

I'm pretty sure that was a cunning and deliberate payback.

Egg was always a pretty fun child to hang around with, but it just keeps getting better and better. I'm sure going to miss her next year when she goes off to college.

That eventuality is what ate up most of the weekend. Rather than watch football or work on the plane, we made a trip down to Lancaster to look for a place for her to live next year. The college she will be attending there is too small to have dorms, so we need to find an apartment for her. Preliminary internet searches did not bode well - it seems that there are no apartments to be had there. Fortunately, we were able to drive around enough to find a few promising locations conveniently located near the school. We also found the mall. Wherein we found a dress shop. Wherein we she found a dress.

Between finding housing and clothing, we both found the trip to be eminently satisfactory.

Sunday morning was also devoted to a road trip, this time to a car dealer about eighteen miles west of Columbus to look at a potential replacement for the Miata. It wasn't a Mustang, though. At the urging of Co-pilot Egg, I have agreed to consider a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible. This trip, alas, was a complete bust. As it turns out, the car dealer in question is not particularly diligent about keeping their online inventory page up to date.

It was after 3:00 Sunday afternoon before I was able to make it out to the hangar, despite the fact that I had been itching to get out there all weekend. Sure, I'm just going to be sanding and sanding and sanding for the next few weeks, a job that typically holds no appeal whatsoever, but this time is different: I had a new tool that I was desperate to try out.

One of the challenges of sanding along the front of the canopy is that the area needs to be formed into a curve with a roughly 2" diameter. Van's suggests using a block of round wood or something to attain that shape. "Bah!" says I. I intend to use something far more sophisticated. I hereby introduce you to the Skil Octo(tm):

I hear you. "Calm down, Fella, it's just an electric sander!"

Well, true, but note this: it has a dust collector! That's a pretty big deal when sanding fiberglass in the hangar; if not captured, the dust will migrate into the adjoining hangars and get all over the neighbors' airplanes. To which I'd normally say, "Yeah? So??" but it's different now that I am my own neighbor. I don't want to have to be dusting my RV-6, after all.

I hear you. "Calm down, Fella, it's just an electric sander with a dust collector!"

True, but check this out: it has a collection of attachments. First, and most important, the 2" radius:

And for those tight areas, the pointy-skinny attachment:

Cool, huh?

It came with a bunch of sandpaper, including a nice 60 grit perfect for the first rough sanding. I knocked that out in about an hour, but it soon became apparent to Pete and me that this job was going to require more than sanding; there was also going to be quite a bit of filling. The worst parts are along the top of the sides and the trough along the front of the canopy.

We had plenty of time and thought we'd mix up a batch of filler to apply, but we ran into a problem. The plans tell us to mix up a batch of filler using epoxy and micro balloons, and we have no micro balloons. We have flox, but that's not the same thing. That was it for the day; I had to place an order with Aircraft Spruce for a pound of micro balloons. The picture in the catalog looks like a hand-filled bag - I sure hope whoever fills it is sanitary!

Here it comes....

2011-10-20T16:43:00.001-04:00

It was 5:15 this morning when I found myself shivering in a 45F degree breeze, feeling the biting sting of small, sharp raindrops being blown against the side of my face, struggling to perform menial tasks with hands that were playing the bumbling fool as is their wont when cold, and irrationally shouting bitter imprecations at the unhearing and unfeeling, yet irritatingly inquisitive, deaf/mute LCD screen of the gas pump as I filled the car for yet another dark and rainy commute to work, the whole while thinking, "This is only going to get worse. And soon."

Winter is coming, and I am ill-prepared for its onslaught of pertinaciously foul and objectionable weather.

Even fall has had an impact on the work schedule. As we can no longer count on temperatures conducive to the curing process of epoxy (60F is required for the type of hardener I'm using), we have had to strive to make good use of every opportunity to get the canopy fiberglass done. The two major applications of glass require a goodly number of contiguous hours to accomplish, so it's no mean feat to find the right combination of available time and appropriate weather. It doesn't take much to throw a wrench into the delicate balance of opportunity. This was readily apparent last Saturday when Pete and I met at the hangar with the hopes of applying the fiberglass strips that cross over the front of the canopy and fair into the sides of the fuselage. As you may recall, we were able to get the strips of cloth cut to size, but had to call for a hiatus to wait for the temperatures to rise.

These breaks that send me home are always risky; it's easy to get out of the house at 7:00 am when the family is still in deep hibernation, but it can be much harder later in the day when events can conspire to trap me at home. Which is precisely what happened on Saturday. With one foot figuratively out the door, I was reminded that Co-pilot Egg was going to be coming home with a few friends in order to have some commemorative photographs taken prior to her senior year homecoming dance. Fair, that, and happy to do it. Besides, Sunday looked to be warm enough towards the latter half of the afternoon.

The problem? Well, we need to come to an agreement with regards to the word "few."

Getting that photo was tricky enough, but it all fell apart when I asked them to form a pyramid.

Kidding.

Sunday fortunately delivered on the promise of 60+ degrees, so the fiberglassing operation got the green light to proceed. As is normal in all cases, but more so in recent endeavors, a great deal of cerebration needs must be applied to figuring out just what it is we're going to try to do. Specifically, that is. We fully understood that the general idea was to build a bridge across the front of the canopy, but the precise positioning of the varied-width strips was somewhat difficult to discern from the provided diagram.

It seems easy at first glance, doesn't it? Well, that's simply because I didn't include the accompanying text. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a picture plus a few dozen obfuscatory words is worth somewhat less. Eventually we figured that those absurdly narrow strips down in the middle of the pack were going to decompose to nothing more than a few loosely affiliated threads once we tried to wet them down with epoxy anyway. Might as well gird the loins and apply the noses to the grindstone, as it were. In the event we pretty much just lined up the forward edges of the thicker strips as shown and placed the narrower strips where it appeared that they'd do the most good.

It's hard to tell if it's right or not; we'll find out when we try to sand it all down to the correct shape. That'll be nice work for the cold, blustery days that will soon be upon us.

An Unfortunate Addition to my Financial Lexicon

2011-10-15T11:20:00.004-04:00

I made an offhand comment about the pending loss of my cute little red Miata (lovingly nicknamed "Ernesto") the other day which has not gone unnoticed. So, in acquiescence to popular demand, I shall attempt to explain what has transpired.

The air bag warning light has come on, and stayed on.

No, it doesn't sound like such a big deal at first blush, but...

Edmunds provides an appraisal value for private sale of $1,699. Now I consider this to be ludicrously low since I can easily find contemporaneous models with asking prices approaching $4,500, but I don't know whether they're selling at that price. Mine has fairly high mileage at 117,000+, but it also has fresh paint, a fresh top, and some wicked nice wheels and tires. I figure that the $4,000 region is more accurate, but all of that is moot: fixing the airbag is at least a $1,000 job, and I'm afraid that if I throw another grand into, something else will break and I'll be right back to where I am now. And $1,000 is the bottom line estimate; the Mazda dealer (I know, but small shops want nothing to do with this kind of work) wasn't even sure they could find the parts.

1996 Mazda Miata - asking $3,850 (21 city / 26 highway)

Your first reaction will be, "So? Drive it without the airbag. Even in that state, it has to be safer than a motorcycle." Well, yes, but there's a reason that I don't ride a motorcycle. You have to understand that Ernesto is my drive-to-work car, and my drive to work is 35 miles each way of moderately dangerous highway driving. I've seen too much mayhem in my fifteen years of traversing the city every day to be comfortable with driving a protection-impaired car. If Ernesto was just a "take a nice drive on a pretty day" car, I might feel differently. He's not, though; his entire raison d'être was to provide an economical means for getting to and from work without running up the mileage on our "good" cars. I cheated a little bit with the selection of a Miata for that task since it was really only useful for 3/4s of the year, but there was a little trade-off for having a car that helped to make the normally onerous commute enjoyable.

So, here we are. It doesn't make any economic sense to repair Ernesto. He is to be sold off to the highest bidder, and it is questionable as to whether his role as "enjoyable ride" will be filled with another vehicle. There are a few reasons why a replacement may not be possible: 1) I'm leery of buying another fifteen year old Miata lest a similar mechanical situation arise, 2) I can't afford a newer Miata, 3) the only other affordable convertible (a convertible being an immutable requirement) I like would be a 2004-ish Ford Mustang (appox. $8,000 - $10,000) and it has a six cylinder engine, which flies in the face of the "economical" requirement, and 4) the mileage on the "good" car has reached a level where the idea of keeping it low seems silly. So, it comes down to whether I need a sports-ish car, or whether this is more a case of wanting a sports-ish car.

The saddest thing about all of this??

It's the fact that "need" has entered into my financial lexicon.

I'm not sure how or when that happened, but there it is. I'm not sure which is the more depressing, the loss of the Miata, or the realization that I might not be able to talk myself into replacing it.

2004 Ford Mustang - asking $9,850 (18 city / 27 highway)

Work on the RV-12 slowed again this week both because of all of the other unrelated work that has been piling up and because the next step, as with the last, requires a fairly big commitment of time. Van's says three hours. I believe them.

I met with Pete today for a brief preparatory session. The next job is more fiberglassing - this time we will be laying down thin strips of glass across the area where the canopy bubble meets the forward top fuselage. The preparation came down to cutting ten 36" long strips of various widths, ranging from 2 3/4" wide down to an absurdly narrow 1/4" wide.

We would have gone ahead with the epoxy work too, but it was only 50 degrees in the hangar and the West Systems 206 hardener I bought requires at least 60 degrees to work properly. We're hoping that it gets warm enough later in the day to proceed.

Happy Anniversary!

2011-10-11T21:20:00.000-04:00

October 9th was the second anniversary of my RV-12 build and I celebrated by starting the fiberglass of the forward canopy arms. This is one of those jobs that takes days of effort - the first day is spent thinking about ways to avoid doing it, the second through fifth days are spent doing the things dreamed up on the first day and, as it turns out, there are a few more days of preparation work to do as well. Sunday dawned temperate and clear, and promised temperatures suitably warm for the efficacious curing of the epoxy. It was on!

The days of preparation are all a blur now so I can't put a firm timeline on the process that I will be detailing below; suffice it to say that the time period is roughly a week of on again, off again effort.

The point of all of this is to create a smooth, attractive, and aerodynamic blending from the stark, angular facets of the metal canopy frame into the canopy bubble and fuselage. Just between you and me, I'll settle for two out of those three, and I don't particularly care which two it is. The plain truth is that I do not like working with fiberglass.

That having been said, here we go with the narrative.

The first step is to provide a support for the fiberglass. You could almost call it a mold, I suppose. It starts out as a pair of foam blocks, one for each side of the airplane. Those were trimmed and glued into place as detailed in this post.

Pete happens to own a very nice sanding block and was kind enough to bring it down to the hangar. In turn, I was kind enough to let him use it to trim the blocks. I'm generous that way - known for it, in fact.

Van's supplies a pair of paper templates that serve the dual purpose of acting as aids to masking off the appropriate areas of the fuselage and for the eventual cutting to shape of fiberglass cloth. I had stored them in a safe place where I wouldn't lose them; I found them after only three days of searching.

A strip of high quality electrical tape is used as to protect the canopy and provide a guide line for the fiberglass strips that will fill in the area between the forward fuselage and the canopy bubble.

I finally found a use for all of the paper that the kit parts come wrapped in.

There are ten fiberglass cloth shapes to be cut out, five for each side. One of the template paper sheets is used as a sacrificial cutting template whereby it is cut smaller for each size of cloth "part." I bought a very sharp rotary cutter to use for the somewhat complex curves required.

A perplexing problem quickly manifested itself. No matter how carefully I would trace the cutter around the template, the resulting sheet wouldn't come out shaped anything at all like the template.

As you can imagine, this problem created quite a bit of back and forth discussion between Pete and myself with suggestions and theories flying fast and furious. We eventually reached a consensus: the loose weave of the cloth combined with the shear forces being applied by the cutter were distorting the shape of the cloth as it was being cut. The solution? I would mark the outline of the template with a Sharpie(tm) marker and cut the cloth without the template paper blocking the view.

That worked somewhat better, but it was still hit or miss. It seemed that the large piece of cloth that I was cutting from might be part of the problem; various areas of it tended to get stuck to the work table and cause strange bends and transformations to occur. We finally hit upon the brilliant idea of cutting out a piece of cloth only slight larger than the finished part would be. It was much easier to get the smaller piece to sit straight on the table than it was when dealing with the huge sheet.

That problem solved, we finalized the masking job by covering the instrument panel and seeking out any sneaky little holes that might allow epoxy to drip into inconvenient places.

The Van's plans rely on a temporary forbearance of gravity to keep the wetted fiberglass from sinking into the areas

Pete had done some research and found a pretty good suggestion on another RV-12 builder's blog. He suggested using the left over scraps of foam to fill in those areas in order to provide support for the cloth.

There wasn't enough foam remaining, so I took a somewhat less satisfying path: I used some weather stripping that I had bought for the RV-6 canopy (which turned out to be a real fiasco, but that's a story that I'd prefer to just forget about).

The piece of foam that Van's specifies gets fiber glass permanently glued to it, but we didn't want that to happen with our extracurricular foam. We covered it with packing tape and waxed it with paste wax to keep the epoxy from sticking to it.

The next step was somewhat painful. The parts of the pristine canopy and the aluminum side skirt that get covered with the fiberglass have to be scuffed up to provide a bite for the epoxy to grab ahold of.

Everything was finally ready to cover with the fiber glass.

So I went flying. I thought it might be instructive to go take a look at a finished RV-12 to see what this fairing was supposed to look like when it was done. While I've said that I'd settle for two out of three of the goals, here's what a three-out-of-three exhibit looks like:

It was a pretty nice day to fly, as it turns out.

The Fall colors are proudly showing the way to a dismal winter.

Back in the hangar, it was time to wet and place cloth.

Three and a half hours of grueling and tedious work later, the peel ply was on.

Things happen fast when you'r working against the ticking time bomb of mixed epoxy and things get pretty messy:

The peel ply came off a couple of days later to reveal a nice, solid build-up of fiberglass. Naturally, the number one rule of airplane building (what has been done will soon be undone) will soon be in play: most of this will get sanded off.

Old Friends, New Friends

2011-10-07T17:34:00.000-04:00

I'm sure there's some pithy, insightful quote that offers sage advice on the preservation of old, loyal friends when newer friends come along, but I'm not going to bother looking for it. I'm relatively sure that the underlying message would be to make sure not to cast aside the former friendship in favor of the newer, yet remain open to the opportunities presented by new acquaintances. This is actually a piece of fatherly advice that I shared with a younger Co-pilot Egg back in the days when I was still able to fool myself into thinking that she would listen. As I recall, she was very enamored with her first true boyfriend, to the exclusion of all of her girlfriends. I warned her that she was driving away her old friends and may some day regret when/if the relationship with the boy had run its course. I probably told her something along the lines of, "Boyfriends come and go, but your girlfriends are forever." Eventually I was proven right and she learned a valuable, albeit painful, lesson.

I now find myself in a similar position on a couple of fronts. At home, Cabot, the little puppy that we adopted a couple of years ago, has blossomed into a healthy, hearty, and attention-demanding young dog. So desirous of attention is he that it is difficult to remember to share time and affection with the older, more sedate Brave Sir Hogarth.

It doesn't help that Cabot has a possessive streak a mile wide and is quite jealous of any petting of, or playing with, Hogarth. He makes quite a scene, really.

The other (and slightly more topical) situation has to do with my airplanes. The RV-6 seems to have adopted a bit of a bad attitude after having been listed for sale. I was warned that anthropomorphizing airplanes tended to make them angry but, as with my progeny, I have to learn these lessons for myself. And have I ever paid the price! You may recall that I had an in-flight situation wherein some of the rubber weather stripping at the back edge of the canopy came loose and caused a ruckus as we were approaching Darke Co. International Airport for landing. A strip of duct tape got us home, but I figured that a prospective buyer might find that kind of repair to be somewhat off-putting; it would need to be fixed.

Figuring that the canopy repair would lead to at least a couple of days of down time, I thought I'd also perform an oil change. While the current load of oil only has a dozen or so hours on it, it's been in there since April. There are those who say that the oil should be changed every three months no matter what, but I figure that oil is millions of years old already. Twice a year will do famously, says I.

I have come to dread the removal of the engine cowls over the last few years because it seems that every time I remove them, some of the hinge strips that hold them together will be broken and in need of replacement. And that replacement? It's an unholy bear to do. The hinge strips are riveted into the fiberglass of the cowl and there is no way to drill out those rivets without creating large, unsightly holes in the fiberglass. That necessitates refilling the holes with epoxy, re-drilling them to fit new pieces of hinge strip, and painting over the result.

As I removed the top cowl, I heard the tinkling of the three hinge hoops that formerly resided on the strip that sits in the small air inlet area right behind the prop spinner as they dropped through the engine and onto the hangar floor. I hate that sound so much that I'm convinced that every time I hear one of those little broken hoops rings as it hits the ground, an angel gets a colonoscopy.

It was at that moment that I realized I had been ignoring my old friend. It was a difficult decision to list the -6 for sale and I dealt with the pain of it partially by starting to step away emotionally. Which is to say, I lost interest in working on it. That would have to change - this time I would not be replacing the broken hinge strip with another hinge strip. No, this time I would do what I should have done ages ago: I would add a metal plate to the bottom half, put some nutplates in it, and match drill the top half so that it could be screwed into place. That would be a far more robust solution and would (in theory) solve the problem of the broken hinge strips. This would, of course, mean that I would have to divert my attention away from the RV-12 canopy for awhile. So be it.

Only one of the four hinge strips was broken, but they all needed to come out. Drilling a metal rivet out of fiberglass is tricky - the bit senses the fiberglass and much prefers to drill through that than metal.

The inner edges needed to be cleaned up. It seems that the original builder didn't trust the rivets to hold and smooshed some epoxy in there too. The little belt sander that I bought for working on the RV-12 canopy sure came in handy!

Meanwhile, Pete was removing the canopy strap so we could put new rubber on it.

Using peel ply for the first time ever made me wonder why I had never done it before. It was a great way to make sure I got a nice flat epoxy surface to work with. In the past, I've always had to try to sand a bumpy surface smooth and it never really worked out very well.

Aircraft Spruce sells aluminum in much larger chunks that I actually needed.

So the RV-6 is fixed, and just in time for a beautiful Native American summer. Hopefully I'll get some flying in to cheer me up. I'm pretty despondent over the loss of my little red Miata, which is a completely different story.

The Funk

2011-10-01T16:30:00.022-04:00

I've been in a bit of a funk all week. It happens now and then and I've found through the years that the only cure for it is time. I'm not always sure what triggers a funk, but this time I have a pretty good idea. I know that I'm in a funk because I lose interest in all things aviation. In this case, that means that I have done no work whatsoever on either the broken RV-6 or the partially built RV-12. I told myself that I was just waiting for parts to come in, which was true, but there were things that I could have been doing in preparation.

For me to explain the funk, you have to know a few things about being a pilot in a population where that is still relatively rare. First, you have to know that people for some reason always want to talk to you about airplane crashes if they know you're a pilot. They somehow believe that pilots will always have an interest in accidents and will always have some insight into the cause. They believe this because it happens to be true, but that's beside the point. Having an interest and an insight is not the same as wanting to talk about it. Not by a long shot. Pilots take a personal interest in accidents and attempt to discern a cause because they want (need) to build a barrier around their own concerns that it could happen to them.

For example, I got a lot of questions about the P-51 crash at the Reno air races. As tragic as that incident was, it is not one that causes me great concern at a personal level. It is unlikely that I will find myself flying at very low altitude and at very high speeds anytime soon. Still... it can be draining to be constantly questioned about it. I have a fairly good idea what caused it, but I have no desire to try to explain it to someone that doesn't even know what a trim tab is.

Other accidents hit closer to home. A few years ago, a picture of an RV-7 that had crashed, killing both occupants, appeared in the local paper. It was a very disturbing picture; the plane had gone straight in and there was nothing identifiable left other than the tail cone sticking out of the ground. I was sitting in the break room at work surrounded by a group of co-workers while one of our temporary clericals was reading the paper.

"Who in their right mind would fly around in a homemade airplane?" she asked.

Dead silence around the table. Finally someone chirped up:

"You want to take that one, Dave?"

I politely declined.

The 'homemade' thing came up again this week in a most unpleasant way. I was moments away from going into a meeting on tuesday morning when I received a message from a friend. He sent me a link to a local news article that was headlined "Homemade Airplane Crashes," thinking that I might want to correct them on their incorrect usage of the word 'homemade' to describe an experimental home built airplane. I sneaked a quick glance at the article and learned that an RV-10 had crashed in southeast Ohio, resulting in serious injuries to the two occupants, one of whom was named Richard Gray.

I have to tell you about Rick Gray. Back when I was thinking about trading in my four seat Tampico and buying an RV-6, Rick was kind enough to give me a ride in his award-winning -6. When co-pilot Egg was terribly upset about changing planes, Rick also gave her a ride in his plane. I'll never forget meeting her at the airplane just after they landed to see how it went. Her smile was a mile wide as she told me how much fun it was, and that "he lands a lot better than you, too!" It is a testament to the quality of man that Rick is that I never heard another thing about that landing comment. I'm not such a man; I would have ribbed him about it mercilessly had the situation been reversed.

Through the years of learning to fly and maintain the -6, Rick has always been ready to offer words of advice. It was Rick that I talked to about my interest in starting to build the -12. We spent 45 minutes on the phone taking things over when it came time to list the -6 for sale.

I had a lot of trouble concentrating in that meeting.

I've since had updates on his condition and it seems that he will make a full recovery, but I can't push this incident to the back of my mind like I could with the P-51. Rick's RV-10 accident happened on a test flight of a recently completed airplane. Coincidentally, my flying friend Wingman Ted recently had a similar incident. This hits close to home - I will be test flying my own airplane in the near future. This is a sobering thought indeed, and it has been on my mind quite a bit this week. Faced with that, a broken RV-6 cowl that I don't know how to fix, and the daunting prospect of the canopy fiberglass work on the RV-12 on the horizon, my mood has been somewhat dark.

I'm feeling markedly better today. Co-pilot Egg and I did a few hours of volunteer work at the Mid-Ohio Food Bank this morning. We were assigned a position in the meat sorting area, and through the luck of the draw we ended up manning the pork table. It started slowly, but it soon became apparent that pork was definitely where the action was. By the end of the shift, we had sorted and boxed three full palettes of pork. The next closest was poultry with just slightly more than one. While it isn't (or shouldn't be, anyway, but I yam what I yam) a competition, it was gratifying that 5,000 of the 7,000 pounds of meat processed came through our station.

We were done with our second palette before Poultry was done with their first:

Tomorrow will see the resumption of work on the airplanes. Blunderbuss Pete (formerly known as Cadillac Pete, right up until the moment he showed up at sporting clays with skeet chokes in his shotgun) will be meeting me in the morning for a day's worth of repairing and/or building.

I think it will do me wonders.

Not much to cheer about

2011-09-25T08:07:00.027-04:00

It's been one of those weekends. Driving home from the paying gig an Friday afternoon, I felt the usual small uplift in mood that precedes a couple days of not having to deal with the traffic and other associated hassles that come from having to interact with the rest of humanity. Nope, weekends usually offer up the promise of minimal computer help desk issues (supporting a handful of family/friends with their computer problems is so much easier than supporting three dozen), quiet relaxation around the house with the family, and a chance for some gratifying work on the airplane. It's the latter, I think, that clears my mind the most.

The paying job is probably better than most for providing some level of "job well done" satisfaction, but it's all so... intangible. I'll spend hours developing an eloquent solution for someone else's work need, and every now and then spend even more hours re-doing it because they didn't like the result. I also spend hours adding in little convenience factors (remembering window sizes and positions, configuration settings, etc.) that they won't even notice as these little gems smooth out their work day. That's all well and good, but at the end of the day I have nothing to show for it. There's nothing that I can touch and feel, nothing that I can step back and take a critical look at and think, "Nicely done," and to be perhaps overly honest, nothing that I can say that I did for myself. It is for these reasons that I look forward to the weekends.

All of that was torn asunder Friday evening when the Co-owner and I received a phone call from Co-pilot Egg as we were driving home from picking up dinner at a new restaurant near by. The dinner stop in itself was an exercise in patience-taxing frustration as they lost our order and we spent twenty minutes waiting for them to get their act together. Now that wasn't time wasted, mind you. It gave me plenty of time for one of my favorite things to do at a new restaurant, which is to find misspellings in the menu. In this case, I chuckled over 'Hot Gralic Chichen,' but I laughed out loud when I got to 'Garlic Fog Legs.' You know what they say about fog legs: they taste just like chichen!

Anyway, I pretty much knew what the problem with Egg was as soon as I heard her voice. Pretty much any time she's crying her eyes out, it means something has taken a turn for the worse in a relationship. Unfortunately, that was the case this time as well. Her boyfriend, Mr. Case, had called it quits. Some of the Dads of daughters reading this will understand me when I say that this was not one of the "Oh, good!" break-ups for me; no, this is one of the break-ups where I feel like I've been dumped too. I really liked this one. And I have to say, the kid had class. None of this texting or phone call stuff for him - he told her in person, and he stayed with her until we could get home. That could not have been easy.

So, it's a weekend of emotional turmoil in the house, a situation that I responded to in my tried and true manner: I got out of here! I escaped to the hangar with the hope of making some good progress on the canopy. I've been muddling through one of those little jobs that I always underestimate. It seemed easy enough (I say that so often that I ought to create an acronym for it): there are two little plastic blocks that get mounted on the front of the roll bar, their raison d'etre being as mundane as their appearance: they do nothing but ensure that the canopy isn't brought down so out of alignment by a careless pilot or passenger that the canopy skirts get caught up on the fuselage sides.

The little bit of fabrication required should have been trivial; all I had to do was drill two holes through each of the two plastic blocks. The problem came from one of those little mistakes Van's makes in the plans and steadfastly refuses to fix. Consider this image:

Note that the width of the block is 1/2". Note that the holes are drawn as being positioned right on the centerline. Note that 3/8" from an edge is not going to put that hole on the centerline. Normally I'd just assume that either the drawing or the measurement was in error, and I was leaning heavily to the measurement being in the wrong. Just to be sure, though, I went home and checked on the Van's Air Force forum to see if any of my building peers had run into the same issue. I searched the archives for 'canopy blocks' and found one mention of them, but it had to do with how much material would need to be removed to ensure clearance from an inconveniently positioned nut on the side of the canopy.

I went ahead and posted a query and got a reply from one person that said he had faced the same issue and decided to position the holes on the centerline. All had worked out well for him. Safe in the knowledge that I could proceed without undue risk, I completed the drilling of the blocks. He also mentioned that he had needed to cut away quite a bit of material to get the needed clearance from the inconvenient nuts and he was right: I had to cut away quite a bit of the corner of the block. I tried removing a little at a time, but finally just bowed to the inevitable and sliced off the whole corner.

And, at long last, it was time to start the fiberglass fairing around the canopy. This starts out by shaping a couple of pieces of styrofoam into a shape that will provide a nicely rounded surface for the fiberglass to bond to and cover up the "coves" where the canopy frame forward arms reside when the canopy is closed.

The blocks get trimmed to fit into the cove. The bandsaw made short work of that:

There's going to be epoxy flying around and some of it will drip. So, masking is called for.

This block didn't fit like it was supposed to. The plans implied that this back edge would be flush with the fuselage skin. Not so much:

Pete and I had a meeting and determined that it was pretty safe to just cut away the offending material.

The bolts that the canopy pivots around must remain accessible, so a hole needs to be cut in the foam to allow access to them. The position of the hole is marked by pressing the foam against the bolt head.

The hole gets drilled out with a 7/8" Unibit. My Unibit only goes as large as 6/8" (3/4" for you mathematicians), but that was no problem. The foam is so soft that I was able to spin the bit by hand, then add the additional 1/8" with a small file. We're then supposed to use a Sharpie marker to trace the outline of the upper fuselage against the inboard side of the foam. We had two problems with that: a Sharpie wouldn't fit between the canopy frame, and we couldn't decide what precisely was meant by "upper fuselage." Looking ahead a few pages, it appears that the foam doesn't go any higher that the edge of the canopy frame. I just used a small screwdriver to trace the edge of the canopy frame.

The bandsaw did the rest.

One squirt each of the resin and hardener, plus a couple of tablespoons of flox made a nice paste that was used to glue the blocks in place.

A Tale of Two Canopies

2011-09-18T16:12:00.004-04:00

Canopies: they are the best of airplane enclosures, they are the worst of canopy enclosures, they are works of wisdom, they are works of foolishness, the are the epoch of in-flight visibility, they are the epoch of build complexity, they provide gobs of Light, their construction brings days of Darkness, they are the spring of hope, built just before the winter of despair....

with abject apologies to Mr. Dickens. I have two to deal with, one being attached to a flying RV-6, the other being a recalcitrant detriment to an RV-12 ever taking flight.

The RV-6 canopy was not mine to build and has, if the truth be told, been pretty reasonable when it comes to maintenance chores. Basically over the years it has all come down to cleaning the bugs off of it now and then. Until yesterday, that is.

Yesterday was one of those days that you wish you could squeeze into a ZipLoc back and put on the snack shelf in the pantry to be parceled out as a tasty snack every now and then when the weather gets bad.

I had to fly.

I had to fly!

The choice of destinations was easy: my Dad's birthday is next week and through the accident of ordering a hand drill whose price was lower than the $25 minimum for free shipping from Amazon, I had on hand a book that just happened to be the Y in the equation X + Y = $25.01, where X = hand drill. And a good book it is, too, being one of the multitude of means available (yet ignored) to lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices to help them determine just exactly what the Founders meant when the plain English that they used in writing our Constitution requires "interpretation." Of course, one cannot expect them to be in need of Amazon.com shipping charge padding in precisely the amount needed to pick up a copy of the Federalist Papers or, in my case, the thousands of words shared between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

So it was that I found myself descending into the pattern at Darke County (KTZR) International with 180 mph showing on the speedometer, wondering just what in the world that horrendous slapping/buzzing sound emanating from the bow of the canopy just behind me was. Upon landing I was quickly able to discern the problem: the airplane, which is mad at me for trying to sell it, had decided that it would quite willingly trade away some of the weather stripping around the edge of the back windshield simply in order to irritate me. A ten inch section of the stripping had worked its way loose and was flapping in the hurricane force winds that come with the awesome speeds the RV-6 can attain.

I didn't want to fly it back that way, but an interim solution was easily at hand: I "borrowed" a length of duct tape from the local mechanic. Here it is, still in place and unruffled after the return flight.

There is simply nothing that duct tape can't do, with the possible exception of surgical suturing.

Sunday morning dawned equally gorgeous and thus seemed perfect for the work of finishing up the mounting of the canopy to its frame, and if all went well, the installation of the canopy latch too. Pete was along to help again, so I figured we'd get these little jobs done in no time. The first thing to do was to rivet on the canopy skirts. That took very little time since, as is the norm when riveting, the job went three times as fast with two people working. After that we had to install the screws, nuts, and washers that attach the canopy sides to the frame.

I thought the same kind of division of labor as used in the riveting would ernder the same time-saving results, but it didn't quite work out as well. As Pete was on one side of the canopy getting the screws and nuts in place for me to tighten, I would be on the other side tightening the ones that he had already started. It worked well enough, but every now and then the movements of the canopy resulting from his work would get out of synch with the coffee palsy my hands get after a large McDonald's cuppa and I wouldn't be able to get the screwdriver aligned with the moving screw.

I had the shop radio tuned to the local NPR classical music station in an attempt to elevate the culture of the shop, but that only led to such high level discourse as:

Me: "You know, all of this classical music sounds the same."

Pete: Silence.

Me: "No, really. There's only one piece of classical music that can be readily identified by 99.999% of people."

Pete: "The 1812 Overture?"

Me: "Hmm, no, I was thinking Beethoven's Fifth, but you might be right about the 1812 Overture too. Although I imagine most people don't get it until the cannon fires."

See? More cultured already!

It was right after that burst of intellectualism that we noticed something. Pete pointed out that the directions called for me to "cut off the threads that protrude beyond the end of the nut " on the most aft screw on each side. Fortunately, we were all brained-up on classical music and recognized the word "protrude." Still, it seemed odd to cut off all of the threads, what with the standard airworthiness measurement being at least two threads ~~sticking out~~ protruding from a lock nut.

A closer reading showed that we were to consult the figure on the following page for more information. It's good that we did!

That was a job for the Dremel.

That finished the mounting of the canopy, so we pressed on with the installation of the latch. The first thing to do there was to insert the D-handle through the tube in the canopy frame. If the handle was loose enough in the tube that it could rotate on its own accord with no more motive force than the weight of its handle, I was to "carefully pinch" the ends of the tube. The handle did, in fact, rotate quite freely, so I proceeded to pinch the end of the tube, but apparently not carefully enough since the handle would then no longer fit into the tube at all.

This left me with the perplexing quandary of how exactly one goes about un-pinching a tube. As it turns out, that can be accomplished by inserting the end of a large drill bit slightly into the tube and using it as a kind of pry bar to separate the sides of the tube back out. It might also require a little cleaning up with a small file. After fiddling with it for a little while, I got it to a state where the handle would fit through the tube and turn only with physical motive force.

All that remained was to attach the handle, which I had placed somewhere where I wouldn't lose it. And we all know what that means. As we were hunting for it, I cupped a hand to my ear and said, "Oh, there it is! It's in the radio!"

To which Pete, quite naturally, said, "Huh?"

"Oh, never mind," I replied, "that's Handel, not 'handle'."

And that was that for any hope of elevated culture.

That done, the matching latch parts needed to be installed on the roll bar. The first part is a Teflon-esque plastic block that will provide a soft-ish latching mechanism for the handle to latch into. The holes in the roll bar need to be tapped to 8-32 to provide two holes for the screws that will hold the latching block in place to screw into. This operation entails a number of steps that seem somewhat make-work and silly until you realize that the entire purpose of them is to get the tap perfectly straight as it works its way into the roll bar. One wonders why they don't just tell us why we're doing odd things now and then.

That was all going swimmingly (even though we had yet to figure out why we were going through all of the seemingly silly steps) until it came time to cleco the latching block into the two holes in the roll bar that were mysteriously left open wwwaaayyyy back on page 24-05.

I had left the wrong two holes open:

In my defense, when I was wwwaaayyyy back on page 24-05 I didn't have the drawings and parts that I have now, and the quality of the drawing that I had to work from was somewhat less than could be desired.

So, out came the mistakenly placed rivets and in went the new. Screwing and tapping and more screwing ensued.

We did a quick test fit of the latching handle and found that it wouldn't fit into the latch block. The plans allow a .020" removal of material from the latch, so I worked on it for a little while with a small file.

Upon a second test, I made an interesting discovery. I discovered that it is possible to get the canopy latch to latch, but to be completely unable to get it to un-latch. Luckily for me, I had a Sharpie(tm) marker in there with me and was thus able to communicate with the outside world:

The latch proved to extraordinarily difficult to get working properly, but we eventually tracked the problem down to the outside handle holding the D-handle up too high. That was caused primarily by a slightly off-center drilling of the screw hole that holds it onto the shaft of the D-handle. There were a number of possible solutions that we kicked around, all of which involved re-ordering parts or trying to remove material from the parts on hand. A consultation of the Van's online store showed the following:

Ruin this part: Buy a new one for:

plastic block $8.50
outside handle $16.00
canopy frame don't even ask

Neither of us wanted to be considered cheap, nor did either of us want to re-build the entire canopy on a new frame so we decided to concentrate our efforts on the handle. With that level of decision-making prowess brought to bear, we soon decided that I would remove 1/16" off of the bottom of the outside handle. The band saw was perfectly capable of that, although that handle got so hot that I was able to use it to finally defrost the little freezer portion of the hangar fridge. Still, it solved the problem!

Everything else fit perfectly and was in reasonable alignment. I was happy to see that the canopy skirts overlapped the fuselage sides perfectly and didn't require the installation of any spacers.

There are a couple of more little plastic blocks to install, and then the fiberglassing begins. This was the point where I had decided that I'd place my order for the engine, but I think I'm going to hold off for another couple of weeks. I don't foresee the fiber glass work going all that quickly.

Just screwing around

2011-09-14T19:17:00.003-04:00

I officially start dreading winter on June 21st of each year, mostly because I have a thirty-five mile commute each way to and from the paying job, and nothing can mess up and already annoying drive like winter weather. But I also dread the onset of the latter half of the year because of the loss of evening light. Working under the single hangar light is a dreary, mood-sapping thing, and the encroaching shortened days are nothing that I look forward to with any sense of well-being.

So, this is the season of shortened work sessions on weeknights. It's bite-sized jobs I'm looking for this time of year, or larger jobs that can be sliced up into smaller segments. This job slicing is what I'm doing with the job of mounting of the canopy on the canopy frame.

I'm getting a little ahead of things, though. Before starting on the mounting of the canopy, Pete and I had to backtrack a little bit to finish the installation of the locating tabs that I failed to do before removing the frame for painting. It wasn't a particularly difficult job and wasn't too long before we were ready to start the canopy mounting.

Looking at the drawing in the plans, it looked like there were a dozen exotically nomenclated (why yes, I do believe I did just now invent that word) rivets, screws, nuts, and washers involved. In reality I think it was actually only three different types of rivets, but it was a somewhat daunting drawing nonetheless. In situations like this I often leverage my skills in the occult to divine the meaning buried in the hieroglyphs of the plans, usually through haruspicy (no, I didn't make that one up) but as luck would have it, the oftentimes over-industrious co-owner had accidentally disposed of the leftover chicken entrails that I had set aside for precisely this purpose.

I figured we'd just have to muddle through with whatever raw human intellect we could summon forth, but luck was on my side, albeit at first glance it seemed to be a misfortune. Having been somewhat careless in the setting down of the canopy frame on the workbench, I managed to spill my container of LP4-3 rivets. It only took a glance for me to see the power of the dark forces at work: it would be just like reading tea leaves:

It only took a few minutes of divination to figure out the solution to the rivet problem. As usual, the answer was.....

...let Pete figure it out.

While he busied himself with that, I installed the row of screws, washers, and locknuts across the aft bow of the frame.

This time of year is also a busy time for my other writing tasks as requests for game reviews start to pour in as the Christmas shopping season starts to wind up. It'll probably be a few days before we take the next bite out of the canopy work.

Distraction Season

2011-09-11T17:13:00.005-04:00

Do you remember the classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck vignette where they are each trying to convince Elmer Fudd that it is open hunting season for the type of animal each is not?

Bugs contends that it's duck season, and Daffy insists that it's rabbit season, up until Bugs switches up the order and tricks Daffy into convincing Mr. Fudd that it's duck season.

I'm here to tell you that they both had it wrong: it is, in fact, distraction season.

Fall is one of the best times of year, as far as I'm concerned, but it often offers up a veritable cornucopia of things that distract me from building the RV-12. Co-pilot Egg is back in school for her senior year, and that brought a school open house and the never-ending chore of trying to get her started on her college applications.

It's also football season, and that means Saturday afternoons either stressing through agonizing losses or yawning through complete blow-outs. I suspect that we're in for more of the former than the latter this year, although Saturday's game was set up to provide the type of exciting down-to-the-wire finish that makes it worth sitting through the game. With a minute and a half left and a five point lead, O$U had to stop the Toledo Rockets from scoring. It was beginning to look grim as Toledo continued to march down the field, but with 90 seconds to go the co-owner, who was sitting in front of a laptop computer, blurted out, "Don't worry; we win."

When you consider that I leave the room after a TV show finishes because I don't want to see or here the scenes from next week, well....

It's also shooting season. That means Sunday mornings are more often than not going to include either sporting clays or skeet shooting. It was sporting clays today. You may remember that my scoring trending as of the end of the season last year was horribly downward. I had one really good round of 21/50 when I bought my new shotgun, but the rounds after that were 9/50 and 8/50. It was obvious to me that the only strategy that worked was to buy a new shotgun every week, but the co-owner, not unreasonably, put the kabosh on that idea. No, I'd have to improve the old-fashioned way: practice. You may also remember that I did just that by buying and using my own trap. The last time I practiced, I was able to string together series of ten to fifteen hits before missing a clay. That practice paid off today with a respectable 16/50. There's obviously a lot of room for improvement, but I was happy with such a reasonably good start.

Squeezed into all of that activity was watching one of the best Formula 1 races of the year at the historic and incredible track in Monza, Italy, and doing some small jobs on the RV-12.

The next big step in the RV-12 process is the attachment of the canopy to the canopy frame, but there are some smaller jobs to be knocked out first. The first of those was the fabrication of the handle that will allow the latching and unlatching of the canopy from outside the airplane. Having not been to the hangar for a full week, I had to spend a few minutes working up mental acuity through the expedient of ingesting caffeine and perusing the plans.

It starts out easily enough. The first thing to be done was to measure and place a spot in the very middle of the handle. Finding and marking these spots is a common task in the RV-12 build, and the purpose of them is to make it graphically obvious how far off-center the hole you will eventually drill will be.

The handle was to be placed on the steel rod extending from the handle assembly that will be used to latch and unlatch the canopy from inside the airplane. As usual, the hole that Van's drilled into the handle is exactly the same size as the rod that's supposed to fit into it, which means.... it won't.

Fit, that is.

In order to make it fit, I resorted to using my Harbor Freight heat gun (Harbor Freight, The Home of Cheap Electric Tools That Are Hotter Than the Sun, Sometimes Deliberately) to expand the aluminum handle so that it could be tapped into place on the rod.

That allowed me to drill the requisite hole through the rod and further into the handle.

Then, the most dreaded of words: "Disassemble." That, in a word, sucked.

I had one heckuva time getting that handle back off of there, even with the assistance of the heating tool. Once I was able to finally get the handle back off, I followed the suggestion of Van's to optionally round off the corners.

With that done, the handle gets cast aside in preparation for ultimately losing it, while attention shifts to the painting of the canopy frame. I've been having trouble getting paint to stick to the material that is used in the roll bar and canopy frame, so this time I gave it a good scratching up with some 220 grit sandpaper.

Then it was back to the little jobs. There are a couple of plastic blocks that get mounted into the canopy frame that will act as centering guides when the canopy is being closed. They're held in with two 8-32 screws each, and the holes for those screws needed to be tapped. At long last, I have found a material that is softer than a Harbor Freight tap!

Here is the tab that will be mounted to the canopy frame, sitting down in the slot. Why is it sitting here and not on the canopy frame? Well, there was a step for that - the tab gets aligned and match-drilled to the canopy frame while it is still installed on the airplane; I thought that since I didn't want this tab to get painted, I would remove the canopy frame for painting first, then install the tab. In hindsight, this was stupid. It's not like I don't have any masking tape, after all. I removed the canopy frame and painted it, then realized that I needed Pete's help to put the frame back on the airplane in order to correctly position this tab. Once that's done, the canopy frame will then immediately get removed again to attach the canopy to it.

Rather than pout about it, I pressed on with the fabrication of the little tabs that will act as lift handles for opening and closing the canopy. They start out as 1 13/16" pieces of aluminum angle, but through a few steps become nice looking little handles.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

2011-09-04T18:23:00.005-04:00

There are events during the building of an RV-12 that have a such a bad reputation for being difficult and/or having the potential for the destruction of expensive parts that builders will go to extreme lengths to postpone, delay, and avoid having to do them. The drilling of the canopy is one of them. Having run out of excuses and having read every forum posting or blog entry on the topic that I could find, there were no more potential procrastination possibilities pursuant to preventing the performance of this particular plexiglass(tm) penetrating project to be found. In other words, today was the day that we would drill the canopy.

My perspicacious preliminary perusal of pertinent personal logs on the subject had provided me with a shopping list of items to procure. That list included two plexiglass(tm) bits (9/64" to fill the demand for a #27, and 1/8" to stand in for a #30), a zero-flute countersink bit, and a hand drill.

The recommendations for these items were gleaned from the dozens of horror stories and how-to postings that I read through. They all came down to one thing: drilling the canopy plexiglass(tm) without causing any cracks. I can't say with any degree of certainty whether or not all of the preparatory angst was unwarranted, or whether all of the breathless descriptions of the monsters that lie embedded within the very fibers of the plexiglass(tm) were fabrications, but I do know this: the first hole was drilled with zero drama and zero damage:

As were every single one of the remaining holes:

The days and weeks of stress and worry were for naught. Although, I must add that this gratifying result could in fact be completely because of the stress and worry that drove me to spend all that time researching hints and tips. It's kind of like all those jobs that were "created or saved" with government stimulus dollars: it cannot be proven, nor can it be disproven. All that matters in the end is that we are where we are, and where we are is done with drilling the canopy! Hurrah!!!

After a brief celebration, Painfully Pragmatic Pete pointed out that there was plenty more work to be done. (Well, not really, but I'm having a hard time breaking this irritating alliteration habit.) The holes that had been drilled were in the front and back of the canopy, but the sides remained to be done. The canopy sides are match-drilled through the holes of the aluminum side skirts. The plans describe the correct placement of the skirts:

Which is all well and good, except for the fact that there is no such thing as an F-1277B, as can be seen in the parts inventory:

I just assumed that the not-quite-as-famous-as-E=MC2 Einsteinian equation F-1277-L + F-1277-R = F-1277B was in play. In other words, the drawing in the plans looked like the skirt should be placed flush against the front edge of the turtledeck skins, so that's what I did.

The first set of match-drilled holes was through the skirt and into the canopy frame:

You'll note that the front of the skirt is curled to better fit against the side of the fuselage. This was one of those vanishingly rare occasions where Van's did not do the bending/curving for us. We did it through the somewhat simple expedient of just bending it around a paint can:

One thing that I noticed when I was clecoing the skirts into place was that they weren't sitting flat against the sides of the canopy frame. It didn't take much by way of Sherlockian deduction to find the cause:

I decided to do something about it. That "something" involved one of the wickedest-looking Dremel attachments I've ever seen outside of a dentist's office:

I didn't grind it all the way down flush to the canopy frame, but the amount that I did remove had a very beneficial affect on the way the skirts looked:

There will apparently be some fasteners in the skirts that need to be flush because the plans then had me dimple five of the holes in each skirt and add a matching series of countersunk holes in the frame.

The next step was written by the unemployed stand-up comic that Van's brings in as contract labor now and then:

Always the first to detect an opportunity to relax while pretending to work, Pete quickly volunteered to perform the role of "non-claustrophobic friend/spouse/child":

The N-C F/S/C is in there to hold a block of wood against the thin aluminum braces while the HBWS (hot, bothered working stiff) match-drills through the canopy skirts, the canopy itself, and the braces. To be fair, it's a pretty important job and it was only due to the cold front that passed through last night that it was even remotely comfortable locked into the enclosed cockpit. As recently as yesterday it would have been unbearable in there. I'm not sure how I would have been able to tolerate it after Pete quickly volunteered to be the HBWS...

After the drilling was done, I decided that I had to try sitting in there myself. This would be the first time I'd get to sit in the plane with the canopy down - it was perfect for pretending that I was flying a fog-blanketed approach to minimums after a complete loss of my radio and transponder:

All that was left to do was final-drill the (approx.) #30 holes in the canopy to their final (approx.) #27 size. I think the additional diameter is added to allow for expansion and contraction of the canopy. In any event, this is a step that came with dire warnings from many of the postings that I read. I more than once came across stern admonitions against the very idea of ever enlarging a hole drilled into plexiglass(tm). Somewhere in my meanderings, though, I came across a suggestion to use a hand drill for this. The slow turning speed and the better tactile feel of the hand drill would allow the enlargement of the holes with a vastly reduced risk of causing cracks.

I was true. I could feel the bit beginning to bite into the plexiglass(tm) as I carefully turned the crank handle. Slow and steady won the race: all of the holes were enlarged with no damage.

Once that was done, it was a simple matter to use the zero-flute countersink bit to deburr the holes in the plexiglass(tm) and countersink the holes across the front edge of the canopy for the flush rivets that will soon be installed through them.

Iraq Enna Grynnndah

2011-09-03T12:03:00.001-04:00

Iraq Enna Grynnndah?? What's that mean?

Well, I'll get to that. Today was the first day back to work on the airplane since my finger surgery on Tuesday. I finally got that annoying bump removed from my finger (and to alleviate the suspense, I will tell you right now that my pants stayed on for the entire operation) but it turned out to be a bigger ordeal than I had expected. It seemed to me that it would be a simple matter of cutting a slot in the skin around the hardened little pellet in there and removing it, but apparently these little pellets put down roots. At anyone that has ever felled a tree can tell you, it's the removal of the roots that's the hard part. There's plenty of digging involved in that, and that's all I'm going to say on the topic in deference to my own squeamishness, if not yours.

In any event, I had a pretty sore finger for a few days, along with a bulky bandage that made it difficult to do much of anything with my right hand. Between that and the 95+ degree days, I thought it prudent to just stay inside and recuperate for a few days.

With today having further promise of oppressive heat and humidity in the afternoon and the first game of the 2011 season for the mighty tattooed Ohio $tate Buckeyes coming on the TV at 1:00, Cadillac Pete and I decided on an early morning work session. The goal for today was to finalize the trimming required to get the canopy to fit. Having had a few days to think about it, I went to the hangar today convinced that the secret was to simply not be afraid to remove material. That said, plexiglass shares a trait with fiberglass: it is easy to remove material. Unlike fiberglass, however, it does not share the salutary trait of being easy to replace material. Once it's off, it's off to stay. An incremental approach would be prudent, even with the generous 1/4" tolerance allowed.

When we last left the canopy, we were having a hard time getting it to sit well on the frame. As we would push on one area to get it to seat against the frame, it would bulge out in other areas, very much like those Walmart shoppers you see strolling the aisles in clothes that even the most optimistic and sartorially challenged person should be able to discern as being three sizes too small. We had been concentrating our efforts on trimming the back edge, mostly because that was only only "adjustment" mentioned in the plans.

Today we decided that it was becoming apparent that some of the other edges would need to be trimmed too, particularly the left and right edges that sit on the canopy frame. I got busy grinding, while preternaturally patient Pete paced back and forth pragmatically pondering the perplexing problem of the persistently misplaced front edge. For some reason, I felt that the front edge was sacrosanct and that any adjustments would/should be made elsewhere. Again, I point to the plans mentioning only that the back edge may need to be trimmed.

As I was grinding away, my mind wandered back to an event in my past. One of my early professional jobs after I had finished my five year enlistment in the Air Force was touring around the country assisting in systems upgrades at Continental Insurance offices. Having had two overseas assignments during my military years, I was used to living in areas where I didn't speak the language. Still, I was surprised one day when I was working a job in New Hampshire and a group of locals suggest we go to lunch with them to get "Iraq Enna Grynnndah."

"A what??"

When they said it more slowly, I was able to pick out individual words, but it didn't help. They were proposing that we go get "a rack and a grinder." Further questioning revealed that they wanted to go get some beers and a submarine sandwich, aka hoagie, aka grinder.

After three or four grinding sessions, each followed with yet another trial fit, we were still having trouble getting the canopy to sit correctly on the frame. Pete's pacing had produced a pertinent proposal, though: trim the front edge.

And that's exactly what we did. The canopy now fits perfectly.

The secret, then, to precisely positioning a precocious and persistently problematic canopy is to procrastinate for a suitable period prior to putting aside preconceived notions regarding the permissibility of paring away various parts of the product.

It's touch and go

2011-08-29T20:58:00.005-04:00

I can't help feeling that this canopy is going to end up being a very slow motion train wreck. While part of me is sure that it will all work out, the part of me that writes checks to replace munged up parts is convinced that I am only one step away from ruining a very expensive piece of plexiglass.

On the plus side, I've won my last two Words with Friends games, so there is that. The last one was touch and go to the very end. I was behind by a dozen or so points with only the letters in my pile remaining to play. I scored fifteen points with a well-placed US, with the 'S' combining with QUADS to produce SQUADS. Up by three, but convinced that I would be overtaken in the stretch to lose by a nose. And nothing left in my quiver but a single, solitary N. Sure enough, my opponent's next play had me down by eight. But there it was, sitting there all ripe and ready for plucking: SEW. With the N to make it SEWN, I took a one point lead and ended the game!

Okay, back to the canopy. As we left the saga, the canopy was in place on the frame but needed to be trimmed for length. It was too long and the excess length was keeping the back edge from sitting flush against the rear window. Taking a hint from Don, soprano vocalist and 12 string lead guitar of The Jackson Two, I braved the maddening crowds at the Harbor Freight (Home of Low Performance Air Tools) sidewalk sale to pick up an air-driven mini belt sander. It's a cute little thing and offers nimble control and a very comfortable (read: "slow") cutting pace.

I shaved off just enough to get the canopy to sit flush. More will have to be removed later.

With the canopy back in place, we tried to mark the tangent line on the front cross bar to find the correct place to drill the rivet holes that the front of the canopy will attach to. The idea (according the the folks at Van's) is to press the canopy against a loosely attached piece of masking tape; they theorize that this will somehow show the correct line. Well, not so much. Admittedly, I was using tape that I bought at Harbor Freight, the Home of Non-sticking Except Where You Don't Want It To tape. Figuring that the tape could use a little help, I resorted to using some blue chalk rubbed on a piece of tape inside the canopy.

A great idea (that I stole from a web forum posting somewhere), and it would have worked, too, except for the inconvenient fact that the tape was also blue.

Still, enough of the chalk was discernible (if the light was just right, and if I viewed it at exactly the correct angle, and if the chicken that I sacrificed at the little altar that I keep in a deep, dark corner of the hangar actually was a virgin) to provide a just-good-enough path to trace with a Sharpie(tm).

With the line to follow, it was a simple matter to drill the #40 pilot holes.

The canopy still didn't fit precisely right, though, but I figured that I had pushed my luck far enough for one day.

I had considered going out for some more work on it again tonight but the weather was far too good. Rather than stress out about the canopy, I decided instead to go fly the RV-6 for a little while. My landings have been pretty shoddy so I decided that a few touch and goes would do me good. We had almost no wind, startlingly clear air, and moderate temperatures to go with the relatively high pressure. In other words, perfect weather for the airplane and pilot both to excel. The only fly in the ointment was the hot air balloon (aka 'hazard to aerial navigation') that insisted on parking just off the end of the runway. No problem for Papa, though: with an empty pattern, we could scream down the runway at ten feet of altitude until we reached 120 mph on the speedometer. A brisk turning pull-up before the end of the runway had us reaching pattern altitude at midfield downwind just as we rolled out of the 180 degree turn. A nice landing right on the numbers left us most of the runway to just do it again, and again, and again, and again.

Five touch and goes in .22 on the tach: that's pretty economical flying!