Things that go Huh? in the night

It sometimes surprises me to find myself suddenly awake in the middle of the night wondering about some trifle or another. It's not so much the broad range of topics that can cross my mind while ostensibly sound asleep, rather it's how critically important even the most trifling thing can seem at the time. A couple of nights ago, I woke up in a near panic because I could not remember having run a string similar to the one that will eventually be used (I'm betting) to pull the stabilator control cables back through the aft bulkhead that would be used to pull the rudder cables. I eventually calmed myself sufficiently to get back to sleep by reminding myself that the tail cone is not yet sealed up. Still, it seemed odd that such a string hadn't been placed at the same time as the stab string. Could I have missed that step somehow in spite of the diligence that I apply to the practice of checking off every step as it's completed?

It wouldn't be until the next evening that I could get out to the hangar to see what was going on. It turned out to be quite simple: there is a step or two required before running the rudder cable string. There are a couple of small brackets whose sole purpose in life is to provide support for a couple of plastic bushings that will ostensibly help guide and protect the rudder cables. In fact, it is the installation of these little brackets that had me out driving in snowy weather on Tuesday night in order to pick up a borrowed 12" #30 drill bit. The directions have us cleco the brackets in place, then match drill a couple of holes using the extended length drill bit. In what turned out to be misplaced faith in the professed need for said drill bit, I braved the slippery roads in order to acquire it before starting the installation of the brackets.

On the plus side, separating the brackets from the now-expected Van's combo-pack allowed me the opportunity to try out my new tool:



Hot knife, it is my pleasure to introduce you to butter! The band saw makes a fast, clean cut that is orders of magnitude better than I have ever been able to accomplish with the tin snips or the hacksaw, and the icing on the cake is the additional excitement that arises from the risk, albeit small, that I could also remove one or more of my lifetime allotment of fingers.

It took a little bit of trial and error along with repeated trips back to the plan book to study the drawings to figure out the correct orientation and placement of the brackets, but as is often the case, it was patently obvious where they belonged once I managed to get them clecoed in:



Finally ready to use the drill bit that I risked life, limb, and automotive sheet metal to attain, I found that I didn't really need it after all. The little Craftsman drill fit in there just fine with my regular sized #30 bit:





Go figure. Someone at Van's apparently owns stock in Acme Extended Length Drill Bit Manufacturing, Inc. Me? I must have missed out on that IPO.

The drilling was the easy part; the spacing of these two rivets was, in a word, bitchy. One of them had to be drilled out and replaced as it rose out of the hole while I was pulling it, which was a first. Blind rivets are usually pretty much fool proof. Of course, when one aspires to be the best fool possible as I do, anything is attainable!

As I retrieved the plastic bushings from the little brown paper bag, I had a horrible flashback to the last bushing I had installed. That would be the 7/16" bushing that was somehow supposed to fit into a 6/16" hole, for those of you that may have missed that little ordeal. It was with great relief that I easily snapped these bushings into the provided orifice. I'm not sure what I would have done had they not fit, but I'm pretty sure it would have involved harsh language and a monumental tantrum.



I'm printing this picture and setting the print on my nightstand tonight, just in case:



Those were the last steps required before a large riveting job on the skins. The timing was perfect as soon-to-be RV-12 builders Don and Kyle were scheduled to arrive for a shop visit just a few hours later. Just let it be said that I have made good use of my high school literary studies, having often leveraged the lesson of Tom Sawyer's clever means of getting other kids to whitewash the fence that his Aunt Polly had instructed him to paint. As it turns out, the only thing easier than blind riveting is having someone else blind rivet for you!

And this is the beauty of the RV-12 in a nutshell. With a "normal" RV, potential builders worry themselves into a froth over not knowing how to drive rivets and wondering if they are even capable of being taught. They make pilgrimages to Oshkosh to attend riveting workshops. They spend hours practicing on scrap metal. The end up drilling out dozens of mis-driven rivets. They sink hundreds of dollars into tools. With blind rivets, if the EAA were to offer a seminar it would take longer to get everyone settled and go through the mandatory don't-blame-us safety briefing than it would to teach the actual operation.

I had each of the visitors pull a couple of rivets under my supervision and then simply turned them loose with a pair of cleco pliers and the air rivet puller. I went and worked on the RV-6, cleaned up the hangar a little bit, and generally made myself scarce while they riveted the entire tail cone. And the best part is, they acted like I was doing them a favor.



Oh, I am soooo good! I wasn't able to convince them to come back for my broom pushing seminar, though. I guess I have my limits.

All kidding aside, it's nice to have neighbors! Don and Kyle will be building their RV-12 down in the area of Jackson, Ohio. That's just a few minutes from Portsmouth, an airport I visit quite frequently. It'll be nice to stop by now and then to see how things are going for them. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure they have a good grasp of riveting fundamentals. They must have pulled a couple of hundred of them with no problems at all.

But the most gratifying thing of all was that those broken skin edges that I was so worried about after having molested them to within an inch of their lives snugged up nice and tight. No worries here:





Which is not to say that I won't be on the look out for other RV builders surreptitiously casting judgmental glances at the skin edges - I will. But I'm much less worried about it than I thought I'd be.

Here's the cone, just about ready to be sealed up:



Amazingly, it seems to weigh about 10 pounds. If the people that ride with us in these airplanes could ever feel how light and flimsy they are during construction, they'd never get near one! It's incredible how much strength they have once they're assembled.

LimaFox Cleco Delivery Service

There were just a few more things to do to finish up the installation of the static ports. Once those were done, two of the last three tail cone skins could be clecoed into place. Which, as it turns out, presented a problem.

As I drove over to the hangar, I couldn't help wondering how painful it was going to be to spend a couple of hours out there working. The concern came from the helpful electronic thermometer in the car that quite blithely informed me that we were enjoying 8, count 'em, 8 degrees of fresh Fahrenheit. In golf that's called a snowman. In everything else that's called, well, it's just called really cold if you want to maintain a family atmosphere in your writing.

All that really remained to be done with the static ports was to finish routing the various hoses and seal the ports with RTV. The former problem I had had with the RTV (which was not having any) had been resolved, but there was a new problem: the R in RTV stands for 'Room', and the T stands for 'Temperature.' And there's the problem: I'm sure Siberian Huskies might consider 8 degrees to be a suitable room temperature, but most of the people that I know insist on defining it as at least 60 degrees more than that. Still, it's bound to get warm at least once between today and the day it actually matters if the RTV has set up, so no worries. On we go.

With the RTV in place, it was just a matter of trimming the 1/8" inside diameter hose to length and plugging the longer part coming from the right static port into a little plastic T fitting, using some of the remaining hose to run a much shorter length from the left static port to the same T fitting, and attaching the 1/4" outside diameter hose that will run its way up to the instrument panel to the third port in the T.



A command decision was required. The instructions that came with the package of static system parts showed one method for attaching the hoses to the T:



The instructions that came with the RV-12 showed a slightly different method:



It was an easy decision; I went with the RV-12 variant. It's not a critical decision anyway. The RV-12 is apparently shaped a little differently than the other RVs and having the 1/4" OD tube coming straight off of the bottom of the T just fits better.

The part of the T that takes the 1/4" OD tube has to first have a 1/4" length of the clear 1/8" Inside Diameter hose applied to it:



That little piece of tube acts as a kind of seal, I think. Apparently the inside diameter of the 1/4" OD tube is too big for the fitting; the small length of clear tube acts as a type of adapter. Easy enough for me to understand, but the 1/4" OD tube was having none of it. It adamantly refused to fit over the clear tube. Fortunately the Cone of Comfort was able to do double duty as the Cone of Coercion. I heated the end of the 1/4" OD tube in front of the heater and was then able to slide it right over the clear tube and onto the T fitting:



Before securing the clear tube with tie wraps, I performed the critical blow test. That entails blowing in one end of the 1/4" OD tube and listening at each static port to ensure that air is making it all of the way through the system. The blow test is not in the plans; I invented it myself, even if only for the caption contest that's in it:



Here it is, all installed and sealed up (eventually, weather depending):





That completed all of the steps that are better accomplished with the tail cone only partially skinned, so I was able to then install the next two skins. I'm sure glad that I ignored the suggestion of 38" tall sawhorses! It was hard enough with the stubby little sawponies I'm using:



I mentioned a problem with clecoing. Here it is:



I'm all out of clecos! Lucky for me, Wingman (and RV-10 builder) Ted was flying out to Indianapolis from his home base in Portsmouth, OH and offered to sidetrack a few miles to drop off 150 more clecos for me to use. And thus was born the LimaFox Cleco Delivery Service, delivering clecos to the needy on a moment's notice:



They were put to good use:





I would have kept working, but the next step called for a couple of pieces that I hadn't prepared yet. So, it was back to the shop to cut apart a couple of little brackets using my new and improved method of cutting apart small brackets:



The band saw makes a much cleaner cut than tin snips or a hacksaw. I wish I had picked one up sooner! You don't have to have a band saw to build an RV-12, but I think it's going to be a welcome addition to the shop.

What you do have to have is a 12" long #30 drill bit. I only have a 12" long #40 drill bit. I'm going to have to borrow the bit I need, and I'm at a stop until I do.

It was pretty cold anyway, even with the heater blowing. It can wait a couple of days.