Wow, what a difference [insert appropriate temporal period here] makes!

It's a trite expression. I'm so tired of hearing it that I actually cringe whenever someone says it. Actually, I think I've moved beyond 'cringe' and now grind my teeth. All of that having been said....

Wow, what a difference a day makes!

Yesterday I enjoyed temperatures in the high 50's accompanied by a light breeze and soft blue skies by shooting a round of sporting clays in the morning and working on the RV-12 wing in the afternoon. The shooting didn't go nearly as well as it did my last time out. You may remember that I had a brand new ("to me," as the impecunious like to say) shotgun last time out, and scored a 22 out of 50 with it. This time around I shot 9. The message here is clear: I need to buy a new shotgun every two weeks.

This morning I drove to work in a Mitty-esque drama that was something akin to flying a B-17 through thirty miles of flak to deliver a load of bombs to the oil fields of New Albany, Ohio. Well, minus the abject, visceral terror of getting blown out of the sky, anyway. With the flashes of lightening in the night sky playing the visual role of flak bursts and the violent slaps against the side of the car from the gusty winds, it was easy to slip into the role of Squadron Commander Dave.

Or it would have been if I wasn't drenched; having failed to buy gas the day before when the weather was nice, I was forced to stop before making the long trek to work. As I stepped out of the car, there was just a light drizzle. Just as I started pumping gas, though, the clouds broken open with a deluge and the winds behind it forced it horizontally under the roof over the pumps. Fortunately I was there to block most of it or the pump might have gotten wet. And what a shame that would have been!

Still, as I was battling my way north with the winds pounding against the flanks of the car and the deep puddles on the highway trying to wrest control of the steering wheel from my white-knuckled hands, I was able to think a few positive thoughts about the pouring rain:

- I had picked a great weekend to replace my worn wiper blades with a pair of brand new (really brand new, not "to me" brand new) Rain-X Latitudes. I had AutoZone install them on my car, but also bought a pair to take home for the wife's car. I couldn't figure out how to get the old ones off and the included instructions offer no assistance on that topic, so I offered Egg the opportunity to take the car back up to AutoZone and get some help. Where's the opportunity for her in that? Well, anytime you can mock your daddy for his ineptitude, well.... kids love that!

- It wasn't snowing.

- It was washing the accumulated salt off of my car - another thing I had failed to do over the weekend.

- It's Monday and I would only be inconvenienced while driving to work as opposed to a rainy weekend day when the whole day would be a write-off.

That's as far as I got with happy thoughts before I caught up with a truck and added temporary road blindness to my list of woes. Man, do those things ever throw up a bow wave!

It was a productive weekend by any measure. On the topic of the RV-12 (oh, and let me now say "Welcome" to those of you that are well versed enough with my preliminary ramblings to just scroll down to the first picture), I was able to get to the point where all that is left to do is to seal the wingtip. I would have gone ahead and done that, but I ran into a situation that I wanted to spend some time thinking about first. We'll get to that in a minute.

First, I found a better way to break the irritatingly-dimpled edge of the wing walk doubler. I'm a huge fan of the converted visegrip edge breaking tool, but it simply wouldn't work with those dimples in the way. The original edge breaking tool that I bought (and hated when trying to break the edges on the tail cone) worked much better.

Riveting the doubler, just like everything else about this wing, seemed easier this time around. I still had to do a Mitty-esque farm veterinarian thing to get the ribs lined up correctly, though. Mooo!

So, there's the right wing mostly done.

The hangar is getting mighty crowded. I've all but decided that it's time to start the more-than-likely lengthy process of selling the RV-6. I need the space. It's due for annual inspection in March and I hate to spring the $$$s (and working hours) for that when a pre-buy inspection is likely to be right around the corner. As much sense as it makes to get busy with selling it, it's still a horribly difficult decision. I'll sure miss it when it's gone!

I started on the wing tip. This too went much more easily the second time around.

Until, that is, I was getting ready to close out the wing tip and noticed that I had forgotten to run a length of fishing line through the wire bushings in the ribs. The fishing line would someday be used to pull through electrical wires for navigation, strobe, and landing lights if I were ever to decide to install a lighting kit. I have no plans to do so at this point, but someday I might. I'm trying to decide if it's worth doing now, or if it would be just as difficult to do now as it would be to do at the time I (maybe) install the lights. It all comes down to whether or not the wing tip has to be re-opened to install the nav lights for not. If so, same pain then as now. If not, slightly less pain to do it now.

Sigh. Another tough decision.

That dog might be onto something...

It's been a relatively easy winter this year with respect to snow and ice storms, and even the temperatures seem friendlier than last year. But...

This has to be the grayest winter ever. I can't remember the last time I've seen anything more than a sliver of blue sky. Today was no different; 35 degrees under gray, hazy skies, and a wind chill of much lower than 35 degrees as a result of the 11 - 14 mph winds. It's so depressing that I strongly considered following Brave Sir Hogarth's lead and just crawling back into bed. Well, my bed, not his. But even so, he sure does make it look comfortable!

I couldn't do it, though. I'm still in the middle of a step in the plans and that tends to encourage me to get out to the hangar and get through that step. It's the purgatory-like feeling of betweenness that does it, I suppose, but I just can't stand leaving a step partially completed. Before going out to rivet the stepping area doubler onto the top of the wing, I decided to check around on the internet and see if there was a better way of handling the situation with trying to break the leading edge of the double, given that it has a row of pre-dimpled holes in it that precludes the use of the normal tool. I had tried putting the doubler in my vise and simply bending the edge a little bit, and while that seemed to work, it also seemed to be a little too brute force to be comfortable.

I found an answer on Torsten's blog:

I decided to work around the problem of the pre-dimpled holes by clamping the doubler in a vise with wood as a buffer and bent it right behind the line of rivet holes, about 3/8" from the edge. This worked pretty well and a visible crease was created that ensured that once the rivets were set, the edge would still be in touch with the skin.

So there ya be! Good enough for T, good enough for me!

Before I clecoed the doubler onto the top skin, I checked the adhesion of the new primer I'm using. This primer isn't self-etching like the other stuff is, so I was afraid that it might flake off. That didn't appear to be a problem, though. It was a nice, tough finish. And according to the fellow at Napa, this stuff should provide better corrosion protection than the other stuff. His opinion was that the other stuff was better if you were going to paint on top of it, but for an interior part that was never going to see a top coat the Zincrom was the better choice. Of course, the Napa guy has never built an airplane so he may be completely off base. On the other hand, I don't work at Napa and am by no means an expert on the topic myself. In any event, some protection has to be better than no protection, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

The bend that I made using the vise must have been adequate because the edge of the doubler fit right up snug against the top skin. Well, the bottom part of the top skin, to be completely precise.

That doubler was apparently the last thing keeping me from riveting the rest of the top skins, so at the urging of the wonderful folks at Van's, I pressed on with that.

I still have an inspection panel to install and the wing tip to do before I can call this wing done and start on the next one, but even at this stage I have completed an aerodynamic form that, if I was capable of propelling it though the air at 100 mph, would be capable of lifting 10 times its own weight. That feels momentous, somehow. I decided to commemorate the event with a nice self portrait.

You may feel some mild irritation...

I don't feel guilty about having one of those days now and then that seems as if it's just one irritation after another. I used to, though. I'd tell myself happy things like "I still have some of my youth left" and "I have most of my health," and that "I have a great job that I actually almost always enjoy doing, a happy family life, and hey, I'm a pilot that owns a sexy little low-wing monoplane."

How could I possibly justify having a bad day??

Well, I finally rationalized that I can only appreciate the preponderance of good days if I also now and then have a bad day. You know, for comparison and all.

Today was one of those days. The bad ones, I mean. It's been building up for awhile.

We're going through one of those periods at work where the parent corporation sends us new PCs. The computers are on a three year lease, which I'm sure makes things easy for the folks in accounting since they don't have to track umpteen thousand depreciating capital assets, but it makes my working life pretty miserable now and then. Our business unit runs almost entirely on custom software, and as the developer of said software it falls to me to configure the new PCs as they come in. That's empty time that could be spent doing something more productive, but it is what it is and I plod on through. The problem this time around is that the machines aren't coming in with the correct call center software, so I have to install it.

That doesn't sound like such a big deal, but it's not something that we normally do and therefore don't know how to do. No worries: a helpful sort down in Texas provided me with instructions:

Install the 1st base package, then apply patch SR2, SR2-E5, 7.2.5, and 7.2.6.

Fine.

I started the install of the base package and was immediately presented with a screen asking for a password. Do you see a password in the list of steps above? Me neither.

A day later I had the password and pressed on with the install. It was not painless. Various steps failed and required the removal of every preceding step. Long story short (too late!!), it took more than two hours and a few dozen reboots to get the program to run. Oddly, though, the program had small black squares where buttons should be. I grabbed a screenshot and sent it down to Texas.

Another day shot.

This morning I arrived to find a reply in my inbox:

"That's a known problem. You need to do this, this, and this."

Are you asking yourself what I asked myself? Are you asking yourself, "If this was a known problem that I was inevitably going to run into, wouldn't it have been nice to have been told that from the get-go?"

I have to confess that I was more than mildly irked.

Way more.

On the bright side, though, the fix worked. Flush with success, I moved on to the next new PC. I slogged through the install, hurdling over installation errors and rebooting with the aplomb of the newly confident. At the end, we ran the program. The buttons were fine! Unfortunately, though, none of them worked and the user couldn't log in. I fired off another email to Texas. I got a reply a couple of hours later:

"Oh, that's a known problem."

I thought it best to work on something else for awhile. I thought it to be critical that I not reply to that email.

Sometimes the cure for an irritating or frustrating day at the paying job is to spend a little time working on the RV-12. It doesn't always work, but it usually does. All I wanted to do tonight was take the remainder of the parts out to the hangar and to get the doubler that goes on the top skin at the wing root primered and ready to rivet on. I stopped at Napa and let the guy at the counter talk me into a different type of primer than the grey stuff I was using. This stuff is colored like Zinc Chromate (although I don't think it has either Zinc or Chromate in it) and is supposed to provide better corrosion protection. That's all I'm using it for, so that seemed like a good thing.

Before priming the part, though, I had to test fit it. And before test fitting it, I had to remove the blue plastic. That, as it turns out, would have been better to do in the warm basement rather than at the much colder hangar, Julyuary or not. It was no fun at all getting that stuff off. In fact, it was irritating. But I got it done and got the doubler clecoed on.

The plans first asked that I dimple three of the holes. Van's, ever schizophrenic on the topic of which holes they will dimple and which they won't, had thoughtfully left three for me to do.

I don't mind that, really, as they're pretty easy to do once you get out the dimple dies and set up the squeezer. But really, as long as they're doing all the rest, would it kill them to do these three and save me the trouble? But that's not what really irritated me. No, what ended up irritating me is that that had dimpled all of the other holes in the first place. "Why would that bother you?" you ask. Well, consider this. As the plans mentioned might be required, I have to put a break on the edge of the doubler to get it to sit flush against the wing.

Which in itself is not hard to do. I've already done it plenty of other times. I even have a special tool for it! A tool, it must be said, that won't work if the edge has a bunch of dimples in it!

That? That's irritating!

I ended up putting the edge in the vise and gently adding a bend to it. Only time will tell if it will be enough. Either way, it will be on the bottom of the wing where only judgmental types like me will ever duck under to look at it.

I went ahead and applied the primer. It sure is purty! And somehow that brown just looks more protective than the grey!

Julyuary

What else could explain this heat wave? It must be Julyuary! While the temperatures were down to about 36F by the time I got to the hangar, I think they got has high as 40F during the day. The days are getting longer, too. If I get up for work at 4:45, I can be home again as early as 3:45 pm. That gives me a good hour and a half of natural light to work with.

I've been using the nice weather and extended hours to finish up the top skin on the left wing. It's just about done; all that remains is the doubler that will go over the area where I still some day be stepping as I get in and out of the airplane. I've read a lot of folks talking about waterproofing under that doubler since it seems as if it was specifically designed to trap water, so I'm going to have to stop by NAPA to pick up some good primer to treat the area with.

Here's the wing, just about buttoned up:

It's nice to be able to work in just a light sweatshirt for a change!