Fall Weekend

Rainy, chilly, fall weekends are perfect for two things: football and airplane building. Unless you live here, you probably don't realize that Columbus is a college town. Not so much a college town as one in which the university itself is almost the raison d'etre for the town itself, though. No, Columbus is a college town for only a handful of days all year. Those days are known as "game days." Weddings are scheduled around game days, and I suspect that more than one funeral has been delayed by a day now and then, depending on the quality of the scheduled opponent. I can state this unequivocal fact: the timing of the game this week had a direct bearing on when I worked on the plane.

Knowing that I only had until noon if I wanted to get any work done by kickoff, I headed out to the hangar pretty early in the morning. I only had a few hours to get the roll bar disassembled, deburred, primed, and put back together again. Deburring was going along just fine. It's easy as can be when I can use the deburring tool in the electric drill.

I knew that the battery in the drill was getting low on juice on Friday night, so I had plugged the spare battery into the charger before I left for the night. Sure enough, the battery died about halfway through the job. I retrieved the newly charged battery, slapped it into the drill, and.... nothing happened. I apparently hadn't gotten the battery all the way down into the charging cradle. It too was dead. Nothing for it but to proceed by hand.

That slowed me down considerably. I only had enough time to get the deburring done and the first coat of primer painted on.

While the primer was drying, I went ahead and prepped the roll bar braces so they'd be ready on Sunday.

I also still had enough time to gather up the roll bar mounts. They're pretty solid looking milled aluminum.

They get bolted onto the fuselage. I thought it odd that bolts were used since the roll bar won't actually be removable; I figure it must be a strength issue.

They look pretty professional, don't they?

As things worked out, I would have just enough time to finish the page since the last step was a simple locate & separate operation.

It all kind of fell apart on the "locate" phase. I looked and looked, and I could not find that big part! At this point the parts shelf is looking pretty barren, so I couldn't figure out how I could not find a big part like that. I eventually realized that the parts had already been separated. That's passingly odd; Van's is a lot like a teenager in that they don't do much of anything for you unless they absolutely have to. I couldn't figure out why they would have started separating a part at the factory that they apparently had never intended to.

Maybe its because it wouldn't have fit through the band saw.

Nah, that can't be it. That's never bothered them before!

Time was up and I had to run home for the game. We all take it pretty seriously!

Back in the shop this morning, I was able to get a running start on a new page in the plans. The bulkhead parts were to be clecoed into the tail cone, and I was then to mark a centerline on the tail cone pieces behind them in order to make sure the holes I was about to drill through them were on the centerline. I had to think about that: Step 1, cleco these things in place. Step 2, draw a line on two parts that were now blocked by the parts that I had just clecoed it. No way that was going to work; I did step 2 first.

That worked a lot better. Doing it that way, the marks were visible after clecoing on the bulkheads. A quick match drilling operation later, the bulkheads were taken back off.

Rather full of myself after my intellectual win over the guy that wrote the directions, I moved right into riveting on some kind of canopy hook thingy.

I then immediately drilled the rivets back out, having noticed too late that they were supposed to be LP4-4, not LP4-3 rivets. Short lived victory, that.

Oh, lest I forget, there was also a lot of countersinking and riveting to get the roll bar parts all assembled. The countersinking was done with the special 120 degree countersink because the outer side of the roll bar assembly uses the CS4-4 flush rivets. I also had to stare at the drawing for quite awhile to make sure I was getting the right rivets in all of the other areas, and that I had correctly marked the holes that weren't to be riveted yet.

Once it's all put together, it gets installed over those nifty aluminum mounts. It's a bit of a tight fit, and it wasn't particularly easy to do alone. At one point I had one end in and was walking around the back of the fuselage to try to get the other side in when the whole thing popped out and just missed landing on my head. That would have stung!

This is only a temporary installation until the matching holes are drilled into the mounts. The plans call for having a couple of braces installed during the drilling, presumably to make sure everything is aligned correctly.

It isn't.

That gap shouldn't be there, and I have no idea how to make it go away. The mounts are extremely solid and there is no way to adjust them. It seems that I have a somewhat crooked airplane.

I'll have to poke around on the internet and see if anyone else has had this problem.

Roll me up to the bar, boys!

I started Section 24 last night. This is the section that was previously known as "The Section When I Have to Move to the Hangar," but lost that designation when I realized that there was no way I wanted to do all of that Section 23 riveting by hand. Section 24 initially held the title because it is the section in which the rollover bar/hoop gets installed. With the rollover bar/hoop on the fuselage, there would be no way to get the assembly out of the basement.

As I said, I started the building of the roll bar/hoop assembly last night. It comes in four parts: a front and a back, each comprised of a right and a left. The first step, not surprisingly, is to cleco the parts together. The left and right halves of front and back pieces are held together with a plate in the middle where the halves meet, and the front and back are then held together with two long aluminum strips. It's hard to describe, but easy to see. I started by joining the left and right halves of the front hoop.

The strip of aluminum sitting at the edge of the table is the strip that will get clecoed on the inner flange at the top of the hoop. I started by clecoing it at one of the corners of the hoop.

The arrow mark is there to ensure that I get the strip back in the same place after the inevitable disassembly that is assuredly coming in the near future.  There is a similar strip that gets clecoed inside the lower flange.

The upper strip gets slid in between a gap in the upper flange.

I was clever enough to figure that out on my own; the drawing of this in the manual leaves a loy to be desired when it comes to clarity of detail. What I wasn't clever enough to figure out was that the clecos would have to go in from the other side of the front hoop. Otherwise, the hoop halves couldn't be joined.

Do-over. Or mulligan, if you prefer.

As I started clecoing the front and rear halves together, I quickly realized that I didn't have nearly enough of the silver clecos on hand. The preponderance of my collection was safely at home, sitting on the abandoned workbench and not doing much of anything to help. I'd have to go get them. Or, as I finally decided, just call it quits for the night. The roll bar is made of a heavier grade of metal that the for more malleable aluminum I've become accustomed to and is by its very nature somewhat objectionable to work with. It had taken quite a bit of cleco coercion to get the front and rear halves to even come to the negotiating table; arriving at an agreeable alignment was going to be more of a task that I was willing to bite off.

I went back tonight armed with the bucket of silver clecos that had been unconscionably lounging in the basement while their copper colored brethren did all of the heavy lifting. Slackers. They remind me of puppy Cabot, who has recently discovered the Rag Doll Defense when faced with a command to remove himself from a piece of furniture when he has worn out his welcome.

"Cabot, down!"

"Down? Me?? Surely you can see that I have suddenly lost all of my bones and muscles and therefore could not possibly remove myself from this extremely comfortable bed. Without skeletal structure for support and  musculature to provide motive force, it should be clear as day to you that I simply have no choice in the matter."

"Cabot! DOWN!"

"No, seriously. Just look at me! I'm lying here like a mass of hairy Jello. Why, the only way that I could conceivably be moved would be for you to... HEY! PUT ME DOWN!!"

My prediction of the previous evening was almost immediately proven to be true: it took a lot of convincing to get those parts lined up. A lot of cleco wiggling, metal pounding, and swearing finally got the parts closely aligned.

Looking ahead in the manual, I saw that these holes are to be eventually filled with the ubiquitous LP4-3 rivets. Odd, that, since those size holes have always been filled with the copper guys. Hmmm. That could only mean one thing. And that one thing is, of course, a whole lot of match drilling.

Yep! Match drilling, and lot's of it! The metal ended up being more receptive to the bit than I had thought it would be given my first impression of its nature as being inherently obstreperous.  First impressions can be wrong, I suppose. The drilling went easily enough. I finished just as the 6:30 dinner bell started ringing. Tomorrow will find me disassembling the whole deal for deburring. I also caught sight of a couple of words in the next step that sent shivers down my spine: machine countersink. Uh-oh! That's gonna be a big job!