A forced break

Wow, did I ever find a crappy way to hurt my back! When I got home from work Friday afternoon, I was met by the guy that had just emptied our septic tank. I'm not super keen on septic tank maintenance, and apparently my negligence had resulted in the aerator motor getting so fouled with gobs of who-knows-what that it had burned itself out. Gave its life in the interest of foamy crap, as it were. Sad, yet somehow heroic.

Being a friendly and helpful sort, Mr. Septic had informed the CFO that we could save a $100 through the simple expedient of me driving across town and buying (and installing! ICK!!) a replacement unit rather than having one delivered. Well, we all know how that went; I was nominated before I even knew about it. Wish I had gotten to him earlier - I'd have sprung for a ten spot just to keep that little tidbit of knowledge between the two of us. $110 to avoid driving clear across town in the company of a piece of equipment that has spent eight years soaking in effluvium? Bargain!! But... not to everyone, and particularly not to those that wouldn't be riding along.

Long story short (too late for that, I suppose, so let's go with "long story finished, here's the punchline"), I was lifting the old crap-encrusted (and I'm afraid I do mean that literally) motor into the car while striving to touch as little of it as possible and ended up wrenching my back. Quite painfully, too.

My back loosened up a little later and it wasn't too bad across the weekend, but as I was getting in the car Monday morning (and catching my first whiff of an interior than had been infused with Eau de Septique for the weekend), my back rebelled with a very noticeable spasm. Which was followed throughout the day with another series of the same every time I lifted anything heavier than a three syllable word, made a wisecrack, or pointed out an irony. In other words, it was nearly constant. I was able to get an afternoon appointment with my chiropractor, thankfully. That was an eye opening session - heretofore I had thought the only way he could bring a tear to my eye was to present me with my bill! Turns out restorative machinations on a truly ailing back can be quite painful as well. Besides which, after dropping $468 on a new motor whose sole function in life is to stir air into sewage, his invoice looked like a bargain.

As it turns out, the pain he put me through had nothing on the bruiser of a girl that gave me a therapeutic massage on Tuesday. I had to look it up when I got home; I had no idea that "therapeutic" was a synonym for "excruciating" and "massage" is French for "the intentional bruising of internal organs." If it had been a guy doing it, I might have mentioned something along the lines of "Hey, that really hurts!" Being as it wasn't, misplaced masculine pride precluded me from making even so much as a whimper while laying there wondering if I'd actually be able to hear my ribs snap as she dug her elbow into my back so hard that she left a trench in the mattress table on the other side.

But finally I felt well enough to get back out to the hangar today. I've had a few days to look into the problem I had with the gap between the roll bar and the brace. The word on the streets was that the roll bar might move forward once I put the top brace on. That step is two pages beyond where Van's would have had me match drill into the roll bar mounts, thus preserving the misalignment of the parts for eternity. What were they thinking?? I decided to skip ahead those two pages and see if the top brace would help with the immediate problem. It looked like it might be easiest to assemble the whole, uh, assembly and attach it all at once.

It wasn't. The side bulkheads have a slot cut into them that is supposed to fit over the longerons, but it's a very tight fit. That, and the fact that the top brace couldn't be reached while holding the rest of the assembly in place, meant that it was too much to do alone. I had to take it all apart again and start with the top brace.

I was then able to put the side bulkheads in.

And take them right back out again.  Something just didn't seem right. The baggage floors weren't reaching the side bulkheads and the bottom flanges seems somewhat off. That was all because I had clecoed the bulkheads into the wrong holes in the side skins. Fixed!

When I got everything assembled, I went back and checked the gap between the roll bad and the brace.

Eradicated!

With everything all aligned, I could finally go ahead and match drill into the mounts.

It all needs to come apart again, as usual. There are nutplates to install and all of the new holes need to be deburred. I have to prime the roll bar mounts and the roll bar itself needs its final coat of paint. Then it will all get riveted back on and it will be just about time to rivet on the tail cone!

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.