Sweating...

Following my prediction that we would "enjoy" a linear progression of ever-higher temperatures, a prediction based on the uncharacteristically mild winter we had, we had an August heat wave in June. When the temps are 90+, it becomes difficult to opt for a few hours in the temperature accentuating hangar (it makes hot days hotter and cold days colder) over spending an evening at home basking in more temperate, albeit artificial, conditions.

So after spending a week in air conditioned bliss, why is the subject of this post "Sweating?"

I'll get to that.

And to be fair, it was easy to opt to stay at home rather than work on the airplane because I had a part on order. As you may recall, I was working on the cable that will open and close the door that blocks heat from the aft side of the engine radiator from pouring into the cockpit. Cold in the winter? Pull the cable, open the door, get warm(er). Hot? Push the cable, close the door.

I had gotten to the point where I needed a rod bearing, but I couldn't find it. There was a bag that was supposed to have four of them in it, but they were all gone, probably having been used on other parts of the plane. They're cheap and I needed to order some other stuff from Van's anyway, so I ordered one on Sunday afternoon.

It finally arrived on Friday.

The first order of business on Saturday morning, then, was to use the newly procured part to finish that cable. First step: screw the rod bearing as far as it will go into the metal tube that will support it. Then tighten the jam nut hard up against it.

Jam nut? I couldn't find any of those either!

Pete: "Have you checked in the engine kit parts?"

Me: "Of course not. I'm working on the Finish Kit - why would it be in the Eng.... oh, yeah, here it as. And here's the rod bearing, too."

An ignominious beginning.

With the parts in hand, I did the measuring and bending of the control wire shown below. When that's done, the hooped end of the wire gets shoved up into the metal tube that holds the fully jammed in rod bearing. Then a cotter pin gets shoved through a hole in the tube and through the hoop in the wire.

I'm nothing if not pessimistic, and I had dire concerns over whether I'd be able to get that hoop into the tube far enough to get the cotter pin to fit through. Sure enough, I got it to where I could see the hoop through the hole in the side of the tube, but I just couldn't get the hoop to move the 1/32" further in that it would need to go to get the pin through it. I tried sticking an awl into the hole to force the wire further into the tube. No go. I tried pushing while swearing. I tried swearing while pushing. I even tried swearing before, during, and after pushing.

No good.

I am beginning to lose my faith in the power of swearing.

The problem turned out to be my slavish devotion to the instructions. Threading the rod bearing all the way into the tube as far as it would go had positioned it such that there was no room for the wire to go.

I had to let it out a few threads.

The cushion clamps that hold the cable housing in place are somewhat loosely mounted on the engine mounts (I don't know why - using the bolts called out by Van's, there's still a little looseness once the bolts are as tight as they can get), so a piece of safety wire is specified as a way to keep the cable housing from slipping.

Meanwhile, Pete worked on the tail cone.

Having finished the heater cable, I started on mounting the oil cooler. The plans called for machine countersinks on the inside face of one of the parts of the holder for the radiator. It was pretty close in there and the only way I could get a counter sink bit in place was to use my little hand drill. I was quite proud of having come up with such an elegant solution.

There were also a couple of doublers that surround the holes that the line fittings will mount to. Those too were dimpled to be flush on the inside.

And even more countersinking.

Then it all gets riveted together. But wait! What happened to my cleverly countersunk cavities? Crap! I countersunk the wrong part!

I didn't want to countersink this part too, thinking that a whole lot more material than planned on by the ultra-sophisticated computers at Van's had calculated as prudent would be removed by double cutting and that might not be a good thing. Instead, I dimpled the second part. It's not uncommon to dimple a thinner piece of metal where it joins with a thicker, countersunk part, so this felt almost natural.

A line of RTV gets run down the corners of the flanges just prior to putting in the radiator.

Van's suggests blocking off the oil fittings once they're installed to keep from getting dust and stuff into the system. The masking tape wasn't sticking very well, so I helped it out with tie wraps. I tend to the overkill, now and then.

Soon thereafter, it was determined that I had missed squeezing in a couple of rivets. Naturally they were rivets located in a spot that was now impossible to get to with the squeezer, what with the radiator oil fittings in the way. And there was no way I was cutting off those tie wraps!

Out came Gucci, my bright red rivet gun.

Pete had finished up the tail cone by that time, at least to the degree where the stabilator needs to be re-installed. Not being overly keen on that idea, I decided to work on the fuel tank instead. Even through I bought the tank already built, there's still some work to do to get it installed. First, the plans say to attach the fill tub with a big rubber hose and some hose clamps. And oh, by the way: leave a 1/8" gap between the fill tube and the fitting on top of the tank.

The rubber hose is, of course, slightly more than 100% opaque and there was no way to see any gap at all, much less a 1/8" . To solve for that, I marked the location on the side of the tube where it was flush against the hidden edge of the other fitting, then just moved the mark up 1/8".

Genius!

And then the tank gets put into the airplane for the first time. And that went.....

Poorly.

Note the difference between where the bolt thinks the nutplate should be and where the nutplate actually is. It is a not insignificant difference!

This is when I started to sweat. Both set of holes (those in the central spine that the bolts pass through and those in the front of the fuel tank) were drilled by Van's. There is simply no way that I could have screwed this up; something is horribly, horribly wrong. There can be no easy fix for this.

Yeah, I started to sweat.

Meanwhile, Pete calmly whittled away on the cooling duct.

I tried over and over to get the tank to fit, but I just kept coming back to the same conclusion: something is horribly, horribly wrong. I'm going to have to call Van's tech support. That didn't go well the last time I had to do it; the condescending attitude of the support person I talked to had me steamed for days. In an attempt to mitigate the "you must be a complete idiot; we could never do anything that horribly, horribly wrong" attitude, I would have to gather evidence.

That turned out to be both easy to do and a strong conformation of the horrible, horrible problem.

This is the left (looking at the front of the tank) hole:

Here is the right hole. It's just a little more than 44.5cm from the front hole.

This is the right hole (looking aft) on the center section:

Right around 44.2cm. That's not good! It's .3cm to far to the left!

Here's another view of the right hole. If, as in the drawings in the manual, the hole is supposed to be centered between the adjacent rivets, well, you can see where the problem is.

It's that damn Metric system!

So, what do you want to bet that hole would be centered between the rivets if it was .3cm to the right?

The fuel tank fiasco completely ruined my day, and there's at least a 50-50 chance that it will ruin tomorrow too by keeping me awake tonight while I sweat out the question of how Van's intends to fix this. Replacing the center section is certainly not an option - it would require undoing something like 18 months of work.

It was too early to quit working, though, so I decided to finish up the oil radiator job by mounting it to the piece of duct that Pete had been working on. Easy, at the start, with just a couple of holes to get drilled.

A pair of nutplates installed.

Bolted into place.

A couple more holes to drill, some little plastic guiding cones, and some nuts and washers. Piece of cake!

Still too early to quit, so maybe we could get the stab back on after all. I started by cleaning up the loose bundle of wires for the trim motor. Those connectors can be replaced with a different type of connector as part of the imminent avionics installation, but I'n not sure that I'll bother.

From there, it all went down hill. The washers that have to be glued to the stab in order to get them positioned on the hinge bolt fell off as we were sliding the stab into place. I wasted half an hour or so trying to get the washers in place using tweezers and swearing, but it was no use.

I am beginning to lose my faith in tweezers.

We took the stab back off, grabbed some fresh washers that I had ordered the last time I ordered a bunch of "just in case" stuff from Van's, and glued them to the stab.

Then we went home. I'd had enough.

Independence Day break

The Production Floor at Schmetterling Aviation was open today for the first time since the traditional July 4th break.

Tradition since 2011, anyway.

Being the eco-friendly, free range, family-oriented type of corporation that we are, the entire production staff took the holiday upon which we collectively celebrate the freedoms that were won for us when our courageous ancestors fought with their very lives to break the shackles forced upon us by an over-bearing government by exercising our inalienable right to bear arms. And to light off fireworks, too, even though that is a (somewhat ironically) illegal way to celebrate freedom from an over-powerful government, when you think about it.

Being as we're all family-friendly and all, the Schmetterling executive leadership invited one of the organization's most valued employees to come along, and to bring along his lovely wife as well. And so it was that Cadillac Pete, Senior Manager of Jobs that I Don't Want to Do, and his wife Красивая женщина (everyone gets a blog name...) joined me in a ride over the hills and through the woods to do some shooting at The Farm.

Now it would seem that the courteous thing to do would be a "Ladies First" ordering of things, but one has to consider the extreme effort that goes into warming up the shotgun. Also, as the most experienced shooter, it was incumbent upon myself to provide an adequate demonstration on how it's done. And so it was that I went first. Makes sense, right?

Right???

Well, it worked out pretty well. For you long-time readers that still remember how bad I was when I first started trying to hit those elusive little clay birds with a piddling 24" spread of speeding lead pellets (It sounds easy when I say it that way, I suppose), you'll be thrilled to learn that I've improved. In fact, I think it hit 85-90% of the ones I shot at. That was fun! And it was instructive, too. Having never fired a shotgun at all, much less at a moving target, how else would you explain the fact that Красивая женщина hit the very first clay she shot at!

We can shoot trap down in the lower field near our campground, but when we decided to put away the shotgun and do some pistol shooting we had to move up to the rifle range adjacent to our sister business, 8150 Automotive Repair and Race Team. My brother is the sole proprietor and mechanic of both the auto repair and racing divisions, and the driver for the race team. One of his main sponsors is, of course, Schmetterling Aviation. It's always fun to visit the shop to see how things are going during the heat of the racing season.

Things are going well this year, but it has not always been thus. Each significant incident with The Wall at KilKare Raceway is commemorated with a new entry on the Wall of Pain.

This is all that's left of last year's car:

The shooting trip was great fun and a good time was had by all.

The following day presented perfect weather for another company event: the Schmetterling Senior Management Retreat. This year the CEO and I would take the company plane on a day trip to Put-in-Bay (3W2) on South Bass Island, Ohio. Now, I wouldn't like to see a fine corporation like Schmetterling Aviation get unfairly included in the latest group of capitalistic villains to be targeted for vilification, so I want to stress that Schmetterling's corporate airplane is bought and paid for, and thus has no need for a depreciation schedule, accelerated or not, that could possibly result in Tiny Tim losing his crutches or The Little Old Lady being evicted from her shoe. Why, the very last thing we would want would be for the good, solid name "Schmetterling" to be in any way associated with the deplorable act of pushing Granny and her wheelchair over a cliff.

What?

Oh, well.... yes. We do burn leaded fuel. Thanks for asking.

Oh look! A Squirrel!


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As long as I was dead-heading the plane out to corporate HQ, I didn't see any harm in having my younger sister tag along. She could help with the piloting duties (by which I mean polishing the pure teak interior and the 24k flush handles in the loo) in order to offset the incremental cost of carrying another passenger. Us not wanting to get in dutch (can you still say that? Or is it not PC anymore?) with the SEC and all.

She's a good sport; she didn't get upset when, right after I had taxied up to the airport terminal to drop her off and pick up the CEO, I quipped, "Out with the old, in with the older!" (See also: insensitivity.) She also showed immense patience with me later in the day when she found out that she was still uncomfortably hot while driving home from Bolton Field after our half hour flight in the bumpy, 91 degree air because I had turned her seat warmer on HIGH as a joke.

Hey, it seemed funny at the time!

The flight up north to the island was glass smooth and very scenic under cloudless skies. It took roughly an hour due to the decreased cruising speed I'm using in light of $5.80/gallon gas. There was a light breeze out of the south which necessitated a left downwind to runway 21. That's nice because it offers a point & shoot photo opportunity while on downwind. Because I am busy setting up for a landing on the short-ish runway, I can't do any more with the camera than turn it on and hold down the button, hoping that at least one shot will turn out okay.

Having survived a simply atrocious landing whose only salutary feature was making the turn off at the first taxiway, we walked down south to a part of the island most people don't go to. Part of the fun of the trip was presenting an opportunity for the land-locked Ohio horseman to get a look at a large body of water and to enjoy the relaxing sounds of water diligently at work eating away at an island lakefront.

Oh, and there's a light house too.

It's about a half mile walk past an incongruous mix of a crowded and hectic ferry port, small businesses renting the ubiquitous island golf carts and bicycles, and rustic scenery.

The lighthouse is like a breath of fresh air after the walk.

Well, drop the 'like.' It is literally a breath of fresh air.

If I didn't have an airplane, I would want a boat like this one.

Eh, who am I kidding?? Even with an airplane I'd like to have a boat like that one.

Rather than walk all the way from the southern ferry port to the town of Put-in-Bay on the northern end of the island, we took the bus. Capt. Buck was in fine fettle, positively jolly that he could speed north unencumbered by any worries of being pulled over by the police; they were all busy escorting a funeral. I commended him on his ability to see the silver lining in just about any cloud.

We were just going up to town to have lunch, but it doesn't take long to realize why people spend hours driving to the mainland ports, and then wait hours longer for a ferry rather than do what I do and fly in. It's so they can spend the night. Why do they want to spend the night? Well, because the town of Put-in-Bay is just one big collection of bars.

Some have been there for ages and define the former appeal of the island.

Some of the newer establishments look as if they were brought in on the winds of a tropical storm.

Others wanted a more traditional look, but simply selected the wrong tradition.

Fortunately the large public square is still in place right on the waterfront. Our lunch destination was close by.

The walleye sandwich was great!

The summer break had to come to and end, though, and this morning found Your's Truly and Cadillac Pete right back at work. Today we split up and worked on separate projects. Pete, as his official title would suggest, got the job that I didn't want to do. He would be installing the candle sticks. I've had enough experience with trying to get those nuts, bolts, and washers fit into very tight quarters to know that I wanted the other job: assembling the little pushrod that will fit down inside the flap handle.

Building up the pushrod required match drilling a tube to mate with an aluminum bracket that supports the little tabs that will press against the return spring in the tube. That was a matter of drawing a center line and measuring the depth that the tube needed to go into the bracket. Well, that and clamping and drilling and riveting...

The flap handle will have a curved, notched plate thrust through a slot carved into its back. This plate will provide the "stops" for the three available flap positions. That plate needed to be mounted onto a bigger, stronger plate that would in turn be mounted in the fuselage.

I could have squeezed the rivets, but it has been a long time since I have used my "real" rivet gun. I thought it would be fun to get it out and drive a few rivets for a change.

Meanwhile, Pete had to take a break from cursing the miner that had pulled the Bauxite out of the earth to create the aluminum that was eventually formed into a tubular shape with the sole purpose of giving him a part that would be just shy of impossible to install in an airplane to put the thumb knob on the flap rod that I had set aside as soon as it became difficult. He seems to have regained his composure quite quickly after being presented by a slightly less almost impossible job.

I went ahead with the fun and interesting (no, seriously! This is a super important part!) job of cutting a teflon-ish block into four equal lengths. These little blocks will sandwich the metal tabs protruding out of the root ends of the flaperons. The candle sticks that Pete had installed will push against a horn on the other end of the tubes that host these little blocks.  All of this combines to provide the ability to control the airplane about its longitudinal axis, which is to say "make it turn."

The first step is to match drill the blocks while they are clamped in place on the rod.

The next step is to drill out the holes in the blocks with a #12 bit, mix up a batch of epoxy and glue the blocks into place, and then rivet the blocks while a 1/8" piece of scrap is used to preserve the proper gap between the blocks.

I read that as "match drill, rivet in place."

I amended that to "match drill, rivet in place, drill rivets back out, drill out the holes with a #12 bit, etc..."

Meanwhile, Pete had read ahead into section 44 in preparation of installing the autopilot servos. It didn't take him long to be right back to cursing out that poor Bauxite miner: installing the roll-axis autopilot pushrod requires the removal of two of the bolts that he had just spent an hour installing. This as known as the "What goes on, must come off" syndrome. It is a malady well-known to aircraft builders throughout history. A little known fact is that Wilbur Wright was once mistakenly diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome after having been overheard installing a control rod in the Wright Flyer*.

While that mighty struggle was going on, I busied myself by watching the paint dry on the flap position latching thingy.

Hey, someone had to do it!

* This might not be true. But you did read it on the internet, so feel free to use it as a rock solid fact anyway.