Distraction Season

Do you remember the classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck vignette where they are each trying to convince Elmer Fudd that it is open hunting season for the type of animal each is not?

Bugs contends that it's duck season, and Daffy insists that it's rabbit season, up until Bugs switches up the order and tricks Daffy into convincing Mr. Fudd that it's duck season.



I'm here to tell you that they both had it wrong: it is, in fact, distraction season.

Fall is one of the best times of year, as far as I'm concerned, but it often offers up a veritable cornucopia of things that distract me from building the RV-12. Co-pilot Egg is back in school for her senior year, and that brought a school open house and the never-ending chore of trying to get her started on her college applications.

It's also football season, and that means Saturday afternoons either stressing through agonizing losses or yawning through complete blow-outs. I suspect that we're in for more of the former than the latter this year, although Saturday's game was set up to provide the type of exciting down-to-the-wire finish that makes it worth sitting through the game. With a minute and a half left and a five point lead, O$U had to stop the Toledo Rockets from scoring. It was beginning to look grim as Toledo continued to march down the field, but with 90 seconds to go the co-owner, who was sitting in front of a laptop computer, blurted out, "Don't worry; we win."

When you consider that I leave the room after a TV show finishes because I don't want to see or here the scenes from next week, well....

It's also shooting season. That means Sunday mornings are more often than not going to include either sporting clays or skeet shooting. It was sporting clays today. You may remember that my scoring trending as of the end of the season last year was horribly downward. I had one really good round of 21/50 when I bought my new shotgun, but the rounds after that were 9/50 and 8/50. It was obvious to me that the only strategy that worked was to buy a new shotgun every week, but the co-owner, not unreasonably, put the kabosh on that idea. No, I'd have to improve the old-fashioned way: practice. You may also remember that I did just that by buying and using my own trap. The last time I practiced, I was able to string together series of ten to fifteen hits before missing a clay. That practice paid off today with a respectable 16/50. There's obviously a lot of room for improvement, but I was happy with such a reasonably good start.

Squeezed into all of that activity was watching one of the best Formula 1 races of the year at the historic and incredible track in Monza, Italy, and doing some small jobs on the RV-12.

The next big step in the RV-12 process is the attachment of the canopy to the canopy frame, but there are some smaller jobs to be knocked out first. The first of those was the fabrication of the handle that will allow the latching and unlatching of the canopy from outside the airplane. Having not been to the hangar for a full week, I had to spend a few minutes working up mental acuity through the expedient of ingesting caffeine and perusing the plans.

It starts out easily enough. The first thing to be done was to measure and place a spot in the very middle of the handle. Finding and marking these spots is a common task in the RV-12 build, and the purpose of them is to make it graphically obvious how far off-center the hole you will eventually drill will be.

The handle was to be placed on the steel rod extending from the handle assembly that will be used to latch and unlatch the canopy from inside the airplane. As usual, the hole that Van's drilled into the handle is exactly the same size as the rod that's supposed to fit into it, which means.... it won't.

Fit, that is.

In order to make it fit, I resorted to using my Harbor Freight heat gun (Harbor Freight, The Home of Cheap Electric Tools That Are Hotter Than the Sun, Sometimes Deliberately) to expand the aluminum handle so that it could be tapped into place on the rod.

That allowed me to drill the requisite hole through the rod and further into the handle.

Then, the most dreaded of words: "Disassemble." That, in a word, sucked.

I had one heckuva time getting that handle back off of there, even with the assistance of the heating tool. Once I was able to finally get the handle back off, I followed the suggestion of Van's to optionally round off the corners.

With that done, the handle gets cast aside in preparation for ultimately losing it, while attention shifts to the painting of the canopy frame. I've been having trouble getting paint to stick to the material that is used in the roll bar and canopy frame, so this time I gave it a good scratching up with some 220 grit sandpaper.

Then it was back to the little jobs. There are a couple of plastic blocks that get mounted into the canopy frame that will act as centering guides when the canopy is being closed. They're held in with two 8-32 screws each, and the holes for those screws needed to be tapped. At long last, I have found a material that is softer than a Harbor Freight tap!

Here is the tab that will be mounted to the canopy frame, sitting down in the slot. Why is it sitting here and not on the canopy frame? Well, there was a step for that - the tab gets aligned and match-drilled to the canopy frame while it is still installed on the airplane; I thought that since I didn't want this tab to get painted, I would remove the canopy frame for painting first, then install the tab. In hindsight, this was stupid. It's not like I don't have any masking tape, after all. I removed the canopy frame and painted it, then realized that I needed Pete's help to put the frame back on the airplane in order to correctly position this tab. Once that's done, the canopy frame will then immediately get removed again to attach the canopy to it.

Rather than pout about it, I pressed on with the fabrication of the little tabs that will act as lift handles for opening and closing the canopy. They start out as 1 13/16" pieces of aluminum angle, but through a few steps become nice looking little handles.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

There are events during the building of an RV-12 that have a such a bad reputation for being difficult and/or having the potential for the destruction of expensive parts that builders will go to extreme lengths to postpone, delay, and avoid having to do them. The drilling of the canopy is one of them. Having run out of excuses and having read every forum posting or blog entry on the topic that I could find, there were no more potential procrastination possibilities pursuant to preventing the performance of this particular plexiglass(tm) penetrating project to be found. In other words, today was the day that we would drill the canopy.

My perspicacious preliminary perusal of pertinent personal logs on the subject had provided me with a shopping list of items to procure. That list included two plexiglass(tm) bits (9/64" to fill the demand for a #27, and 1/8" to stand in for a #30), a zero-flute countersink bit, and a hand drill.

The recommendations for these items were gleaned from the dozens of horror stories and how-to postings that I read through. They all came down to one thing: drilling the canopy plexiglass(tm) without causing any cracks. I can't say with any degree of certainty whether or not all of the preparatory angst was unwarranted, or whether all of the breathless descriptions of the monsters that lie embedded within the very fibers of the plexiglass(tm) were fabrications, but I do know this: the first hole was drilled with zero drama and zero damage:

As were every single one of the remaining holes:

The days and weeks of stress and worry were for naught. Although, I must add that this gratifying result could in fact be completely because of the stress and worry that drove me to spend all that time researching hints and tips. It's kind of like all those jobs that were "created or saved" with government stimulus dollars: it cannot be proven, nor can it be disproven. All that matters in the end is that we are where we are, and where we are is done with drilling the canopy! Hurrah!!!

After a brief celebration, Painfully Pragmatic Pete pointed out that there was plenty more work to be done. (Well, not really, but I'm having a hard time breaking this irritating alliteration habit.) The holes that had been drilled were in the front and back of the canopy, but the sides remained to be done. The canopy sides are match-drilled through the holes of the aluminum side skirts. The plans describe the correct placement of the skirts:

Which is all well and good, except for the fact that there is no such thing as an F-1277B, as can be seen in the parts inventory:

I just assumed that the not-quite-as-famous-as-E=MC2 Einsteinian equation F-1277-L + F-1277-R = F-1277B was in play. In other words, the drawing in the plans looked like the skirt should be placed flush against the front edge of the turtledeck skins, so that's what I did.

The first set of match-drilled holes was through the skirt and into the canopy frame:

You'll note that the front of the skirt is curled to better fit against the side of the fuselage. This was one of those vanishingly rare occasions where Van's did not do the bending/curving for us. We did it through the somewhat simple expedient of just bending it around a paint can:

One thing that I noticed when I was clecoing the skirts into place was that they weren't sitting flat against the sides of the canopy frame. It didn't take much by way of Sherlockian deduction to find the cause:

I decided to do something about it. That "something" involved one of the wickedest-looking Dremel attachments I've ever seen outside of a dentist's office:

I didn't grind it all the way down flush to the canopy frame, but the amount that I did remove had a very beneficial affect on the way the skirts looked:

There will apparently be some fasteners in the skirts that need to be flush because the plans then had me dimple five of the holes in each skirt and add a matching series of countersunk holes in the frame.

The next step was written by the unemployed stand-up comic that Van's brings in as contract labor now and then:

Always the first to detect an opportunity to relax while pretending to work, Pete quickly volunteered to perform the role of "non-claustrophobic friend/spouse/child":

The N-C F/S/C is in there to hold a block of wood against the thin aluminum braces while the HBWS (hot, bothered working stiff) match-drills through the canopy skirts, the canopy itself, and the braces. To be fair, it's a pretty important job and it was only due to the cold front that passed through last night that it was even remotely comfortable locked into the enclosed cockpit. As recently as yesterday it would have been unbearable in there. I'm not sure how I would have been able to tolerate it after Pete quickly volunteered to be the HBWS...

After the drilling was done, I decided that I had to try sitting in there myself. This would be the first time I'd get to sit in the plane with the canopy down - it was perfect for pretending that I was flying a fog-blanketed approach to minimums after a complete loss of my radio and transponder:

All that was left to do was final-drill the (approx.) #30 holes in the canopy to their final (approx.) #27 size. I think the additional diameter is added to allow for expansion and contraction of the canopy. In any event, this is a step that came with dire warnings from many of the postings that I read. I more than once came across stern admonitions against the very idea of ever enlarging a hole drilled into plexiglass(tm). Somewhere in my meanderings, though, I came across a suggestion to use a hand drill for this. The slow turning speed and the better tactile feel of the hand drill would allow the enlargement of the holes with a vastly reduced risk of causing cracks.

I was true. I could feel the bit beginning to bite into the plexiglass(tm) as I carefully turned the crank handle. Slow and steady won the race: all of the holes were enlarged with no damage.

Once that was done, it was a simple matter to use the zero-flute countersink bit to deburr the holes in the plexiglass(tm) and countersink the holes across the front edge of the canopy for the flush rivets that will soon be installed through them.