Happy Anniversary!

October 9th was the second anniversary of my RV-12 build and I celebrated by starting the fiberglass of the forward canopy arms. This is one of those jobs that takes days of effort - the first day is spent thinking about ways to avoid doing it, the second through fifth days are spent doing the things dreamed up on the first day and, as it turns out, there are a few more days of preparation work to do as well. Sunday dawned temperate and clear, and promised temperatures suitably warm for the efficacious curing of the epoxy. It was on!

The days of preparation are all a blur now so I can't put a firm timeline on the process that I will be detailing below; suffice it to say that the time period is roughly a week of on again, off again effort.

The point of all of this is to create a smooth, attractive, and aerodynamic blending from the stark, angular facets of the metal canopy frame into the canopy bubble and fuselage. Just between you and me, I'll settle for two out of those three, and I don't particularly care which two it is. The plain truth is that I do not like working with fiberglass.

That having been said, here we go with the narrative.

The first step is to provide a support for the fiberglass. You could almost call it a mold, I suppose. It starts out as a pair of foam blocks, one for each side of the airplane. Those were trimmed and glued into place as detailed in this post.

Pete happens to own a very nice sanding block and was kind enough to bring it down to the hangar. In turn, I was kind enough to let him use it to trim the blocks. I'm generous that way - known for it, in fact.

Van's supplies a pair of paper templates that serve the dual purpose of acting as aids to masking off the appropriate areas of the fuselage and for the eventual cutting to shape of fiberglass cloth. I had stored them in a safe place where I wouldn't lose them; I found them after only three days of searching.

A strip of high quality electrical tape is used as to protect the canopy and provide a guide line for the fiberglass strips that will fill in the area between the forward fuselage and the canopy bubble.

I finally found a use for all of the paper that the kit parts come wrapped in.

There are ten fiberglass cloth shapes to be cut out, five for each side. One of the template paper sheets is used as a sacrificial cutting template whereby it is cut smaller for each size of cloth "part." I bought a very sharp rotary cutter to use for the somewhat complex curves required.

A perplexing problem quickly manifested itself. No matter how carefully I would trace the cutter around the template, the resulting sheet wouldn't come out shaped anything at all like the template.

As you can imagine, this problem created quite a bit of back and forth discussion between Pete and myself with suggestions and theories flying fast and furious. We eventually reached a consensus: the loose weave of the cloth combined with the shear forces being applied by the cutter were distorting the shape of the cloth as it was being cut. The solution? I would mark the outline of the template with a Sharpie(tm) marker and cut the cloth without the template paper blocking the view.

That worked somewhat better, but it was still hit or miss. It seemed that the large piece of cloth that I was cutting from might be part of the problem; various areas of it tended to get stuck to the work table and cause strange bends and transformations to occur. We finally hit upon the brilliant idea of cutting out a piece of cloth only slight larger than the finished part would be. It was much easier to get the smaller piece to sit straight on the table than it was when dealing with the huge sheet.

That problem solved, we finalized the masking job by covering the instrument panel and seeking out any sneaky little holes that might allow epoxy to drip into inconvenient places.

The Van's plans rely on a temporary forbearance of gravity to keep the wetted fiberglass from sinking into the areas

Pete had done some research and found a pretty good suggestion on another RV-12 builder's blog. He suggested using the left over scraps of foam to fill in those areas in order to provide support for the cloth.

There wasn't enough foam remaining, so I took a somewhat less satisfying path: I used some weather stripping that I had bought for the RV-6 canopy (which turned out to be a real fiasco, but that's a story that I'd prefer to just forget about).

The piece of foam that Van's specifies gets fiber glass permanently glued to it, but we didn't want that to happen with our extracurricular foam. We covered it with packing tape and waxed it with paste wax to keep the epoxy from sticking to it.

The next step was somewhat painful. The parts of the pristine canopy and the aluminum side skirt that get covered with the fiberglass have to be scuffed up to provide a bite for the epoxy to grab ahold of.

Everything was finally ready to cover with the fiber glass.

So I went flying. I thought it might be instructive to go take a look at a finished RV-12 to see what this fairing was supposed to look like when it was done. While I've said that I'd settle for two out of three of the goals, here's what a three-out-of-three exhibit looks like:

It was a pretty nice day to fly, as it turns out.

The Fall colors are proudly showing the way to a dismal winter.

Back in the hangar, it was time to wet and place cloth.

Three and a half hours of grueling and tedious work later, the peel ply was on.

Things happen fast when you'r working against the ticking time bomb of mixed epoxy and things get pretty messy:

The peel ply came off a couple of days later to reveal a nice, solid build-up of fiberglass. Naturally, the number one rule of airplane building (what has been done will soon be undone) will soon be in play: most of this will get sanded off.

Not much to cheer about

It's been one of those weekends. Driving home from the paying gig an Friday afternoon, I felt the usual small uplift in mood that precedes a couple days of not having to deal with the traffic and other associated hassles that come from having to interact with the rest of humanity. Nope, weekends usually offer up the promise of minimal computer help desk issues (supporting a handful of family/friends with their computer problems is so much easier than supporting three dozen), quiet relaxation around the house with the family, and a chance for some gratifying work on the airplane. It's the latter, I think, that clears my mind the most.

The paying job is probably better than most for providing some level of "job well done" satisfaction, but it's all so... intangible.  I'll spend hours developing an eloquent solution for someone else's work need, and every now and then spend even more hours re-doing it because they didn't like the result. I also spend hours adding in little convenience factors (remembering window sizes and positions, configuration settings, etc.) that they won't even notice as these little gems smooth out their work day.  That's all well and good, but at the end of the day I have nothing to show for it. There's nothing that I can touch and feel, nothing that I can step back and take a critical look at and think, "Nicely done," and to be perhaps overly honest, nothing that I can say that I did for myself. It is for these reasons that I look forward to the weekends.

All of that was torn asunder Friday evening when the Co-owner and I received a phone call from Co-pilot Egg as we were driving home from picking up dinner at a new restaurant near by. The dinner stop in itself was an exercise in patience-taxing frustration as they lost our order and we spent twenty minutes waiting for them to get their act together. Now that wasn't time wasted, mind you. It gave me plenty of time for one of my favorite things to do at a new restaurant, which is to find misspellings in the menu. In this case, I chuckled over 'Hot Gralic Chichen,' but I laughed out loud when I got to 'Garlic Fog Legs.' You know what they say about fog legs: they taste just like chichen!

Anyway, I pretty much knew what the problem with Egg was as soon as I heard her voice. Pretty much any time she's crying her eyes out, it means something has taken a turn for the worse in a relationship. Unfortunately, that was the case this time as well. Her boyfriend, Mr. Case, had called it quits. Some of the Dads of daughters reading this will understand me when I say that this was not one of the "Oh, good!" break-ups for me; no, this is one of the break-ups where I feel like I've been dumped too. I really liked this one. And I have to say, the kid had class. None of this texting or phone call stuff for him - he told her in person, and he stayed with her until we could get home. That could not have been easy.

So, it's a weekend of emotional turmoil in the house, a situation that I responded to in my tried and true manner: I got out of here! I escaped to the hangar with the hope of making some good progress on the canopy. I've been muddling through one of those little jobs that I always underestimate. It seemed easy enough (I say that so often that I ought to create an acronym for it): there are two little plastic blocks that get mounted on the front of the roll bar, their raison d'etre being as mundane as their appearance: they do nothing but ensure that the canopy isn't brought down so out of alignment by a careless pilot or passenger that the canopy skirts get caught up on the fuselage sides.

The little bit of fabrication required should have been trivial; all I had to do was drill two holes through each of the two plastic blocks.  The problem came from one of those little mistakes Van's makes in the plans and steadfastly refuses to fix. Consider this image:

Note that the width of the block is 1/2". Note that the holes are drawn as being positioned right on the centerline. Note that 3/8" from an edge is not going to put that hole on the centerline. Normally I'd just assume that either the drawing or the measurement was in error, and I was leaning heavily to the measurement being in the wrong. Just to be sure, though, I went home and checked on the Van's Air Force forum to see if any of my building peers had run into the same issue. I searched the archives for 'canopy blocks' and found one mention of them, but it had to do with how much material would need to be removed to ensure clearance from an inconveniently positioned nut on the side of the canopy.

I went ahead and posted a query and got a reply from one person that said he had faced the same issue and decided to position the holes on the centerline. All had worked out well for him. Safe in the knowledge that I could proceed without undue risk, I completed the drilling of the blocks. He also mentioned that he had needed to cut away quite a bit of material to get the needed clearance from the inconvenient nuts and he was right: I had to cut away quite a bit of the corner of the block. I tried removing a little at a time, but finally just bowed to the inevitable and sliced off the whole corner.

And, at long last, it was time to start the fiberglass fairing around the canopy. This starts out by shaping a couple of pieces of styrofoam into a shape that will provide a nicely rounded surface for the fiberglass to bond to and cover up the "coves" where the canopy frame forward arms reside when the canopy is closed.

The blocks get trimmed to fit into the cove. The bandsaw made short work of that:

There's going to be epoxy flying around and some of it will drip. So, masking is called for.

This block didn't fit like it was supposed to. The plans implied that this back edge would be flush with the fuselage skin. Not so much:

Pete and I had a meeting and determined that it was pretty safe to just cut away the offending material.

The bolts that the canopy pivots around must remain accessible, so a hole needs to be cut in the foam to allow access to them. The position of the hole is marked by pressing the foam against the bolt head.

The hole gets drilled out with a 7/8" Unibit. My Unibit only goes as large as 6/8" (3/4" for you mathematicians), but that was no problem. The foam is so soft that I was able to spin the bit by hand, then add the additional 1/8" with a small file. We're then supposed to use a Sharpie marker to trace the outline of the upper fuselage against the inboard side of the foam. We had two problems with that: a Sharpie wouldn't fit between the canopy frame, and we couldn't decide what precisely was meant by "upper fuselage." Looking ahead a few pages, it appears that the foam doesn't go any higher that the edge of the canopy frame. I just used a small screwdriver to trace the edge of the canopy frame.

The bandsaw did the rest.

One squirt each of the resin and hardener, plus a couple of tablespoons of flox made a nice paste that was used to glue the blocks in place.