Taking another stab at it

With the vertical stab installed, there's one more to go: the horizontal stab. But before that could be done, the rudder needed to be installed on the VStab. This was made more difficult by the newly tall and increasingly inconvenient VStab. The only way to reach the top hinge was to use the new scaffold.

Cadillac Pete showed up just in time to help me install the rudder (it wasn't going very well as a one-man job) and to help get the HStab ready to mount.

The bolts that hold in the counterbalance arm have to be removed and the arm twisted 90 degrees in its mount to allow the weights to fit through the aft bulkhead.

The fit through the slot easily.

I marked the arm to help me remember which way to turn it in order to get it back to its original orientation. Yes, it matters.

Putting in the bolts to hold the stab in place turned out to be slightly more difficult that it initially appeared. I thought it lucky that the washers that I had super glued into place almost two years ago were still holding, but it turned out that the glue bond had grown brittle and fragile in the intervening months as had, truth be told, my patience when it comes to super glue in general. As soon as we tried to get the flanges with the washers glued to them into position, the washers broke loose. That led to a trip to Lowes where I found a new package design for Super Glue: four single-use tubes instead of the normal larger tube that ends up being a de facto higher cost single-use package since the unused portion inevitably hardens in the tube before I get around to needing it again.  Maybe I will find super glue to be more tolerable now.

Once the washers were glued back onto the flanges, it was relatively easy to get the stab bolted into place.

Cap Down!

In the neighborhood where I grew up, we had an expression we used whenever we slammed another kid with a really good insult: Cap Down! I hadn't thought of that in decades; it came to me just now as I was trying to think of a pithy title for this post. I kind of miss the concept, though, and wish I could use it in my day-to-day life as an adult. Why? Well, through necessity (read: overly timid HR departments) my cap downs have become extraordinarily subtle and surgically precise. The problem there is that the people that most need to know that they've been the target of one of my oh-so-subtle zings are more often than not completely oblivious to it.

Oh well, at least I know. And every now and then I see the secret eye shift from some of the witnesses that passes for a silent Cap Down!

So what's the deal with caps? I'll get to that shortly. First allow me to set the stage for yesterday's efforts. I'm at a bit of a crossroads now and faced with a few decisions as to how and where to proceed. The next step in the plans if I want to proceed in a linear fashion is to drill the flaperon torque tubes. Doing so required installing the wings. All well and good since Cadillac Pete and I got that done just a few days ago. Soon after that will come the installation of the rudder and stabilator control cables. To do that, the rudder and stabilator need to be installed. Since the plane looked so incredible with the wings attached, I was leaning towards installing the tail feathers to get some more of that "Wow, does that ever look like an airplane!" feeling in my belly.

Each of those activities requires a trip back to the deep past to find the place in the plans where I was supposed to do those things in the first place. Having decided that the emotional lift of installing the tail feathers was a desirable goal, I decided to start there. But wait! The parts bags for the tail kit were nowhere to be found in the hangar, even though I was sure that I had gathered everything up when I brought the rest of the finish kit parts out to the hangar from the basement shop. I must have missed bringing the box full of brown paper bags with the tail kit hardware in them. I didn't want to go home to get it.

Pete suggested that we install the flaperons instead. While they would not be as visually striking as having the tail feathers on, they would still meet the soft and recently imposed requirement to install at least one control surface per day. Unfortunately, two of the AN3-10A bolts required have gone missing. An exhaustive search (I assume it to have been exhausting - I let Pete do it so I don't really know) didn't find them, so I'll have to order new ones. I'm going to order a handful of various sizes while I'm at it because 1) it's nice to have spares for the years of maintenance that lie ahead, and 2) it mitigates the pain of the shipping charges. Then I will take bets as to how long it will take to find the original two bolts after the replacements arrive.

Which reminds me: I found the bag of cotter pins.

Stymied on the flaperons, there was no choice but to run home and get the box of tail kit hardware. It was easy to find; it was sitting on the corner of the workbench where I put it so I wouldn't forget to take it out to the hangar. Funny how that works.

Once back at the hangar, I followed the bread crumbs back through the plans to see which part of the tail should be installed first. That turned out to be a good way to do it because it unearthed all of the "install this, remove it to do this, re-install it, remove it to do this" frustrations that are liberally sprinkled throughout the process. For example, had I started at "install vertical stabilizer" I would have been frustrated by having to remove it just a few pages later to install the fiberglass caps (Ah, there it is! We get to the caps at last!) that go on top of the VStab and rudder.

So where are the caps? I remembered very clearly that I threw them into the car so I'd be sure to drop them off at the hangar. What I didn't remember was ever having actually dropped them off. Surely, then, they are still in the car. Just not the car that I happened to have with me.

Another trip back home.

The caps come nicely formed and almost ready to go right out of the box, but they do require some trimming. They have a recessed edge that slips down into the open top if the VStab and rudder, and the molded corner of that recess needs to be squared up with a razor knife. Pete picked that job.

That left the trimming jobs to me. There are scribe lines around the edges of each part that show an approximation of the final fit. Van's asks that we approach the scribe line tentatively so as not to take off more material than needed. As I've said many times before, the great thing about working with fiberglass is how easy it is to remove material, while the horrible thing about working with fiberglass is how easy it is to remove material. I marked the suggested 1/8" buffer zone with a Sharpie(tm) marker.

Van's also suggests that a good way to remove the material is 80 grit sandpaper wrapper around a cylindrical object. I thought that was a terrific suggestion, but I had no 80 grit sandpaper. Not to worry, though, because I did have some sandpaper of undefined grittiness wrapped around a cylindrical object, and I figured the coarseness of 80 grit paper could be very suitably simulated with a high number of revolutions per minute. In other words, I grabbed the Dremel(tm) and a little sanding drum.

The Dremel(tm) was absolutely the right tool for the job. It removed the stuff I needed to trim away so easily that I commented to Pete that I had on a few occasions had an Anne Frank moment. I was met with a quizzical look that indicated to me that I might need to clarify what I meant by that.

"Well, I was only one sneeze away from tragedy."

Yeah, I know. I blame the fiberglass dust. Apparently it suppresses politically correct thoughts.

The trimming worked, though, and it was a simple matter to match drill to the tail parts and cleco the caps in for riveting.

The caps had been the only thing preventing us from bolting on the VStab, so that was next. A dozen AN3 bolts hold the VStab on and each was tightened up according to the torque values provided in the handbook provided by Van's with the kit.

I think the VStab was the right choice for a good emotional boost. Look how tall the plane has gotten!

Evangelism

On any topic where there is a meaningful amount of room for opinions, you will eventually run into evangelism. For example, most people agree that 2 + 2 = 4, and anyone having a different belief is simply ignored. There simply isn't a lot of wiggle room in whether you believe that simple equation to be true or not. Subjects of any importance whatsoever are seldom (rarely?) as binary as the true or false proposition of mathematics, though. On any more complex subject, the strength of personal opinions will fall roughly into one of these categories: uncertain and don't care, uncertain and open to suggestion, certain but willing to tolerate other opinions, and so certain that no other opinion can or will be entertained. That final stage is what I define as evangelism.

There are three demographics that are well known for the high degree of evangelism in their ranks: the religious folk, the political junkies, and pilots. Get any group of pilots together (and by 'group' I mean two or more) and get them talking about flying (which is easy since that's all they will want to talk about anyway) and you will soon see that at least one of them is evangelical on at least one topic. Some of the more common are high wing vs. low wing, straight-in pattern entry vs. 45 degree entry on downwind, whether or not pilots that check in with a new controller by saying "with you" should be thrown into a pit filled with 1000's of rabidly hungry Chihuahuas, nose wheel vs. taildragger, and Lycoming vs. Continental engines. When it comes to people building airplanes, one of those evangelical topics is the question of whether or not to use primer.

There are two questions, really. The first is how much (if any) to prime the interior parts of the airplane and if so, what primer to use. On the prime-every-surface side are people that live in a corrosive environment, typically those on the coastal regions where there's a lot of salt in the air. The why-bother crowd are folks that live in dry, arid regions. Me? Well, I live on the coast of a corn field. It's not dry, but it's not salty either. That puts me in the group that generally think it's enough to prime parts that have had their alclad coating removed. We've already seen a part like that here at Schmetterling:



The inside part of those assemblies have had the alclad layer sanded off on the sides to smooth them out. I'll want to prime it.

Having decided that, the second question came up: prime them with what? Naturally, there are a dozen answers to that. Two-part epoxy and hours of preparation is at one extreme of difficulty, a spray can of self-etching primer from Napa Auto Parts after a quick wipe-off with some soapy water is at the other. The Napa spray can being on the easy side, in case you didn't figure that out on your own.

Here's what I decided on:



Anything else is overkill. Most of the 40+ year old Cessnas and Pipers you see at any midwest airport are not heavily primed and they're still going strong. In forty years, I'll be 88. Even with an LSA, I doubt that I'm still going to be flying or in the least bit concerned about the state of this airplane.

In addition to buying a can of primer, I also made a trip to Harbor Freight to pick up another mover's blanket. I'm going to be working on a part with all of the blue protective vinyl removed and I don't want to set it on an unprotected surface, especially one with so many protruding screw heads that could put a deep scratch into the vulnerable aluminum. Cost of the blanket? $4.99. Final tally at the Harbor Freight cash register? $42.

Cashier: "Did you find everything you were looking for?"

Me: "Yes, plus another $37 worth, thank you very much."

That happens every single time I go there.

After my morning errands, I picked up Wingman Ted, who is mid-way through building an RV-10 and his Co-pilot Wayne at the airport. Wayne is also going to be building an RV-10. They were looking for somewhere to fly and decided to come visit the Schmetterling Aviation shop. After a nice visit and lunch at BW3 (where I got to see the only good part of the O$U - Purdue game), I dropped them back at Bolton and headed back to the shop.

Today's job was to start drilling the holes in the spar cap I worked on yesterday. And again, there was a little head scratching. Basically what it came down to is whether the instructions that said MATCH-DRILL #30 THESE HOLES meant just the holes I have circled in red or if it included the blue holes too:



It's as if I'm learning the nuances of a new dialect. I understand the words, but their true meaning sometimes still eludes me. In this case, it was a simple matter to look ahead in the plans a few pages and definitively determine that I was to drill both red and blue.

The directions say that you should drill and cleco every fourth hole. That went well enough after the first hole. What happened on the first hole? Well, the bit drilled through the metal and then kept on going, right through the new blanket. The bit pulled a bunch of blanket material back up through the hole. Oops! After that I started putting a small plank under the part as I drilled it so the bit would have someplace less irritating to come to rest. The every-fourth-hole method results in a nice zig-zag pattern:



The next step is do the same on the other side. I can't do that as I am out of clecos. I could shuffle around the handful that I have, but the shop floor will be closed tonight anyway for spouse date night. It'll wait until tomorrow, unless the weather is nice for flying. My RV-6 misses me.

I read ahead a little bit and found that once the other side is drilled, it all gets taken apart for deburring and general clean-up. After that the directions say to "Match-drill the rear spar flange holes."

To which I said, "Huh? Wouldn't I have just done that?" After an embarrassingly long time thinking about it, I realized that no, no I hadn't. I had drilled the web holes. It's another example of that new dialect I'm learning. The 'web' is the wide part of the spar, the 'flanges' (there are two, actually) are the thinner, bent over parts. The sides, if you will.

I'm on hold now until Co-pilot Rick brings over some tools. He will be a welcome addition to the shop; my current assistant Hogarth really isn't all that into it:

Friday!

Although it was an abbreviated work week after taking Monday and Tuesday off, it felt like a full week. The first day back after even just a couple of days off is stressful as pent up demand for my services hits full force as soon as co-workers start coming in, but even after burning all of Wednesday getting caught up I was able to get some good work accomplished. I'm in the middle of at least a half dozen long- and short-term projects, but with only two full working days left in the week I concentrated on small stuff.

Even with only two days to spend I got two new customer-facing reports done, and the technology I'm using for these (Microsoft C# and Crystal Reports to programmatically generate PDF files, if you must know) is somewhat brittle so any progress at all is gratifying. These particular reports turned out very well, if I do say so myself, and I'm particularly proud of the one I did today. The one I did yesterday was mostly to spec, although a clever two-line approach for each data row that I came up with answered a thorny issue having to do with horizontal page space. The one I did today was my own idea, and although it used the same data as the other report, it presented it in an entirely new way that garnered a few of the "oohs" and "ahs" that IT folks just live for.

Somewhere during the half hour commute home I went through my daily transition from SME (subject matter expert) to VI (village idiot). In this case, the transition to "airplane builder" was especially jarring. You see, I'm very much still in head scratching mode. I look at the plans and instructions with the same level of comprehension my dog Hogarth demonstrates when he sees me perform what to him are the minor miracles of turning darkness to light and summoning forth water on demand.

So, here's where we're working:



The red ellipse is around the rear spar of the vertical stabilizer. You might also call it the tail fin. The blue ellipse is around the part that I worked on tonight, the VS-1212A Lower Spar Cap. The VS-1212A and VS-1212B come in one big part called the VS-1212. The VS-1212 has to be separated into the A and B components. That's pretty easy; I just cut them apart with tin snips and filed the leftover tabs off. The part that had me perplexed was this:



"Remove Area Shown Hatched" is pretty easy to understand, but what I didn't know was where to draw the line, so to speak. There were no markings on the part to show where to stop removing metal:



Once metal is removed, it's darn hard to put back on, so I wanted to think about it awhile! After staring at it for awhile, I decided that I could just use a straight edge to continue the slanted edge all the way down to the end of the part like so:



Then I just traced a line with a Sharpie marker:



Once that was done, it was just a matter of clamping it to the table and filing it down to the line:



There are a still lot of rough edges to be deburred, but I clamped it into place on the spar just to see if it looked reasonably right:



I'll either deburr it tonight or wait until tomorrow morning. Once it's deburred, it has to be drilled to match the holes pre-drilled by Van's into the spar. That should be pretty straight forward. I hope to have it done before noon when I will sit down to watch THE Ohio $tate Buckeye$ play the Purdue Boilermakers.

Is it too early to be thinking about the paint?

Well, of course it is!

Does that mean I won't?

Well, of course not!

I wonder if something like this would work:



I was only able to work for about an hour tonight, but not for lack of time; It was a tool availability issue.  I think I'm ready for a final brush-up and riveting of the rudder hinge supports, but I don't have a rivet squeezer quite yet. Sometime this weekend, I hope.

For tonight, though, I had to file away the "tabs" left from hacksawing the parts apart:





The filing didn't take long, but using sandpaper to smooth the edges of the parts did. Once that was done, the bearings had to be pressed into the sandwich and the assemblies clecoed back together:



I'm starting to remember why I like working with aluminum so much. It's so soft and easily worked that it almost feels like a very viscous liquid.

Into the abyss

I just couldn't put it off any longer: I had to make the first step. Sure, it was only one small step for man, and an even smaller step for mankind, but it sure felt important!

It really couldn't have been easier: find the VS-1210 and final drill #12 the eight 3/32" holes. Sounds easy, right?

Well, not so fast. Should I put it in the drill press and ensure a straight hole? I could do that, but I'd have to clamp the part down and if I got it aligned just a bit off center I'd end up elongating the hole. So, maybe I should just drill it with my nifty new hand drill. The bit would more or less correct itself if my alignment was off, but what if I had the drill at an angle? What would that do?? I finally decided that the hand drill was the way to go - the piece is so thin that any angular error would be tiny. Seriously, I stewed about that for an entire day! Sort of. I was at work and struggling to get caught up after a two day absence, so that took most of my available brain cycles. I stewed during the rare respites when someone wasn't after me to do something. I swear, some days I don't dare emerge from my office; they're out there waiting like lions hoping a hapless gazelle will walk by on the way to the watering hole.



Once the decision regarding drilling method was out of the way, I had to convince myself that the drill bit inhabiting the #12 spot in the box was, in fact, the #12 bit. Things may have gotten moved around over the years, after all. Ah, my aging eyes simply aren't up to the task without a significant amount of aid:



The actual drilling, while significant in that it was the first time tool had touched metal, was a bit (heh, "bit" - get it?) anti-climatic:



With the holes successfully drilled, we find that the VS-1210 is actually four parts and that they need to be sawed apart. No real tool selection decision to be made here: hacksaw!



Here they are, alongside a couple of other parts that arrived as one, but are now two:



These all get assembled together with a pair of bearings (yet to be found, but I'm betting they're in one of the brown paper parts bags) to form the hinge point for the rudder. But first they need to be fit together into assemblies and the holes need to be final drilled to a #30 size. Putting them together temporarily brought another momentous event: the first cleco:



One down, 100,000 to go!

Here they are, clecoed together, drilled, and ready to be taken apart again for deburring:



That's it for today. Now I need to decide whether or not to buy another bench vise and clean up these kinds of parts with a file, or spring for the $55 or so to buy a ScotchBrite wheel for my bench grinder.