Blind Spots

Some lessons just need to be learned over and over and over, or so it would seem. I thought I had a pretty good handle on my propensity to develop blind spots. As evidence I point to the fact that despite taking the sixteen hour course that will permit me to sign off the annual condition inspections on N284DG, I intend to continue the practice of paying a local AP/IA to take a look at it once a year just as I've done every year that I've owned the RV-6. I think this is a prudent thing to do, especially after he found a crack in the elevator trim tab that I had to have looked at hundreds of times, but never saw.

It happened again with the CHT problem. After getting some hints from Van's on what to look for in my quest to isolate the problem, I asked Pete to come down to the hangar and help out. It's much easier to trouble shoot wiring when there are a couple of people working on it - someone has to hold a multi-meter probe at each end of the questionable wire and with a long wire, that can be difficult to do alone.

As we were looking around at various wires to test, Pete asked about a PURPLE/YELLOW wire that was hanging loose from the wire bundle. I had seen that wire before, but because I was looking for a PURPLE/BLUE wire, and because it is not uncommon to have cut/stubbed wires on a Dynon D-180 to Skyview conversion, I ignored it. I ignored it even after learning from the wiring diagram that I was, in fact, very interested in the condition of PURPLE/YELLOW wires. In other words, I was looking right at the problem, but a blind spot that I had developed it was precluding me from actually seeing the problem.

Sure enough, fixing that broken wire fixed the CHT problem.

Man, did I ever feel like an idiot!

It's fixed now, though, and we can press on with the next items on the to-do list.

I'm not sure why the wire broke in the first place, and that's going to nag at me for awhile. I do have a theory: that particular bundle is the only one that doesn't seem to have enough slack. In fact, it seems that there is quite a bit of stress on it. I think it's possible that starting the engine introduced enough vibration to simply rend the wire in half.  I'm going to have to find a way to relieve the stress on the bundle so this doesn't happen again.

X's and O's and OH-NO's!

Before starting on the lengthy acceptance tests, I thought I'd work on a couple of little things that turned up during the engine start. First was the situation of the right side cylinder heat temperature which was showing a big red X on top of the Dynon indication. Second was the lack of an O. The O in question is the red circle that is supposed to light up when the stall warning vane is lifted on the wing.

I started with the stall warning. I figured the little micro-switch inside the wing just needed adjusting, so I removed the little access panel, stuffed a little flashlight up in there to provide some light, retrieved my little side-ratchet screw driver, and loosened the two set screws. A little pressure on the switch and it swung into place. A test of the switch showed not only the red O on the Dynon but also sent a loud warning horn into the headsets. Problem solved, I replaced the panel and went to look at the CHT wire.

Now where did that flashlight get to? I just had it, right there in the....

I glanced over at the stall vane and could see the bright illumination coming from inside the wing.

Rats. Now the access panel would have to come off again so I could extract the flashlight.

I didn't get much done on the CHT problem other than verifying that the problem is with the wire. I'll have to remove the avionics bay cover (a royal pain) and dig around in the wires looking for the problem. For now I will live with the X problem, but it will have to be fixed before the airworthiness inspection.

Before removing the cover, I thought I'd so something else that I would have to do with the cover on. I need to check the engine RPM when running at WOT (wide open throttle).  I pulled the plane out to the taxiway, out some chocks about eight inches in front of the wheels (figuring that I might as well test the brakes too), and started her up. As I was waiting for the oil temp to get high enough to throttle up, I thought I saw wisps of white/gray smoke out the right side of the canopy. Wondering what that could be, I glanced at the Dynon only to see the oil pressure starting to fluctuate. That didn't seem right so I started the shut-down process. Just before killing the engine, the dulcet tones of the HDC (Hot Dynon Chick) pointed out that my oil pressure was getting low, and had in fact just dipped down into the yellow. I've heard about people struggling with wiring/sensor issues that cause strange behavior in the oil and fuel pressure, so I sighed with disgust, wondering how long it would take to track down this problem.

As it turns out, not long at all!

Oh-NO!!

Oil was gushing out of the #3 valve cover!  Odd, that, or so I thought until I touched the single allen-head bolt that holds it on. Hmmm. So I checked #1: also loose. And it is at that very instant I remembered the patriarch of The Jackson Two telling me to make sure I check the torque on those bolts before running the engine again. Which.... I had failed to do.

It looks like I lost about a quart of oil and the engine never ran anywhere near dry, but it was a close call nonetheless. My new rule is now nothing gets screwed or bolted onto the airplane at anything other than final torque. It's too easy to miss something important otherwise.

Bonehead!

I called Van's the other day to request my documentation packet. This is the collection of paperwork that I need to fill out and submit back to them to prompt them to send me a Bill of Sale. It also causes them to send an FAA Form 8130-15, or at least I hope it does, because that is one daunting form! It's much like a tax form in that the only thing more opaque to the casual reader than the form itself is the instructions for how to use it. And, as we will see a little later in this post, my reading comprehension of even the simplest instructions can be, now and then, quite lacking.

Van's customer service is always a pleasure to work with, and this interaction was true to form:

"Hi, I'm builder number such-and-such, and I need my documentation packet."

Cynthia: "Oh, congratulations!"

They clearly know that this means that the plane is almost done!

On the other hand, my dealings with the FAA have just begun. The FAA, not surprisingly, become very interested in my goings on when it appears likely that I will be taking to the skies and overflying innocent ground-bound citizens in a home made airplane. Can't argue that, right? They should take at least a cursory look at the quality of the assembly job before putting the citizenry at risk. I'm all for it too! After all, I might not hurt anyone on the ground, but I definitely will have my own skin in the game. The more experienced eyes that I can find to look over my work, the better!

But, as mentioned above, there is a mound of inscrutable forms to be filled out, and it all has to progress in a rigid, immutable order. An airplane is nothing but an expensive and sophisticated piece of abstract sculpture without the requisite paper trail pushing it along through the air. This is why it is important to contact the local FAA guys early in the process.

The easiest way to accomplish that initial contact, at least for someone like me that spends most of the day in front of a computer, is to submit a request via the FAA.gov web site. I did so and received a call from an FAA representative within just a few days. He had me sit down at the computer and winnow out the appropriate forms on the FAA web site and bookmark them for later retrieval. It was all going swimmingly until I made one fatal error: I mentioned that I had attended the required 16 hour training course to receive an inspection authorization and it would be nice to get that paperwork submitted as part of the overall documentation exercise.

"Wait, what?" he asked. "Are you building an LSA?"

"Uh, yeah," I timidly responded, having picked up on the negative vibe.

"Oh, well.... we don't do those. You have to get a DAR for that."

A DAR is a Designated Airworthiness Representative. It is, in less lofty terms, an individual designated to perform tasks too common or onerous for the Feds to deal with. It is very, very common, but mostly in the case of performing private pilot checkrides. It is exceedingly rare to take such a lowly check ride with an actual FAA examiner. Note that I am NOT criticizing this way of doing business with the taxpayer; the designated examiner gets paid by the aspirant, not the taxpayer. I think my most recent flight check cost about $100.

Fair, that.

The thing is, there are only two DARs close enough to come to Grove City, and both would have to drive a goodly distance. For this, they charge in the $600 range.

Not so fair, that.

Que sera, sera, and you can't take it with you. It's only money.

Cold comfort, that, but sufficient to the need, despite the penurious nature of my budget this late into the build.

I had no sooner settled into the idea that I would have to arrange my inspection with a DAR when a different FAA guy called me. It seems that they have decided that it is high time that they learn how to deal with an LSA and that they would use my inspection as a learning event. This isn't as risky as it sounds. They have inspected hundreds of home built planes; it is just the somewhat different paperwork that gives them pause. The conversation went quite well. These guys don't wear the Cloak of Unctuosity one might expect from a Federal employee. In fact, at one point the guy felt that he needed to warn me that he would be inspecting my work with a critical eye and that it was very likely that he would find something that I would need to fix. He encouraged me not to take it personally. I'm not sure why I would take offense at a guy trying to save my life, but I inferred that he had encountered responses like that before.

If I didn't have enough on my mind with all of that going on, I also had to solve a little dilemma of my own making. It's time again for the annual Arts in the Alley, which is a local art/crafts show put on by Grove City. Part of it is a photography competition, and I like to enter. The best I've ever done is an Honorable Mention (which I like to call '4th Place' or 'One Level Better Than A Stick In The Eye'), and that was years ago, back before the competition got so tough. I am allowed three entries but they also have an additional 'In Memory Of' award for photos featuring flowers. I had misunderstood that to be a completely separate category and therefore allowing of a fourth entry. Reading comprehension: lacking. But wait, it gets worse.

So, laboring under my incorrect understanding of the rules, I printed and framed four entries:

When I re-read the rules and realized that I was only allowed three entries, I had a problem: I couldn't decide on which three to enter.

Eh, it could wait. Off to the hangar to do some work.

What??! I have to countersink some rivet holes in my freshly powder-coated panel?? Oh no! What if it chips off the powder-coat?

No worries - it went fine.

Those rivets support a piece of metal that will help support the big 10" Dynon screen. There were others that would hold nutplates in place. Squeezing nutplate rivets is something I have done literally millions of times (with a nod to Joe Biden, who literally loves that word to death!) and I could pretty much autopilot my way through it.

Or..... not. Hey, look! A rivet to nowhere!!

If I was nervous about countersinking a hole in the panel, I was beside myself with worry about drilling out a rivet! It all turned out okay, though.

Back when I was still in the TSA phase of the Skyview conversion, I had to cut the four wires that ran to the autopilot disconnect button in the lower panel. Anxious to never make me take so crass an action ever again, Van's has me install a four-pin Molex connector on the wires to the switch so it can be more easily removed should I ever again need to do so.

I have never crimped a Molex pin, so I was kind of worried about how to do it. Here's what I figured out:

Looks good! What a relief! On to the next task, which is to put the pins into the Molex receptacle.

The other side of the wires, the ones in the airplane, will get Molex connectors crimped on too, but I didn't want to mess around with figuring out how to get them separated.

Instead, I decided to make the 1/2" hole in the lower panel for the switch to fit through. If I was worried about drilling out a rivet... well, how worried was I about using a Uni-Bit, not the suavest tool in the toolbox, to rip open a 1/2" hole?

A lot!

The hole turned out fine, so I went to install the switch.

Oops!

There's no way that connector is going through that hole. Chagrined, I went back to the instructions to see where I went wrong. And there it was, as plain as day: I was supposed to have put that connector on the wires in the plane, not on the switch. That, as you've surely surmised, comes later.

So, now I need to figure out how to get those pins back out of a Molex receptacle. I figured that perhaps I should save that for a later day when my mind might not be so distracted with other problems.

Smoke...

It won't be long now until I apply power to the airplane and its associated subsystems. In the vernacular this is known as a "smoke test," perhaps for obvious reasons, perhaps not. The idea is, of course, that no smoke appears at all, and if it does, that it comes out of something relatively cheap, easy to replace, or if you're really lucky, both.

Because I'm getting close to the point where all of the smart little boxes get installed into the airplane, I thought it might be a good time to take the instrument panel parts out to be powder coated. For those not in the know, powder coating is:

...a type of coating that is applied as a free-flowing, dry powder. The main difference between a conventional liquid paint and a powder coating is that the powder coating does not require a solvent to keep the binder and filler parts in a liquid suspension form. The coating is typically applied electrostatically and is then cured under heat to allow it to flow and form a "skin". The powder may be a thermoplastic or a thermoset polymer. It is usually used to create a hard finish that is tougher than conventional paint. Powder coating is mainly used for coating of metals, such as household appliances, aluminium extrusions, and automobile and bicycle parts.

I want you to make note of a couple of things. First is that it "create[s] a hard finish that is tougher than conventional paint." I thought this would be desirable for the instrument panel. In retrospect, it would have been desirable in a lot of other places too, but it's too late for that. Second, note that it is "cured under heat."

Here's why that matters. When I stopped by the hangar to pick up the instrument panel pieces, I impulsively also grabbed the two steps that will be mounted outside the airplane to provide a means to climb up onto the wing in order to get into the plane. These steps will see rough duty, and they were already starting to rust just from sitting around in the humid hangar, so I thought I'd go ahead and get them coated too. Doing so would add $25 to the bill, but I thought it was worth it. I dropped them off last week and was told to expect a call midweek to let me know when they were done. Well, I got a call all right!

"Hey, I'm calling from the powder coating shop and I was wondering if there was something inside those steps you wanted powder coated. We put them in the oven and they're spewing clouds of smoke!"

Uh-oh! I had completely forgotten that Van's had me pour fuel tank sealant down into them to keep water out!! That stuff smells to high heaven anyway - I can't imagine the smell of it burning! Soooo, the steps didn't get powder coated. But the panel looks great!

I am in the middle of what has been described as the hardest part of the Skyview conversion, which is the routing of some wire bundles from the avionics bay back to the back end of the plane where the main computer will be installed. I pulled the biggest bundle through a few days ago, so all that was left was a pair of two wire bundles. These are the ones that I used heat shrink on to protect the little gold pins. I may have shared that I thought that idea would prove to be either brilliant or stupid and only time will tell.

It did.

It's not a great place to work from a comfort point-of-view.

But I managed to get both bundles through without breaking off any of the pins. The heat shrink was a brilliant idea!

No, really, I was thrilled! You just can't tell because the 90% humidity made working conditions pretty ugly.

So there it is! A lot of work for just eight wires, no?

I sure hope none of them smoke!

More travel planning...

Fresh off of my amazing to trip to San Francisco to rub elbows with the Ferrari crowd and race head-to-head against a professional IndyCar driver came another interesting email which read something like this: "Hey Dave, can I count on you to be on deck for another product announcement trip in case I can't get away from work?"

"Well," I immediately thought, "that depends." I read further. The details were, in a word, intriguing:

Wanted to see if you'd be interested in a potential event for *Need for Speed Most Wanted*, hosted at the Porsche Driving School in Leipzig, Germany.

The event would take place on Sunday, Sept 30th. EA would take care of your travel to Germany and hotel of course, and the event would be a full day at the Porsche driving school, followed by hands on time with *Need for Speed Most Wanted*'s single and multiplayer modes before the game hits shelves on October 30th. Here's the breakdown of activities included.

    - Hands-on never-before-seen *Need for Speed Most Wanted* gameplay
    - Porsche driving school drive-along (ride the famed Porsche track driven by a professional race car driver)
    - Porsche off-road training (hands-on driving at the Porsche off-road course)

Not surprisingly, they had me at "Porsche." I replied back in the affirmative in whatever measure of time it is that falls between "second" and "instant," and that was before I even had a chance to Google the Porsche Driving School in Leipzig, the results of which are here. It looks like a lot of fun, although I'd be lying if I didn't say that I would prefer to do my own driving on the paved track too! And that's not to say that the off-road track doesn't look interesting; it just doesn't look fast. But hey, a chance to drive a Porsche? What's not to like??

I will spare you the suspense that I endured over the ensuing couple of days waiting to see if I would be going or not and come right out and say it: I'm going!

So, let the preparations begin. Step one was to find Leipzig on a map. Despite having been stationed in Germany for two years, I had never been to Leipzig. It turns out that there is a reason for that: the Berlin Wall blocked it off from western access a week after I was born and the wall was not knocked down until three years after I had returned from my two year tour of duty.

Step two was to address the issue of the language barrier. My German language skills have eroded to the point where all I can do is proclaim a situation of pecuniary embarrassment: "Ich habe kein geld." Oh, and I suppose I could ask for a beer in a pinch. There's no chance of re-learning the language to any kind of meaningful level at my age and with the short time available, so I decided to see if I could lean on 21st century technology. And you know what? I can! Look what you can get for $4.99 these days:



What could go wrong?

Seriously, though, isn't that amazing? There are two nice things about it beyond the unbelievably low price: it has the entire translation dictionary stored in onboard memory so there is no need to have internet access available to use it, and it will also allow me to type in text to be translated. The latter is pretty important because as you've seen in the video, the voice recognition can get confused. It will also be important for translating signs, menus, directions, etc. I will need another, non-language translation device to go with it, though. I'll have to get something to allow me to plug in my battery charger and translate foreign electricity to English electricity. Their wall plugs are of a different voltage and design over there.

That's not happening until the end of September, so progress continues on the airplane. When last we met, I had broken one of the the little gold pins off of the end of the trim wire bundle. I wasn't sure where to get a replacement, but that turned out to be easy. Kyle, drum stick whittler and bagpipe tuner for The Jackson Two, had also broken a pin off and had ordered replacements, some of which he had left over. Still heavily into the infatuation phase with his completed RV-12, I didn't even have to suggest that he fly up to Bolton with a pin and the specialty tool required to crimp it onto the wire.

The crimping was so simple as to be a non-event, and chock full of confidence I proceeded to install the pins in the big 37-pin connector that will attach to the main junction box. Interestingly, the wire bundle contains two white wires and the plans make no distinction between the two when it comes to pin location in the connector. Also interesting is that the music input wire bundle also contains two white wires, and it too goes into the 37-pin connector. While the plans don't seem to care which order each of the respective white wires go, they do care where which two holes are for the trim wires and which two are for the music wires.

I immediately put the music wires in the wrong holes.

That's bad, you see, because while it is easy to get those pins to snap into place, it is much harder to get them back out again.

Enough said about that.

Shamed, embarrassed, and disgusted, I quit for the night and we went over to the airport BBQ place and had dinner. I haven't been back to the hangar since.

Dropping the Toast

I don't know if it's true or not, but conventional wisdom has it that a slice of buttered toast, if dropped, will invariably land butter-side down. I can see the appeal of such a belief to the pessimistic crowd - the planets are aligned against me, anything bad that can happen will happen, and it's just the way of our universe and has nothing to do with any kind of personal curse that may have earned by flipping off a witch-like old hag puttering along in the fast lane at 42 mph. You know, as in "it could happen to anybody."

So, it must have been right around 3:00 am last night when I popped awake with an idea. Now sometimes this happens and it's actually a good idea, but more often than not it's a realization that something I thought was bad actually might be even worse. In this case it had to do with the mispainted fuselage side skin. My belief was that I had mislabeled the side skin as the right side instead of the left and simply failed to not trust myself. That belief was helpful because it meant that I wouldn't have to drill out the 20 rivets that I had just used to install 10 nutplates on the supposed "real" right skin. Why, if it turned out that the labeling had been correct in the first place, that meant that those rivets would have to be drilled out. That's not a real big deal, although it would mean ordering 20 replacement rivets from Van's, which would be yet another of those $2.25 for a few ounces of rivets shipped for $12.95. That would certainly be a butter-side down eventuality.

I didn't sleep well after that. The inexorably slow clock finally worked its way around to 5:00 am, the earliest time I will allow myself to get up and go to work. There would be a stop at the hangar on the way, but I already knew exactly what I would find when I got there.

I'll be ordering rivets today.

On the bright side, such as it is, at least I didn't spend a lot of time removing all of the paint from the skin that now turns out to be the one correctly oriented.

Douglas Corrigan

Apropos of nothing in particular, I had occasion to look up the details regarding one Mr. Douglas Corrigan today. My memory had it that he was famous for having flown out of New York and ending up in Ireland accidentally, having intended instead to fly to California. To his dying day he maintained that he had simply flown the wrong way, earning him the immortal sobriquet Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan. Here's what Wiki has to say in the introductory synopsis:

Douglas Corrigan (January 22, 1907 – December 9, 1995) was an American aviator born in Galveston, Texas. He was nicknamed "Wrong Way" in 1938. After a transcontinental flight from Long Beach, California, to New York, he flew from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, to Ireland, though his flight plan was filed to return to Long Beach. He claimed his unauthorized flight was due to a navigational error, caused by heavy cloud cover that obscured landmarks and low-light conditions, causing him to misread his compass. However, he was a skilled aircraft mechanic (he was one of the builders of Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis) and had made several modifications to his own plane, preparing it for his transatlantic flight. He had been denied permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland, and his "navigational error" was seen as deliberate. Nevertheless, he never publicly admitted to having flown to Ireland intentionally.

Reading that, it sounds as if there was no accident involved and the truth of the matter was that Mr. Wrong Way was well aware of his direction. Interesting story, though.

I've been lazing about the house the last few nights and haven't gotten much done on the airplane. I've noticed that my interest in working at the hangar waxes and wains depending on what I've been doing at the paying job. On those days when I have to wear my business-side hat and participate in seemingly interminable meetings during which I participate in scintillating debates such as what something should be named, I can't wait to get out to the shop to do some tangible work. It's not that those meetings aren't important, it's just that my nominations for names are never chosen. I suppose it could have something to do with the uncanny propensity I have for suggesting names that acronymize poorly (Claims Reconciliation Accounting Process and Bidirectional Asynchronous Load Leveling System come to mind), or it could just be bad luck. You be the judge.

In contrast, on the days when I wear my technical genius hat and spend hours that fly by like minutes building new capabilities into my suite of software applications, I come home tired and drained, wanting nothing more than to slouch through the remainder of the day. This week I've been in full-on invent mode, cranking out amazing new features such as the ability to generate a catalog report and automatically fax a copy to 2,724 individual fax numbers at the press of a single button on the screen. Pretty slick, that, and well received by my co-workers, but when all is said and done it leaves me as an empty husk driving home on autopilot in hopes of a relaxing evening spent vegging in a chair.

It wears on me, though, this laying about. I feel guilty about it. I have a lot of things needing done, and one of the biggest is finishing this airplane in less that a decade. I thought that tonight I'd go out and do some simple work in preparation for riveting the side skins on. Each skin has ten nutplates that needed to be dimpled and riveted in. That seemed an easy task and it would be just gratifying enough to alleviate the creeping guilt I've felt washing over me for the last few days.

I had forgotten that the nut plates used the #3 size blind rivets that I hate so much. They seem like they should be incredibly simple to put in, and in most ways they are. It's just that they have a very irritating habit of breaking off in the rivet puller now and again. Tonight it was three out of twenty.

As usual, I cut them off with a pair of wire cutters and ground the remaining stub of mandrel off with the ScotchBrite wheel. With that done, I could hang the longeron and skin back on the fuselage to see how it looked. Having done that, I thought I'd also test the fit of the forward upper firewall section again to see if my adjustments had worked.

It looked good on the left side and I thought I'd go ahead and put the right side on just long enough to see if there would be more longeron work to do before installing its nutplates and clecoing it in position for riveting.

Ah, now you see why I wanted to look up the biography of one Mr. Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan.

I PAINTED THE WRONG SIDE!!

I blame Rust-Oleum. I remember being pretty torqued off at them at the time. It'll be just my luck that the one thing they got right was to formulate a paint that can't be removed.

Amazing, isn't it? As careful as I was to mark the skins to avoid exactly this kind of mistake, I had gone ahead and done it anyway. I swear, I'd be better off just flipping a coin rather than trying to keep track of things with a Sharpie marker. Still, how could I have messed this up? Well, there's your answer. I marked it wrong, and then trusted myself.

I started the sure-to-be-lengthy-and-infuriating process of stripping off the paint, but I very quickly realized that I must have cut my finger when moving the side skins around. The burn of paint thinner getting in my cut was the last straw. I'm back in vegetative mode for the foreseeable future.