Finishing kit trickling in

I received the notification of shipping from Van's last week, so the finishing kit is on its way. The paperwork showed a back ordered item, though. Apparently there would be some delay in the receiving of the tunnel wiring harness. I also noted that they are shipping via Baxter rather than ABF. I wonder if there has been some kind of falling out? Because, truth be told, every kit that I've received from ABF looks like it has fallen out of something on the way from Oregon. They don't treat the packages very gently at all, despite the big "FRAGILE" and "$$$$$" painted on the crates.

In any event, I touched base with the folks at the local Baxter (after tracking them down via their national phone number - the number provided by Van's was disconnected) early this week and was told to expect a call back from them when the package departed Chicago ("Which should be later today," they said on Monday) but I've not heard back from them. Having had recent experience with how long it can take to get a package from Chicago (remember the troubles I had with UPS?), I'm not yet worried.

I did get the wiring harness, though. It arrived via USPS a couple of days ago.

And last night, just as we were leaving to go out to dinner, the UPS guy showed up at my door. I was shocked to see him, and more shocked to see that he was delivering a very large and poorly wrapped package. Not expecting any deliveries, I was naturally suspicious. The return address provided no recognizable origin. To make matters worse, the package was beeping in that oh-so-clichéd way a package bomb beeps! Thank you for that, Hollywood.

I suggested to my well-insured spouse (by which I mean she has a lot of insurance on me) that she move away just in case. No sense missing out on the big insurance payment if worse comes to worst, right? It was at just about that time that the UPS guy got back to his truck and drove away, taking the ominous beeping with him.

Phew, at least that removed 'explosive' from the list of potentially bad things in the box, leaving only 'biological agent.'

"Honey, bring one of the dogs and have him give this thing a sniff!"

When the dog failed to immediately keel over from the effects of a malicious scent, I took a whiff myself. There's good news and bad news arising from that: while the box was redolent with an obnoxious odor, it was a smell that I'm familiar with: Pro-Seal. Could it be??

We fought a lengthy battle with the wads of packing tape that were loosely holding sheets of cardboard in place in the malformed shape of a box. Inside we found a cubic yard of those irritating foam packing peanuts. Pushing those aside in a way that guarantees that we will still be finding vestiges of them four years from now, we found a mile of bubble wrap with an RV-12 fuel tanks ensconced within. Yes! The smell of Pro-Seal was indeed an indication that my Van's-built fuel tank had arrived. Although... because of the way it was shipped, I don't think Van's built it. Someone is doing it for them. The work looks great, though, so more power to him. It feeds my prediction that there will be quite a few people going into the business of developing and selling after market parts for the RV-12.

Immediately recognizing the danger of allowing Egg to have six months worth of bubble wrap to torture me with from her incessant popping of the bubbles, I proactively announced that the tank would be required to stay in the wrapping until such time it is installed in the airplane.

At which point I will conveniently forget to bring the bubble wrap home.

Yes, I'm like that. It's how I roll.

I delivered the wiring harness and the fuel tank to the hangar and retrieved the plans, tools, and parts that I will need to construct the flaperons in the comfort of the Schmetterling Home Office. I'll start on that over the weekend, but in the meantime I have refined my drawings for my current favorite paint scheme.

The inspiration:

The "roundels" on the top wing will be decals costing about $100 each. As such, I don't think I will put anything on the bottom of the wing - no one sees that anyway when it's on the ground.

A new idea for the paint job

If you haven't yet, I encourage you to go read my story of my ride in a PT-17 Stearman here.

For you recalcitrant non-link followers, all you really need to know is that I enjoyed it immensely and that I'm thinking of a new direction for the RV-12 paint scheme.

Here's a picture of the Stearman:

Now obviously that's a biplane and by definition has an awkwardly placed extra wing as compared to my monoplane RV-12, but wait, there's more! There's also a plane from the same era called a PT-19. The PT-19 will be familiar to anyone that remembers Cox .040 control line model planes - it was the first one you'd buy.  As with the Stearman, there are still a few of the real thing flying around.

I don't have a good way of making pictures of paint jobs specific to the RV-12, but I did find a demo version of a paint design tool that uses a CAP 232. I could buy a version specific to the RV-12 for $24.95, but I don't think it's worth it. You can get a general idea from the CAP 232, I think:

What do you think? It has the benefit of being a relative easy paint scheme since there are no stripes, etc. to deal with. The military logos and 'Army' text could be done quite easily as vinyl decals, just like the markings on my RV-6. So there's that to consider too.

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.

Interior paint done

The thinking, such as it was, behind using off-the-shelf rattle can spray paint for the interior painting was as follows:

  - easy to buy in precise quantity needed
  - easy to match color if/when touch up is required
  - no need for advanced painting equipment
  - if a "textured" paint is used, insects and travelling dust motes that get caught in the wet paint only serve to add to the effect

So, how did it work out? Well, okay as far as it goes, but I have to confess that I am beyond disappointed and well into irritated with Rust-Oleum.

Issue 1: easy to buy in precise quantity needed. I suppose it would have met that criteria if there was any degree of quality control on the actual spraying part of the term "spray paint." One can was a complete dud and refused to expel any paint whatsoever. A second can would only spray for moments at a time before sputtering, stopping, starting, sputtering, etc. I finally realized that someone at Rust-Oleum had cleverly modified the can to send a message in morse code. I carefully transcribed the dots and dashes formed by the sputtering spray can:

- .... .. ... /  .--. .- .. -. - /  .. ... /  -.-. .-. .- .--. 


(Here, let me help: Morse Code Translator here)


Issue 2: easy to match the color later. Not likely. The colors didn't match from can to can now, so I can't see them doing any better in the future.

All I have to say is this:

It's time to rewrite the promise at the top of the can. "Trusted Quality Until 2010" would be more accurate.

Retro Logo extravaganza!

I'm still solidly sold on the idea of going with a retro paint scheme on the airplane, and enhancing the retro aspect with the inclusion of era contemporaneous oil company sponsor logos. Those aren't especially easy to find, but I ran across a veritable treasure trove of them here at Vic's 66 online store.

These are porcelain signs with old logos on them, typically running 12" or so in diameter and costing $20 or less. The sign itself would act only as fodder for the scanner with the resulting electronic image being used to generate a set of decals for the plane. The signs themselves would then be relegated to the role of hangar decorations.

Here are a few I picked as strong contenders:

The Husky "Gasolene" caught my eye simply because I like Husky dogs. That's probably not enough reason to select it, but certainly enough to include it in the pool.

The two Flying A's will probably not make the cut for a reason that may or may not be obvious. It's just that it would be oh-so-easy to append a 'hole' to it, you see. Too many people think of me that way already, thank you very much. No sense in encouraging more of that, right?

The oil logo with the B-17 can, fortunately, co-exist in harmony with whatever gasoline (or gasolene) logo that I ultimately choose.

If you follow the link, you will see that they are also offering some of the more well-known brands such as Gulf, Sunoco, and, of course, the Red Lion that started me down this path. There are also some brands that I recognize but are no longer with us. It will, no doubt, be harder to choose one than it was to find such an extensive collection to choose from in the first place. Deliciously ironic, that!

There is some similarity in their shape...

Still thinking about paint:

Saturday morning in the Schmetterling Design Bureau

I'm a morning person, but only as a result of being averse to a 35 mile drive in rush hour (such as it is in Columbus, OH) traffic. I've been getting up at 5:30am for so long that I don't even need or use an alarm clock. That's great, but only for five days a week. It's not so great on the weekends, especially since the rest of the household wants to sleep in, and they want it to be quiet as they do.

That gives me a lot of time on weekend mornings to find something quiet to do. For part of the year, I can watch Formula 1 racing on TV. For the rest of the year, it's a lot trickier to keep myself entertained. Today I sat down at the computer and played around with paint colors and designs again. I know it's way too early to give any serious consideration to it, but it's relaxing and fun.

I'm still leaning towards a retro scheme based on the air racing planes of the early 1930's. Today, the famous Roscoe Turner and his Gilmore-sponsored Wedell Williams Racer were the inspiration:

I didn't get the front of the stripe right (waking up early is one thing, being attentive to detail that early in the day is quite another):

Maybe I'll fix it tomorrow morning, but probably not.

Good news and bad news about presumptive paint scheme #1

The good news? It was apparently a pretty good idea.

The bad news? It's such a good idea that's it's been done:

Does the fact that it's been done mean that I won't? No, probably not. I'd change the big 9 to a 12, though, and see if I could get double six dice to match the 12.

But still... people will always say "Hey, you copied Tom Sampson's paint job." The RV community is very small, you know. People talk. Pictures are gathered.

I still like the 20's air race motif, though, so I go to thinking about just finding something slightly different. Google proved reticent about offering me up a good selection of pictures to chose from, though. The only one I could find in any quantity and in color was a few small pictures of the Texaco #13:

Not much to go on, is it? But I did learn that the airplane is hanging in a museum in Chicago, and I'm looking for another excuse to got, after all. I could go get some pictures of my own. But Google is bottomless - I kept looking.

I found this:

The box in back is a model of a Texaco air racer. That thought got me to thinking...

thinking...

thinking...

Hey! Don't I already have one of those??

Well, yes. Yes I do!

The colors remain red and white, some decals would have to be made, and I think it would have to be "Texaco #12," but this will work for now as presumptive paint scheme #2.