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.

A clever two-fer

There are any number of subtle benefits that accrue from the decision to build an E-LSA airplane as opposed to a more traditional "figure it out for yourself" experimental. One of those benefits comes from the fact that the designer of the kit knows exactly what components will eventually be installed in the airplane. I ran into a very good example of this when I built the combination battery box and oil tank holder.

Because I will be required to use a specific size of battery, and because the designer also know that I would be installing a dry-sump Rotax 912, it was possible to design a clever little box that will hold both the battery and the external oil tank that is the definitive feature of a dry-sump engine.

There are only a handful of parts involved. I started out by clecoing it all together in order to get a clear idea of how it's supposed to look.

The battery will fit into the slot behind the curved arms that will hold the oil tank. It's a deliberately tight fit, so the rivets used to attach the battery hold-down brace need to be flush to the interior. That means two things: the plates need to be dimpled (easy), and the flanges of the hold-down brace need to be countersunk to make room for the other side of the dimples. If you remember a similar operation just a few days ago when I was building the canopy ribs, you will remember that it was not all that easy. It's a stressful operation, requiring a careful balance between digging the countersink holes deep enough to absorb the entire dimple yet shallow enough to not end up increasing the diameter of the rivet hole.

I think I got it just right, but it took a lengthy series of trial fits to reach the final fit.

A quick trial fit to the firewall to make sure everything was correctly aligned.

Then a decision had to me made: rivet front-to-back through the firewall, or from back-to-front from inside the airplane. Van's provided no clue whatsoever as to their personal preference, so I opted for the easier of the two. Again, note that "easier" is not to be conflated with "easy." While it would have been a royal pain to get the rivet puller up tight against the flanges if riveting from the outside, it was no picnic to endure the contortions required to rivet from the inside out.

Here's what happens when you don't have any choice but to work in the close confines of a flange. That broken mandrel stub is going to have to be filed down.

With everything finally riveted to the firewall upper panel, I had another decision to make. The plans had been very clear that I was to rivet to the firewall upper, but had made no mention as to whether or not I should also rivet to the firewall ledge. I could see that I would have to do so from inside the plane, and that's an area that is going to get ever more crowded as I progress through the installation of the rudder pedals, etc. I opted to go ahead and do it now.

Like I said: easier, but not easy. It took painstaking effort for each and every rivet since I had to lean around to the front while fishing around with the rivet puller trying to find rivet holes.

It took awhile, but I got it done. I can only imagine what it would have been like to have to design and fabricate my own mounts - I love this kit!!

You know the drill...

The replacement aluminum angle material for the mis-drilled canopy strut mounts arrived today. I placed the order on Saturday, but Van's is closed on the weekends so it wouldn't have been picked and shipped until Monday morning. They're located all the way out in Oregon, three time zones away, so it probably wouldn't even be Monday morning Columbus time; it was far more likely to be shipped Monday afternoon at the earliest. I used that delay to call them up and have them add a couple more things that I hadn't thought of ordering at the time that I ordered the replacement aluminum angle. For example, I've come up short on CS4-4 rivets. I must have had to drill a few of those out some time in the past, or there just weren't enough included in the kit. I've been working on this fuselage for so long that I can no longer remember which it is.

In any event, I was pretty irritated with myself for messing up the drilling of those holes in the first place and was even more frustrated when I remembered too late that I needed to order those rivets. If I didn't get the rivets added to the order, I'd end up paying shipping charges twice. As much as I like Van's, their shipping is maddening. They inexplicably refuse to enhance their web site with a shipping cost predictor like every other eCommerce site in the universe. They basically offer you the opportunity to roll the dice on who's going to be cheaper between UPS and FedEx. They also offer US Postal, but go to pains to discourage you from using it.

I mean, SIX WEEKS?? Really??? The 19th century pony express was faster than that! This time around I decided to call their bluff. So, instead of paying FedEx $8.95 to ship $4.00 worth of stuff, I paid the US Post office $4.52 to ship $4.00 worth of stuff. And what's more, it didn't take six weeks. They shipped Monday morning (Oregon time) and it got here Wednesday afternoon Ohio time. Remind me: why do people deride the US Postal Service? That's pretty impressive as far as I'm concerned.

So, with 8 inches of replacement angle in hand, I toddled out to the hangar right after work in hopes of getting at least a couple of useful 1 5/8" braces crafted before losing the sun at 5:20 pm or running out of aluminum. That's pretty sad, isn't it? Dark by 5:30. I don't know how I'm ever going to get this thing done.

I needn't have worried about running out of light or aluminum. Using a pilot hole rather than rushing in with a full frontal 1/4" drill bit attack worked famously.

As with the first attempt, I started by very precisely measuring the location for the three holes and marking the spots with a center punch.

I then drilled three of what I thought were #40 pilot holes. Well, they were in fact #40 holes; that's not where I misconstrued what I was supposed to do. No, what actually happened was that I thought all three of the #40 holes were pilot holes that would then be drilled to final size, but I realized just in a nick of time that 66.66667% of those holes actually were supposed to be #40, not the larger #30 holes that I thought I was to drill.

That just left the 1/4" hole in the middle to drill. This is where it all ended in tears the last time I tried it.

No tears this time. Perfect!!

The rivet holes matched perfectly too.

That all went so quickly that I actually had some sunlight left over. As long as I was having a good night with the drill, I went ahead and tackled the very, very scary job of drilling through the shelf and into the longerons. One bad move here would be devastating! Not to worry, though, as all went well for that operation too.

On solitude

Do we ever really have solitude anymore? Are we ever truly alone? I think the closest that I ever get is on the relatively rare occasions when I fly alone, but even then I share often-crowded radio frequencies with other pilots and, should push come to shove, there is always someone on the other end of the emergency 121.5 frequency.

I started thinking about this just recently when I had one of my middle-of-the-night anxiety attacks, this one on behalf of my daughter who, to all indications, sleeps through the night like a petrified log. We have been discussing where she will attend college once liberated from the confines of government mandated public education and allowed to choose her own path. She has long wanted to attend the Nursing College at Mt. Carmel Hospital here in Columbus, but I've been reluctant to wholeheartedly get behind that idea.

There are two tangentially related reasons for my failure to fully support this decision: 1) I think it is very important for her to get out of the house and learn to live on her own, particularly after her highly cloistered upbringing as an only child, and 2) Mt. Carmel is located in the shadow of downtown Columbus. There's a world of difference between "being out on your own" and "being out your own in a tough neighborhood." During our campus visit, Mt. Carmel tried to put me at ease by assuring me that there are armed guards available to escort her to and from classes, but all that did was starkly point out the validity of my concerns.

Well, it turns out that Mt. Carmel now has a regional program in not-too-close-but-not-too-far Lancaster, OH. Lancaster is a much smaller town and our visit to the medical center showed that it is located in a nice neighborhood. Egg loves the idea and is keen to go, and I fully support her in that decision. That said, I woke up one night not long after our visit to Lancaster wondering how I could ever kick her out of the nest like that and how she would respond to being utterly and completely alone for the first time in her life. It's hard. Very hard. I don't know if she fully understands what it's like to be all alone in a strange city, completely separated from everyone you've grown up with. I've done it myself, and I know how horribly lonely it can be.

After stewing about it for half an hour, I finally suffered an epiphany that somewhat comforted me: kids today are never really alone. They may be physically separated by thousands of miles, but they are always only a text message, a Skype call, or a Facebook chat away from each other. Chances are that she would never even notice that she was alone; she spends most of her free time with her face planted to a computer monitor anyway.

Today I realized that in a very similar way, I am not alone in my efforts to build an RV-12. It may seem that I'm out at the hangar working away in complete solitude, but it isn't any more true in my case than it is in Egg's. Here's how I came to that realization.

I started out with a simple job: remove the blue plastic stuff from the tray that will hold the brains of the airplane. As you can probably infer, it was pretty cold today. I think it was 35F when I got to the hangar. There will come a day in the not-very-distant future when 35F is positively balmy, but for now it seems mighty cold. The blue plastic thinks so too; it did not want to leave the comfort of the nice aluminum tray. It was quite a pain to get it all off of there.

I couldn't help noticing that the schizophrenic attitude that Van's has towards dimpling holes for us showed up again. I actually came across the step in the instructions that directed me to do these dimples, yet here they are, already done. It's not that I don't appreciate their effort, mind you. It's more that I wish they would do a lot more! And, as long as I'm dreaming, I wish they would provide pre-dimpled nutplates as well. Still, beggars/choosers and all that.

Things soon got a little more complicated. The part shown below is a canopy rib. There are two of them, a left and a right. These are fairly critical parts. Their purpose is to provide a surface to host the canopy hinge bolts and the bases of the hydraulic lift cylinders that will lift the canopy. It needs to be pretty robust for that task, and that is reflected in the width of the metal. It's thick enough that the rivet holes for the ubiquitous collection of nutplates get machine countersunk instead of dimpled. All but two, anyway. There are two that will have blind rivets through them and thus don't need any type of recess. That left the question of what to do with the collection of seven holes that I have outlined. Should they be countersunk too? I wasn't sure. I was having trouble visualizing how the parts were going to go together.

It was then that I realized that I was not alone, nor was I solely responsible for figuring this out. Kyle, bass player and managing agent for The Jackson Two, had just gone through this stage of the build himself and could likely offer some advice. I sent him a quick question and a supporting picture to see what he had to say.

Just moments later I had an answer.

We both enjoy figuring out the 'why' in addition to the 'how', although I've been known to settle for the latter now and then, depending on my mood.

So I dimpled them.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm nowhere near too proud to ask for help, but it actually is the case that I was visiting a local completed RV-12 just a few days ago and had intended to take a few dozen pictures of exactly these types of details but was thwarted by a dead battery in Egg's camera. A little venting was in order, right? Even if completely unfair and unjustified...

As I drilled the countersink holes, I matched the part to the inside of the dimpled canopy ribs. I couldn't get the parts to sit flush against each other because the dimples were just too big for the countersunk holes. I eventually got to the point that if I countersunk any deeper, I'd risk making the rivet hole too big.

I solved that problem by clamping the parts together really, REALLY tightly before riveting them together.

There is nothing quite as awkward as trying to squeeze #4 rivets on a part that isn't being held in a vise. Knowing through personal experience (I'm glad that experience didn't leave a scar on my forehead!) how that rivet squeezer has a propensity to spring back with a great deal of force and given the topography of the particular region where the handles were, I was more than a little concerned over the possibilities of damaging some rather sensitive protuberances. Fortunately, all went well.

Here's how smart people do it:

There they are! A baker's dozen-plus-one of squeezed rivets!

The next couple of parts are the vertical braces that will support the center instrument panel that will hold the radio and transponder. As I was installing the nutplates, I noticed that there were 'bumps' on the surface that apparently were caused by the stamping of the lightening holes. My experience with these things is such that I became somewhat suspicious that those bumps would cause me great consternation when it came time to install the radios. Having just recently seen how tightly the radios fit on Capt. Lonnie's RV-12, I thought it best to grind those potentially frustrating obstructions off of the braces.

All gone! Compare the bottom part shown in the two pictures.

I clecoed the braces in and moved the tray over to test fit it to the fuselage.

It seems to fit so far. There's a lot more to be installed still, though.

At least I won't be lonely while I do it.

Political leanings

As the never-ending campaign season takes a few months off before the beginning of the 2012 cycle, we can finally get back into a little normalcy for awhile. I can turn on the radio now and get back to hating the commercials that were supplanted by endless campaign commercials that I hated even more. Incessant lies, half-truths, and fabricated accusations of the most outlandish personality traits of any given political opponent have been replaced with self-important political analysts spewing forth endless words intended to tell us all why we voted as we did. Of the two, I find the latter even more annoying than the former. The one I hear the most is that at its very core, America is politically oriented to the right of center.

I'm here to tell you that they may just be onto something. Allow me to explain.

I somehow convinced Co-pilot Egg to join me in the hangar this morning to do a little work on the airplane. I'm starting to work on all of the stuff that will sit in between the upper firewall and the control panel. There are a half dozen or so parts that need to be separated into left and right halves and buffed up on the ScotchBrite wheel. Perfect work for her. I told her to be sure to dress warmly as the thermometer was reading in the low- to mid-30's.

She snuck that beanie out of the house while I wasn't looking.

Getting the parts ready took about an hour. That was just enough time to start getting cold and hungry, so we took a lunch break. One thing led to another and it was 4:30 in the afternoon before I got back out there to do some more work. I had a couple of parts to fabricate. Well, "fabricate" is a bit ostentatious; I really just needed to trim some angle aluminum to the correct length and drill some holes in it. Piece of cake.

Here you can see how carefully and precisely I marked the spots to be drilled.

I clamped down the angle and drilled the holes.

And here it is, my evidence that everything in this country is right of center:

There's no fixing that. That hole has to be just right. A bolt is going to go through that hole to act as a hinge for the canopy, and having the hole off center like that would cause all kinds of problems. I had to order more of the aluminum angle from Van's. It was something like $3.43 for eight inches of it, which will give me four more tries at getting it right. Not that big of a deal, but the shipping will probably be at least $10.

I was pretty disgusted with myself. After all, I've been working on this thing for more than a year; you'd think I could drill a hole by now. I shared my tale of woe with Kyle (back-up vocals and roadie for The Jackson Two) who replied that he too had made the same mistake. I figured that what I had done wrong was to drill the larger hole all at once. Even with the spot punched with a center-punch, the big bit still 'walked' as I was drilling. It would have been better to have started with a smaller pilot hole. When I asked Kyle what he had done differently the second time he tried it, he said pretty much the same thing. So there you are: the secret to success is to center-punch and use a pilot hole.

In theory, anyway.

More tightly packed than an Ikea bedroom set

If you're not familiar with Ikea, you just need to know that it is a furniture company that owes a great deal of its international success to being a pioneer in the realm of flat-packing. For the 98% of you that won't follow a link, no matter how topical or what the cost in time and energy it took for me to find it for you, here's the gist:

Flat packing is a way of preparing furniture so that it can be easily shipped in constituent parts and assembled on location. It has become very popular in recent years because of its convenience for consumers and stores, and its cheaper costs. Flat packing is most recognized by American consumers for its use in the popular IKEA chain of stores, which are largely based on the idea of flat packing affordable and stylish furniture. Flat packing is also sometimes referred to as ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture, or knock-down furniture.

I bring this up because I have found that it is becoming increasingly common for me to have to try to explain just how (relatively) tiny the Rotax 912 engine is. With the RV-12 fuselage more or less complete and sitting next to an RV-6, the question often comes up as to how they will compare in size when the -12 is done. The RV-6 has a long, long nose, so the assumption is that the -12 will as well. Not true. The engine adds only a couple of feet to the overall length.

The Rotax 912 is, as mentioned, much smaller than the Lycoming O-320 that powers the RV-6. But that's only half of the story. It is also the case that the Rotax, as installed in an RV-12, is packed into the fuselage like an Ikea bedroom set is packed into an 8.5" x 11" FedEx shipping box. It's a marvel, really. I had the opportunity recently to get a few pictures that will hopefully convey just how tightly packed this thing is:

Get the picture?

The upper firewall

The RV-12 has a somewhat abnormal (at least in my experience) firewall. Rather than being one flat piece, it has a shelf in the middle of it. The engine mounts will be offset to account for that, which is pretty odd too. I'm not sure if all Rotax 912 powered airplanes exhibit the same (or something similar) trait or not. If they were, it would imply that it is a requirement based on the shape of the engine. In any event, there are two vertical firewall surfaces and the task of the day was to install the second.

As with just about everything else in the fuselage kit, the firewall wears nutplates like Charlie Allnut wore leeches when he was pulling the African Queen through the river. Nothing gets done without adding more of the parasitic little buggers. In the case of the upper firewall, there were eight to be installed, and they required those odd little blind rivets that have caused me so much trouble in the past.

The problem that I've had with those rivets is that the mandrel will break off in the rivet puller roughly twenty percent of the time. I used to have to get out the Dremel tool and a cutting disk to cut the mandrel off as close to flush with the top of the rivet as possible, and then file away the rest manually with a small file. And we all know how I feel about doing manually. Anyway, I just recently learned a better, easier way: I can just tap the mandrel back through the rivet in the other direction. They come out easy-peasy that way. Which, I firmly believe, is why I was able to pull sixteen of those little buggers without breaking a single one.

Figures.

The upper firewall has a lower flange that slides underneath the horizontal shelf. You have to put some sealant between the layers before you install it; I think it's intended to make an air-tight seal to keep engine compartment fumes from leaking into the cockpit. The lower firewall had the same thing at the flange where it meets the shelf, and I remember it as being a messy job that resulted in a bunch of my clecos being covered in goopy, sticky sealant. This time around, I ran a thin bead of sealant back on the flange back behind the row of rivet holes so the clecos wouldn't get any goop on them. I think I got just as good of a seal, but with much less mess.

This is an antenna shelf. I really like this idea. The antennas for the Garmin 396 in my RV-6 sit on the glare shield under the canopy. Fiberglass is transparent to these antennas, so there's no reason that they need to sit out in the open like that. On the RV-12, both the GPS and XM (XM satellite service is required for receiving NEXRAD radar data) antennas will live out here with the engine.

It looks more like an airplane every time I touch it these days!

A couple more cowl hinges needed to be installed. These are from the sets that I cut to fit last week.

There were two more nutplates to go. They sit on the top of the shelf. The rivets were those little blind rivets that no longer bother me all that much. The had to be installed from underneath the shelf, though, which was actually a spot of bother.

Naturally, I broke two of them. And, being under the shelf, it was hard to get the mandrels pushed out.

It's always something with those little bastards.

With the firewall essentially done, Van's wants me to seal it around the perimeter with "firewall sealant." Nothing matching that description came with the kit, and no part number is provided. It's for things like this that I donate more than the requested amount for the VansAirforce.com web site every year. A few minutes of research there was enough to find out that other builders had contacted Van's to get an idea of what was supposed to be used.

The answer was that I needed something called Flamemaster CS1900. No problemo, available at Van's for the princely sum of $42 for a 3.5 ounce tube, including shipping. The "includes shipping" thing is nice; normally it's frustratingly impossible to know what they're going to end up charging for that. Google is my friend, though. I found it here for $16.99 for a 6 oz. tube. Shipping (which their site was able to tell me right up front) was $8.95.

There are a few parts that I can prep while waiting for the sealant, and there's still a recalcitrant autopilot to work on, so the four day delay isn't quite as bad as it might have been. I hate to miss a whole weekend of work while waiting for it, though. I think this is why they tell you to read ahead in the plans....