A new day

Having had a distinctly unproductive day on Saturday, I figured Sunday could only be better. To start the day off, I revisited the aborted attempt at tapping a couple of 10-24 holes in the pins that will hold the larger wing pins in place, who in turn will would the wings onto the airplane both in flight and on the ground. The first of those being pretty near and dear to my heart, as you can imagine.

I got to thinking that perhaps I was a tad over quick in blaming my woes on the well respected Harbor Freight Tool Emporium and maybe, just maybe, there was a little fault on my side of the equation. For you see, I had not verified that the starter holes in the pins were actually of the correct diameter for tapping to a 10-24 size. I pulled out my handy Aircraft Mechanics Handbook and took a look at the size required:

A-ha! A #26 bit! I have one of those, so I tried it out in the existing starter holes. It fit with room to spare. So there, Harbor Freight. Not. My. Fault. In fact, the Sears tap included a #25 bit, which is one size larger, and it fit easily into the holes too.

I clamped in the first pin, gave the tap a light coating of Boelube, and it screwed in as easily as a light bulb. Thank you, Sears.

These pins will have magnets inside of them that will work as a safety switch. If the pins are not installed, or not installed correctly, the magnets won't close the switches that allow the engine ignition to work. The first step was to find the magnets and switches in all of the bags of stuff. Luckily, it was a "find one and you've found them both" situation.

I was less lucky in finding the two screws that I needed. I read through the inventory sheets over and over to no avail. At one point I even sent a text message to Kyle, apprentice roadie and catering assistant for The Jackson Two, to ask if he remembered having had any trouble finding those little buggers. "Nope, they're in one of the 'Misc' bags."

 And so they were. There they are, plane (heh, 'plane' instead of 'plain') as day: 10-24 BAFFLE SCREW. Well, they sure had me baffled! [rim shot]

With the wonderful Sears tap, the screws rolled right in. The magnet went in easily too.

The magnets are held in with epoxy. One of the nice things about having scrap metal lying around is that there is no shortage of mixing surfaces and tools:

One of the not quite as nice things about having scrap metal lying around is that it sometimes has dangerous edges and points. I gave myself an impromptu TB test with this one:

I held the pins upright in the vise while the epoxy set.

Then I found an easier way:

Next I was supposed to cut 1/4" pieces of clear tube and push them down into 1/4" ID bushings. That sounded a lot like something that would be a pain to do, so I went a different route. First I tapped the full length of tube into the bushing.

The bushing was already 1/4", so the net result was the same.

All I had to do was cut off the excess tube.

The little pins inside the bigger pins are spring loaded. The springs slip right in.

The pins, however, did not. They were quite stiff and very reluctant to go into the bigger pins. I buffed the internal pins with a small piece of Scotchbrite pad, and smeared a little grease on them. After working them in and out of the tubes for awhile, everything got loosened up. The screws and bushings were put in to finish the assembly.

I couldn't think of a better place to store them than in the airplane, so in they went.

Having finished something successfully for the first time all weekend, I decided to push my luck and go on to the next part. These are the electrical transfer plates that will meet with the plates in the wing roots to carry power and ground out into the wing. They get trimmed and drilled to match a provided template.

Clecos and clamps are used to ensure that the plastic part doesn't move in relation to the template.

Then the terminals are separated from a strip. Eight are needed per side, ten are provided. The band saw made short work of the job.

The rivets sit way too close to each other for the rivet puller to get in there, but I was afraid to just pull one rivet first and hope that the terminals were still loose enough to turn for alignment. I ended up pushing the second rivet in from the back side and holding it in place while I pulled the front side rivet.

Taaa-daaaaa! Perfect, right? Really?? Look again. Still think it looks okay? Well then, ask yourself this: what am I going to use for a template on the other one of these if I leave it riveted to the first one?? Ah, there's the problem: it's not supposed to be riveted to the first one.

Drill out the rivet, swear profusely.

In the end, though, it turned out nicely.

I decided to push my luck. There was only one step left on the page. "Modify a grommet by squeezing it in a vise. There will be a distinct crunching sound when it is accomplished."

Now those of you who were with me when I attempted to mis-use a vise during the fabrication of the longerons will remember why this promised crunching sound didn't seem like a good idea. For those of you who weren't, consider this:

Vises are made for holding things, not squeezing things.

Still, Van's said to do it, so do it I did.

It turned out fine, but I'd be lying if I were to say that I didn't have a moment of concern at crunch time.

On my way out of the hangar, I remembered that I had promised to verify that a few mystery holes were supposed to have been filled with something by the time the firewall sealant was used to seal the firewall. Here's the picture of mine:

One of those days, again

It's another game review weekend. This one is a hurry-up; they would like to have it done by Monday. It's reportedly a short-ish game, though, so I thought it would be no problem to run through it Friday night and early Saturday morning, leaving me plenty of time to write it up on Sunday. Unfortunately, I quickly encountered a bug in the game that made it very difficult to play.  Without a great deal of hope that anything could be done, I fired off an email to the development studio in the UK. Surprisingly, I had a reply from the managing director in just a few minutes. We exchanged a few emails wherein I tried to describe as accurately as possible where I was in the game when the problem started. That will hopefully help the developers locate the offending code, but my experience with these things leads me to believe that they have a very long and stressful weekend ahead of them.

Having failed in getting the review work done, I thought I'd address a problem in my own five year old getting-ready-to-be-put-out-to-pasture computer, that being the issue of hard disk space. The problem being that I'm essentially out of it. It should be a simple matter, I thought, to buy a hard drive and stick it in.

It wasn't.

After hours of trying to figure out why the PC refused to see the barren and bountiful new pastures of available storage now eagerly awaiting a healthy crop of photos, videos, games and the like, I gave up and went to the hangar to get started on the finishing kit, having thrown in the towel on the issue of the leaking RV-6 fuel tank and bequesting that particular pain the rear to my paid mechanic.  Step one is to tap some holes into the pin that will hold the larger wing attach pins in place.

I didn't get very far with that, as it turns out. My tap kit was purchased at Harbor Freight, the home of approximately-sized wrenches and extraordinarily soft-metal taps.

I gave up on getting anything productive done for the day.

I did get myself up to Sears to buy a decent tap, though, since to wait for Sunday would require waiting until their ridiculously non-competitive noon opening. Hopefully the next session will be more productive. There might be a dearth of supporting photos, though, if I can't figure out the hard drive problem in the meantime.

The Repairman

One of the best things about owning an Experimental class airplane is that you can do your own maintenance work on it. This is as opposed to the rules that come with a store-bought plane; those rules define a very small set of jobs the owner is allowed to do. The rest has to be done by a Federally licensed A&P *=(Airframe and Powerplant) mechanic. There is also a requirement for an annual inspection to be performed. In the case of the store-bought plane, the A&P requires an additional Inspection Authorization before being qualified to sign off an annual inspection. These AP/IA guys are relatively scarce and as such the annual inspection on a store-bought plane can get pretty pricey.

In the Experimental world, the builder of the airplane, assuming that he completed at least 51% of the job on his own, qualifies for a Repairman's Certificate. This certificate grants him one privilege that someone like me who bought an already completed airplane can never have: he can do his own annual condition inspection. I do get one benefit from buying an Experimental over a store-bought, though, in that I only need an A&P licensed mechanic to do my annual rather than the AP/IA. I don't exercise that privilege; I use an AP/IA anyway.

The new E-LSA category that the RV-12 will be a member of has a slightly different set of rules. As with the other Experimentals, I will be able to do all of my own maintenance, but I will not be able to get the Repairman's Certificate simply by virtue of having built the airplane. To earn inspection rights with an E-LSA, I have to attend a 16-hour FAA training class. Oddly enough, the 16-hour class is all that would be required even I had never spent a minute building the plane. Federal laws are not required to make any sense... so they often don't.

The down side of being able to perform your own maintenance is that you get your hands dirty. I've been working on the tasks generated by the RV-6 annual inspection for a month now. One of the items has been surpassingly frustrating. As part of the inspection, we noticed that the left fuel tank had a seeping leak. I drained the tank last week and the A&P made an attempt at re-sealing it. I replaced the ten gallons of gas last Thursday for a multi-day leak check while I flew off with a small group of RV-12 builders to attend the required FAA inspection class over the weekend.

The classes are hard to come by; I think there are only a handful of them throughout the year. The one we were to attend was located on the airport at Oshkosh. As we all know, that's a miserable ten hour drive each way, and I was loath to undertake that unless it was absolutely necessary. Luckily, it wasn't. Mr. Hurry*, the former owner of my RV-6 and current RV-12 owner, also has a very nice Beechcraft Bonanza. He wanted to take the class, and what's more, he wanted to fly up there in his Bonanza. Having three empty seats seemed wasteful, so invited The Jackson Two and me to ride up there with him and also attend the class. There was no way I was turning down that offer!

Friday morning found us out at his hangar marveling at the newly applied paint job on his RV-12.

It didn't take a genius to figure out where the paint scheme idea had come from:

We were soon in the air and pushing our way northwestward against a persistent headwind. Even with the winds against us, we were descending into the Oshkosh area after only a little more than two hours:

Having only ever seen Oshkosh from the air once, and that being a landing fraught with the nearly unbearable tension of being only my sixth solo landing in an RV-6, it was nice to be able to observe without the distractions inherent in having to make the landing myself. As it turns out, Oshkosh looks pretty much like any other airport for fifty-one weeks of the year:

We arrived and got checked into the hotel early enough to allow us to spend a couple of hours visiting with the friendly and knowledgeable at the Sonex Aircraft "factory" based right on the Oshkosh airport.

They buy yellow paint by the truckload:

After building your own airplane, you never look at other airplanes the same way. Every detail of the design and construction is examined:

The latest Sonex is called the Onex or One-X, I'm not sure which. It's a single-seat taildragger like the Van's RV-3, but it has folding wings to enable trailering or sharing a hangar.

The wing folding design is quite elegant. Those two "paddles" inside the little square holes move with the pilot's control stick. They press against the aileron pushrods in the lifted part of the wing when it is latched back down into its flight position. Quick, easy, and impossible to forget. Very clever!

In the R&D hangar, I found this intriguing little gem:

Yea, that is a jet engine!

They also have a prototype electric engine:

And turbo-charged VW engine:

It's really not all that much of a "factory" in the traditional sense. Most of the parts manufacturing is outsourced. They make the wing ribs and the cockpit canopies in their shop; everything else is contracted out, but eventually ends up in the parts warehouse:

The quality of the parts is high, and I was particularly impressed with the pre-fluted wing ribs:

Mr. Hurry is standing on the right, next to John Monnett who is the founder of Sonex Aircraft. I too spoke briefly with Mr. Monnett, just long enough to suggest that the One-X would make a great prototype for a future two-seat tandem design (presumably called the Two-X) that would be similar to the RV-4 and a virtually guaranteed success in the market. Someday we'll see if he agrees:

Saturday morning we showed up for class in the nearly deserted EAA museum building.

Registration went quickly and we found ourselves with enough spare time to peruse the also deserted exhibit space:

Hey, my current proposed paint scheme on an old Link trainer:

The class was informative, although a lot of it was stuff that I had been through before when I was taking A&P classes. There was a lot of material to cover and it wasn't possible to dig too deeply into any of the subjects, but the class wasn't intended to make AP/IA level mechanics out of us in two short days. I think the most important lesson imparted is that this is serious stuff and not to be taken lightly. It's a big responsibility.

We finished on time late Sunday afternoon and were in the air within half an hour of receiving our certificates. As we were climbing out to the south, I took a couple of pictures of the desolate Airventure grounds:

The trip back took just over two hours and was mostly smooth, although there was some pretty good turbulence over the lake. Still, two hours in a Bonanza is worlds better than ten hours in a car!

So, what did I find when I got back to the hangar tonight and checked up on the fuel tank leak check? It wasn't good. It had failed to the tune of nine of the ten gallons being gone. I drained out the dregs of the remaining gas and removed the tank. It's going to be a much bigger job to fix, it would seem.

Drat.

* Names changed to protect the innocent, by which I mean "me."