A wheely tiring day

Yeah, I know, it's a hokey title, but we did work on wheels and tires today, and it was very tiring indeed. Our difficulties didn't arise from lack of help, though, since Cadillac Pete was back in the shop with his son 'Warthog' (everyone gets a bl

What? Don't look at me, his dad came up with that.

So, as I was saying, Pete and Warth

What??? Hey, don't be so judgmental. Pete came up with that sobriquet because he felt it apropos for a young man whose very laudable career goal is to pilot an A-10C Warthog for the U. S. Air Force.

So, again, Pete brought Warthog along to help because we had planned to start the installation of the landing gear. That job actually begins with the drilling out of the mounting holes for the top engine mount. I took care of that.

Before starting on the wheels, we had a brief meeting to put together an action plan. Personally, I thought that was a big waste of time; I've been disassembling and reassembling the wheels on the RV-6 for years.

While I have never had to do anything with a nose wheel, it really wasn't very much different from the wheels I have had so much experience with.

The Matco wheels and brakes on the RV-12 main gear, on the other hand, are like nothing I've seem before. I suddenly wished that I had paid more attention at the planning meeting!

I let Pete and Warthog figure the wheels out while I returned to my comfort zone: packing the bearings.

After a suitable period of letting them figure things out, accompanied by dealing with a faulty axle that held onto the wheel nut like an old widow hugging her last remaining cat, it came time to assemble the wheel halves with the tubes and tires in place. The way the valve stem works with these wheels is completely different from the way my old wheels work, and it fell to Warthog to figure out how they were supposed to be installed while the two old guys stood slack-jawed on the sidelines. It's pretty slick how the Matco's work, but it is a massive pain to get everything to fit into place. That nut in particular was horribly reluctant to grab the two or three threads available to it.

Too bad this part won't be visible when the wheels are mounted - it's all kinds o' sexy.

Sitting there looking at pictures, it's probably hard for you to believe how much effort went into this. I think it was a good three and a half hours of sweaty work to get these things put together, and it still isn't done. The wheels need the bolts that hold the halves together installed and torqued, and the tires need to be aired up. And I still need to call Matco for some help on the really tough axle nut problem. But it was quittin' time and Warthog had earned himself an RV-6 ride, so off we went!

What?? Oh, for crying out loud. He was that dirty when he showed up, I had nothing to do with it.

Rolling with the punches

It was a frustrating day in the shop, not least because I was working alone and had to do all of the hard stuff myself. It shouldn't have been a difficult day, really, since all I wanted to do was install the autopilot roll servo. As usual, it looked like a simple job from front to back: finish up the control rod that I had started yesterday, crimp some electrical connectors onto the wires, and bolt it in. Nothing to it.

The control rod was done in no time even with the slower pace dictated by having to gather the little pieces/parts by myself. It was also a simple matter to bolt it to the control horn. I didn't really start facing any significant headwind until I tried to remove the wrench that I had used to hold the nut.

Oops! In hindsight it appears that I may have selected the wrong end of the wrench to use. Trapped!

The fix for that was easy; all I had to do was loosen the nut a little bit. The next step is where it all fell apart. I tried and tried and tried to get the servo bolted in, but no matter how many times I tried it and how many different ways I ordered the bolts as I put them in, it always came out the same: the fourth bolt would not align with the hole in the servo.

It made no sense at all! Those brackets were pre-drilled and riveted into a set of holes put there by the ultra-sophisticated computerized parts making machines at Van's. There was simply no way that I could have screwed that up.

Or.... was there? Was it possible that those brackets weren't as identical as they appeared? Might there have been a 'left' bracket and a 'right' bracket that I had somehow managed to install incorrectly?

As it turns out, the answer is yes.

That mistake, made more than a year ago in the thermally controlled indoor workshop where the fuselage was initially constructed, was paid for today in a 91 degree hangar. Both of the brackets had to be drilled out and replaced in their correct positions. Not. Much. Fun. But in the end, the roll servo dropped into place perfectly and it was an almost simple batter to bolt it into place. I say almost because one of the bolts was in a difficult location, but I was eventually able to get it tightened up by using the same wrench that I had mis-used earlier in the day.

Independence Day break

The Production Floor at Schmetterling Aviation was open today for the first time since the traditional July 4th break.

Tradition since 2011, anyway.

Being the eco-friendly, free range, family-oriented type of corporation that we are, the entire production staff took the holiday upon which we collectively celebrate the freedoms that were won for us when our courageous ancestors fought with their very lives to break the shackles forced upon us by an over-bearing government by exercising our inalienable right to bear arms. And to light off fireworks, too, even though that is a (somewhat ironically) illegal way to celebrate freedom from an over-powerful government, when you think about it.

Being as we're all family-friendly and all, the Schmetterling executive leadership invited one of the organization's most valued employees to come along, and to bring along his lovely wife as well. And so it was that Cadillac Pete, Senior Manager of Jobs that I Don't Want to Do, and his wife Красивая женщина (everyone gets a blog name...) joined me in a ride over the hills and through the woods to do some shooting at The Farm.

Now it would seem that the courteous thing to do would be a "Ladies First" ordering of things, but one has to consider the extreme effort that goes into warming up the shotgun. Also, as the most experienced shooter, it was incumbent upon myself to provide an adequate demonstration on how it's done. And so it was that I went first. Makes sense, right?

Right???

Well, it worked out pretty well. For you long-time readers that still remember how bad I was when I first started trying to hit those elusive little clay birds with a piddling 24" spread of speeding lead pellets (It sounds easy when I say it that way, I suppose), you'll be thrilled to learn that I've improved. In fact, I think it hit 85-90% of the ones I shot at. That was fun! And it was instructive, too. Having never fired a shotgun at all, much less at a moving target, how else would you explain the fact that Красивая женщина hit the very first clay she shot at!

We can shoot trap down in the lower field near our campground, but when we decided to put away the shotgun and do some pistol shooting we had to move up to the rifle range adjacent to our sister business, 8150 Automotive Repair and Race Team. My brother is the sole proprietor and mechanic of both the auto repair and racing divisions, and the driver for the race team. One of his main sponsors is, of course, Schmetterling Aviation. It's always fun to visit the shop to see how things are going during the heat of the racing season.

Things are going well this year, but it has not always been thus. Each significant incident with The Wall at KilKare Raceway is commemorated with a new entry on the Wall of Pain.

This is all that's left of last year's car:

The shooting trip was great fun and a good time was had by all.

The following day presented perfect weather for another company event: the Schmetterling Senior Management Retreat. This year the CEO and I would take the company plane on a day trip to Put-in-Bay (3W2) on South Bass Island, Ohio. Now, I wouldn't like to see a fine corporation like Schmetterling Aviation get unfairly included in the latest group of capitalistic villains to be targeted for vilification, so I want to stress that Schmetterling's corporate airplane is bought and paid for, and thus has no need for a depreciation schedule, accelerated or not, that could possibly result in Tiny Tim losing his crutches or The Little Old Lady being evicted from her shoe. Why, the very last thing we would want would be for the good, solid name "Schmetterling" to be in any way associated with the deplorable act of pushing Granny and her wheelchair over a cliff.

What?

Oh, well.... yes. We do burn leaded fuel. Thanks for asking.

Oh look! A Squirrel!


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As long as I was dead-heading the plane out to corporate HQ, I didn't see any harm in having my younger sister tag along. She could help with the piloting duties (by which I mean polishing the pure teak interior and the 24k flush handles in the loo) in order to offset the incremental cost of carrying another passenger. Us not wanting to get in dutch (can you still say that? Or is it not PC anymore?) with the SEC and all.

She's a good sport; she didn't get upset when, right after I had taxied up to the airport terminal to drop her off and pick up the CEO, I quipped, "Out with the old, in with the older!" (See also: insensitivity.) She also showed immense patience with me later in the day when she found out that she was still uncomfortably hot while driving home from Bolton Field after our half hour flight in the bumpy, 91 degree air because I had turned her seat warmer on HIGH as a joke.

Hey, it seemed funny at the time!

The flight up north to the island was glass smooth and very scenic under cloudless skies. It took roughly an hour due to the decreased cruising speed I'm using in light of $5.80/gallon gas. There was a light breeze out of the south which necessitated a left downwind to runway 21. That's nice because it offers a point & shoot photo opportunity while on downwind. Because I am busy setting up for a landing on the short-ish runway, I can't do any more with the camera than turn it on and hold down the button, hoping that at least one shot will turn out okay.

Having survived a simply atrocious landing whose only salutary feature was making the turn off at the first taxiway, we walked down south to a part of the island most people don't go to. Part of the fun of the trip was presenting an opportunity for the land-locked Ohio horseman to get a look at a large body of water and to enjoy the relaxing sounds of water diligently at work eating away at an island lakefront.

Oh, and there's a light house too.

It's about a half mile walk past an incongruous mix of a crowded and hectic ferry port, small businesses renting the ubiquitous island golf carts and bicycles, and rustic scenery.

The lighthouse is like a breath of fresh air after the walk.

Well, drop the 'like.' It is literally a breath of fresh air.

If I didn't have an airplane, I would want a boat like this one.

Eh, who am I kidding?? Even with an airplane I'd like to have a boat like that one.

Rather than walk all the way from the southern ferry port to the town of Put-in-Bay on the northern end of the island, we took the bus. Capt. Buck was in fine fettle, positively jolly that he could speed north unencumbered by any worries of being pulled over by the police; they were all busy escorting a funeral. I commended him on his ability to see the silver lining in just about any cloud.

We were just going up to town to have lunch, but it doesn't take long to realize why people spend hours driving to the mainland ports, and then wait hours longer for a ferry rather than do what I do and fly in. It's so they can spend the night. Why do they want to spend the night? Well, because the town of Put-in-Bay is just one big collection of bars.

Some have been there for ages and define the former appeal of the island.

Some of the newer establishments look as if they were brought in on the winds of a tropical storm.

Others wanted a more traditional look, but simply selected the wrong tradition.

Fortunately the large public square is still in place right on the waterfront. Our lunch destination was close by.

The walleye sandwich was great!

The summer break had to come to and end, though, and this morning found Your's Truly and Cadillac Pete right back at work. Today we split up and worked on separate projects. Pete, as his official title would suggest, got the job that I didn't want to do. He would be installing the candle sticks. I've had enough experience with trying to get those nuts, bolts, and washers fit into very tight quarters to know that I wanted the other job: assembling the little pushrod that will fit down inside the flap handle.

Building up the pushrod required match drilling a tube to mate with an aluminum bracket that supports the little tabs that will press against the return spring in the tube. That was a matter of drawing a center line and measuring the depth that the tube needed to go into the bracket. Well, that and clamping and drilling and riveting...

The flap handle will have a curved, notched plate thrust through a slot carved into its back. This plate will provide the "stops" for the three available flap positions. That plate needed to be mounted onto a bigger, stronger plate that would in turn be mounted in the fuselage.

I could have squeezed the rivets, but it has been a long time since I have used my "real" rivet gun. I thought it would be fun to get it out and drive a few rivets for a change.

Meanwhile, Pete had to take a break from cursing the miner that had pulled the Bauxite out of the earth to create the aluminum that was eventually formed into a tubular shape with the sole purpose of giving him a part that would be just shy of impossible to install in an airplane to put the thumb knob on the flap rod that I had set aside as soon as it became difficult. He seems to have regained his composure quite quickly after being presented by a slightly less almost impossible job.

I went ahead with the fun and interesting (no, seriously! This is a super important part!) job of cutting a teflon-ish block into four equal lengths. These little blocks will sandwich the metal tabs protruding out of the root ends of the flaperons. The candle sticks that Pete had installed will push against a horn on the other end of the tubes that host these little blocks.  All of this combines to provide the ability to control the airplane about its longitudinal axis, which is to say "make it turn."

The first step is to match drill the blocks while they are clamped in place on the rod.

The next step is to drill out the holes in the blocks with a #12 bit, mix up a batch of epoxy and glue the blocks into place, and then rivet the blocks while a 1/8" piece of scrap is used to preserve the proper gap between the blocks.

I read that as "match drill, rivet in place."

I amended that to "match drill, rivet in place, drill rivets back out, drill out the holes with a #12 bit, etc..."

Meanwhile, Pete had read ahead into section 44 in preparation of installing the autopilot servos. It didn't take him long to be right back to cursing out that poor Bauxite miner: installing the roll-axis autopilot pushrod requires the removal of two of the bolts that he had just spent an hour installing. This as known as the "What goes on, must come off" syndrome. It is a malady well-known to aircraft builders throughout history. A little known fact is that Wilbur Wright was once mistakenly diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome after having been overheard installing a control rod in the Wright Flyer*.

While that mighty struggle was going on, I busied myself by watching the paint dry on the flap position latching thingy.

Hey, someone had to do it!

* This might not be true. But you did read it on the internet, so feel free to use it as a rock solid fact anyway.

Candle Making

One of the things Van's (surprisingly) doesn't tell us to do as part of the RV-12 build is to leak test the fuel lines before covering them up with a bunch of airplane. I'm not the first person to figure out that it makes a lot more sense to test the lines now, when all of the irritating obstructions are still sitting on the shelf, rather than later when the fuel lines are not only blocked but also inconveniently populated with fuel. Because Van's (surprisingly) doesn't advocate this kind of testing, they provide no mechanism for doing so. The kind of people that are attracted to the idea of building their own airplanes are (not surprisingly) somewhat industrious in nature, so (not surprisingly) there have been a number of testing methods developed by those that have gone before me.

The most popular way seems to be to employ a user-fabricated stand pipe made out of leftover fuel line, a brass T-fitting, a Schrader valve, a rubber hose to act as a proxy for the pressure-sensitive fuel tank, and last but by no means least, the diligence required to gather all of that stuff up. I was lacking in every single one of those things. Fortunately, RV-12 building compatriot Torsten is not only far more energetic than I am, but also far more generous. He kindly sent me his test kit to use. He didn't actually send the faux fuel tank rubber hose - I purloined that from the local mechanic at the airport.

The fuel that will be pushed through the fuel lines will only exceed 5 PSI through some kind of miraculous pump failure mode in which it actually works harder than normal as it dies, but I still decided to test at a hefty 20 PSI.

Here's the faux fuel tank closing the fuel system:

And here is the fuel leak that I detected by brushing on some of the bubble-blowing liquid that kids know and love:

The leak was (not surprisingly) in the second worst possible place for it. Actually, that ranking could be argued - the only potentially worse place would be where the return line passes through the firewall shelf. That would be hard to get too, of course, but the leak at the bottom of the fuel shutoff valve actually required the entire valve to be removed in order to tighten the fitting. And by "removed," I mean "the rivets that hold it in drilled out."

Here it is after the fix and 20 new PSIs stuffed in to replace the previous twenty that escaped when I loosened the fittings in order to remove the valve. No more bubbles!

That all took a few hours of sporadic effort; the remainder of the time was spent making some yard long candles.

Well, no, they aren't actually candles. Those are the pushrods that will be attached to the oddly shaped assembly of metal that rocks left and right as the control sticks are moved. These rods will convert that lef/right action to forward/aft motion in order to transfer it further back in the fuselage. They will attach to a couple of rotating columns that will transfer torque forces out to the flaperons. Or, in easier to elucidate terms, these control rods will help the airplane remain right side up, and turn it on demand from the pilot or autopilot.

The fabrication of the two pushrods was a matter of cutting one long aluminum tube into two equal length shorter tubes and a third very short tube that ended up in the scrap box. Being that the two shorter (but not shortest) tubes are almost a yard long, the first cut had to be done with my old friend, the hacksaw. The throat of the band saw is nowhere near big enough to swallow that much tube.

Once cut, each tube end had four holes drilled through the both the tube wall and a brass(?) threaded fitting, with the intention of providing holes to allow the riveting of said threaded fitting into the control rod ends.

It was humid today and that, combined with the fact that I put three coats of paint on the control rods all at once, means that the rods need a good 24 hours to dry. In the meantime, we prepared the torque tubes that will convert the forward/aft motion of the control rods into, well, torque. By "prepare" I mean "remembered that powder-coated parts need to have the bolt holes drilled to final size before expending great effort getting them into the tight and confined place that they need to go, only to find that they need to be removed to drill out the bolt holes."

That didn't take long, mostly because I beat the long odds and managed to not lose anything.

While I was doing that, Cadillac Pete was gathering up the parts for the next thing to do. These are the parts that will complete the flap handle. The tube will get the silver knob-looking thing attached to it to give the pilot a place to press with his thumb. The spring will go into the flap handle tube before the new tube and force the tube back after the pilot releases the thumb pressy-on-thingy. The idea behind this pressing and releasing is to move a clevis pin in and out of the teeth on the part that has the three notches that look as if they were sized specifically to the correct width required to absorb a clevis pin.

Where is the clevis pin?

Well...

Remember when I ordered all of those cotter pins to replace those lost when bag 2791 flew the coop? There's something I didn't tell you about that. You see, there was a clevis pin in that bag too and I failed to order it. I thought for sure that the act of ordering the cotter pins would be enough to convince the misbehaving bag 2791 to come out from hiding. As it turns out, fate will not be fooled by such transparent shenanigans.

I ordered the clevis pin this afternoon when I got back from the hangar.

I know when I'm beaten.

Having crapped out on assembling the inner guts of the flap handle, we pressed on with installing the torque tubes. That turned out to be another of those three-handed acts. One hand holding the bolt, the other handing holding the washer wrench, and the third hand (i.e. my teeth) holding the inspection mirror while trying to get the washer lined up with the bolt hole.

What can I say? I'm good with my teeth.

Compared to the control rods, the torque tubes were a piece of cake to install.

Hmmmm, cake. And I'm hungry. And there is a pristine cake sitting out in the kitchen.

That gives me an idea....