Happy Anniversary!

October 9th was the second anniversary of my RV-12 build and I celebrated by starting the fiberglass of the forward canopy arms. This is one of those jobs that takes days of effort - the first day is spent thinking about ways to avoid doing it, the second through fifth days are spent doing the things dreamed up on the first day and, as it turns out, there are a few more days of preparation work to do as well. Sunday dawned temperate and clear, and promised temperatures suitably warm for the efficacious curing of the epoxy. It was on!

The days of preparation are all a blur now so I can't put a firm timeline on the process that I will be detailing below; suffice it to say that the time period is roughly a week of on again, off again effort.

The point of all of this is to create a smooth, attractive, and aerodynamic blending from the stark, angular facets of the metal canopy frame into the canopy bubble and fuselage. Just between you and me, I'll settle for two out of those three, and I don't particularly care which two it is. The plain truth is that I do not like working with fiberglass.

That having been said, here we go with the narrative.

The first step is to provide a support for the fiberglass. You could almost call it a mold, I suppose. It starts out as a pair of foam blocks, one for each side of the airplane. Those were trimmed and glued into place as detailed in this post.

Pete happens to own a very nice sanding block and was kind enough to bring it down to the hangar. In turn, I was kind enough to let him use it to trim the blocks. I'm generous that way - known for it, in fact.

Van's supplies a pair of paper templates that serve the dual purpose of acting as aids to masking off the appropriate areas of the fuselage and for the eventual cutting to shape of fiberglass cloth. I had stored them in a safe place where I wouldn't lose them; I found them after only three days of searching.

A strip of high quality electrical tape is used as to protect the canopy and provide a guide line for the fiberglass strips that will fill in the area between the forward fuselage and the canopy bubble.

I finally found a use for all of the paper that the kit parts come wrapped in.

There are ten fiberglass cloth shapes to be cut out, five for each side. One of the template paper sheets is used as a sacrificial cutting template whereby it is cut smaller for each size of cloth "part." I bought a very sharp rotary cutter to use for the somewhat complex curves required.

A perplexing problem quickly manifested itself. No matter how carefully I would trace the cutter around the template, the resulting sheet wouldn't come out shaped anything at all like the template.

As you can imagine, this problem created quite a bit of back and forth discussion between Pete and myself with suggestions and theories flying fast and furious. We eventually reached a consensus: the loose weave of the cloth combined with the shear forces being applied by the cutter were distorting the shape of the cloth as it was being cut. The solution? I would mark the outline of the template with a Sharpie(tm) marker and cut the cloth without the template paper blocking the view.

That worked somewhat better, but it was still hit or miss. It seemed that the large piece of cloth that I was cutting from might be part of the problem; various areas of it tended to get stuck to the work table and cause strange bends and transformations to occur. We finally hit upon the brilliant idea of cutting out a piece of cloth only slight larger than the finished part would be. It was much easier to get the smaller piece to sit straight on the table than it was when dealing with the huge sheet.

That problem solved, we finalized the masking job by covering the instrument panel and seeking out any sneaky little holes that might allow epoxy to drip into inconvenient places.

The Van's plans rely on a temporary forbearance of gravity to keep the wetted fiberglass from sinking into the areas

Pete had done some research and found a pretty good suggestion on another RV-12 builder's blog. He suggested using the left over scraps of foam to fill in those areas in order to provide support for the cloth.

There wasn't enough foam remaining, so I took a somewhat less satisfying path: I used some weather stripping that I had bought for the RV-6 canopy (which turned out to be a real fiasco, but that's a story that I'd prefer to just forget about).

The piece of foam that Van's specifies gets fiber glass permanently glued to it, but we didn't want that to happen with our extracurricular foam. We covered it with packing tape and waxed it with paste wax to keep the epoxy from sticking to it.

The next step was somewhat painful. The parts of the pristine canopy and the aluminum side skirt that get covered with the fiberglass have to be scuffed up to provide a bite for the epoxy to grab ahold of.

Everything was finally ready to cover with the fiber glass.

So I went flying. I thought it might be instructive to go take a look at a finished RV-12 to see what this fairing was supposed to look like when it was done. While I've said that I'd settle for two out of three of the goals, here's what a three-out-of-three exhibit looks like:

It was a pretty nice day to fly, as it turns out.

The Fall colors are proudly showing the way to a dismal winter.

Back in the hangar, it was time to wet and place cloth.

Three and a half hours of grueling and tedious work later, the peel ply was on.

Things happen fast when you'r working against the ticking time bomb of mixed epoxy and things get pretty messy:

The peel ply came off a couple of days later to reveal a nice, solid build-up of fiberglass. Naturally, the number one rule of airplane building (what has been done will soon be undone) will soon be in play: most of this will get sanded off.

Old Friends, New Friends

I'm sure there's some pithy, insightful quote that offers sage advice on the preservation of old, loyal friends when newer friends come along, but I'm not going to bother looking for it. I'm relatively sure that the underlying message would be to make sure not to cast aside the former friendship in favor of the newer, yet remain open to the opportunities presented by new acquaintances. This is actually a piece of fatherly advice that I shared with a younger Co-pilot Egg back in the days when I was still able to fool myself into thinking that she would listen. As I recall, she was very enamored with her first true boyfriend, to the exclusion of all of her girlfriends. I warned her that she was driving away her old friends and may some day regret when/if the relationship with the boy had run its course. I probably told her something along the lines of, "Boyfriends come and go, but your girlfriends are forever." Eventually I was proven right and she learned a valuable, albeit painful, lesson.

I now find myself in a similar position on a couple of fronts. At home, Cabot, the little puppy that we adopted a couple of years ago, has blossomed into a healthy, hearty, and attention-demanding young dog. So desirous of attention is he that it is difficult to remember to share time and affection with the older, more sedate Brave Sir Hogarth.

It doesn't help that Cabot has a possessive streak a mile wide and is quite jealous of any petting of, or playing with, Hogarth. He makes quite a scene, really.

The other (and slightly more topical) situation has to do with my airplanes. The RV-6 seems to have adopted a bit of a bad attitude after having been listed for sale. I was warned that anthropomorphizing airplanes tended to make them angry but, as with my progeny, I have to learn these lessons for myself. And have I ever paid the price! You may recall that I had an in-flight situation wherein some of the rubber weather stripping at the back edge of the canopy came loose and caused a ruckus as we were approaching Darke Co. International Airport for landing. A strip of duct tape got us home, but I figured that a prospective buyer might find that kind of repair to be somewhat off-putting; it would need to be fixed.

Figuring that the canopy repair would lead to at least a couple of days of down time, I thought I'd also perform an oil change. While the current load of oil only has a dozen or so hours on it, it's been in there since April. There are those who say that the oil should be changed every three months no matter what, but I figure that oil is millions of years old already. Twice a year will do famously, says I.

I have come to dread the removal of the engine cowls over the last few years because it seems that every time I remove them, some of the hinge strips that hold them together will be broken and in need of replacement. And that replacement? It's an unholy bear to do. The hinge strips are riveted into the fiberglass of the cowl and there is no way to drill out those rivets without creating large, unsightly holes in the fiberglass. That necessitates refilling the holes with epoxy, re-drilling them to fit new pieces of hinge strip, and painting over the result.

As I removed the top cowl, I heard the tinkling of the three hinge hoops that formerly resided on the strip that sits in the small air inlet area right behind the prop spinner as they dropped through the engine and onto the hangar floor. I hate that sound so much that I'm convinced that every time I hear one of those little broken hoops rings as it hits the ground, an angel gets a colonoscopy.

It was at that moment that I realized I had been ignoring my old friend. It was a difficult decision to list the -6 for sale and I dealt with the pain of it partially by starting to step away emotionally. Which is to say, I lost interest in working on it. That would have to change - this time I would not be replacing the broken hinge strip with another hinge strip. No, this time I would do what I should have done ages ago: I would add a metal plate to the bottom half, put some nutplates in it, and match drill the top half so that it could be screwed into place. That would be a far more robust solution and would (in theory) solve the problem of the broken hinge strips. This would, of course, mean that I would have to divert my attention away from the RV-12 canopy for awhile. So be it.

Only one of the four hinge strips was broken, but they all needed to come out. Drilling a metal rivet out of fiberglass is tricky - the bit senses the fiberglass and much prefers to drill through that than metal.

The inner edges needed to be cleaned up. It seems that the original builder didn't trust the rivets to hold and smooshed some epoxy in there too. The little belt sander that I bought for working on the RV-12 canopy sure came in handy!

Meanwhile, Pete was removing the canopy strap so we could put new rubber on it.

Using peel ply for the first time ever made me wonder why I had never done it before. It was a great way to make sure I got a nice flat epoxy surface to work with. In the past, I've always had to try to sand a bumpy surface smooth and it never really worked out very well.

Aircraft Spruce sells aluminum in much larger chunks that I actually needed.

So the RV-6 is fixed, and just in time for a beautiful Native American summer. Hopefully I'll get some flying in to cheer me up. I'm pretty despondent over the loss of my little red Miata, which is a completely different story.

The Funk

I've been in a bit of a funk all week. It happens now and then and I've found through the years that the only cure for it is time. I'm not always sure what triggers a funk, but this time I have a pretty good idea. I know that I'm in a funk because I lose interest in all things aviation. In this case, that means that I have done no work whatsoever on either the broken RV-6 or the partially built RV-12. I told myself that I was just waiting for parts to come in, which was true, but there were things that I could have been doing in preparation.

For me to explain the funk, you have to know a few things about being a pilot in a population where that is still relatively rare. First, you have to know that people for some reason always want to talk to you about airplane crashes if they know you're a pilot. They somehow believe that pilots will always have an interest in accidents and will always have some insight into the cause. They believe this because it happens to be true, but that's beside the point. Having an interest and an insight is not the same as wanting to talk about it. Not by a long shot. Pilots take a personal interest in accidents and attempt to discern a cause because they want (need) to build a barrier around their own concerns that it could happen to them.

For example, I got a lot of questions about the P-51 crash at the Reno air races. As tragic as that incident was, it is not one that causes me great concern at a personal level. It is unlikely that I will find myself flying at very low altitude and at very high speeds anytime soon. Still... it can be draining to be constantly questioned about it. I have a fairly good idea what caused it, but I have no desire to try to explain it to someone that doesn't even know what a trim tab is.

Other accidents hit closer to home. A few years ago, a picture of an RV-7 that had crashed, killing both occupants, appeared in the local paper. It was a very disturbing picture; the plane had gone straight in and there was nothing identifiable left other than the tail cone sticking out of the ground. I was sitting in the break room at work surrounded by a group of co-workers while one of our temporary clericals was reading the paper.

"Who in their right mind would fly around in a homemade airplane?" she asked.

Dead silence around the table. Finally someone chirped up:

"You want to take that one, Dave?"

I politely declined.

The 'homemade' thing came up again this week in a most unpleasant way. I was moments away from going into a meeting on tuesday morning when I received a message from a friend. He sent me a link to a local news article that was headlined "Homemade Airplane Crashes," thinking that I might want to correct them on their incorrect usage of the word 'homemade' to describe an experimental home built airplane. I sneaked a quick glance at the article and learned that an RV-10 had crashed in southeast Ohio, resulting in serious injuries to the two occupants, one of whom was named Richard Gray.

I have to tell you about Rick Gray. Back when I was thinking about trading in my four seat Tampico and buying an RV-6, Rick was kind enough to give me a ride in his award-winning -6. When co-pilot Egg was terribly upset about changing planes, Rick also gave her a ride in his plane. I'll never forget meeting her at the airplane just after they landed to see how it went. Her smile was a mile wide as she told me how much fun it was, and that "he lands a lot better than you, too!" It is a testament to the quality of man that Rick is that I never heard another thing about that landing comment. I'm not such a man; I would have ribbed him about it mercilessly had the situation been reversed.

 Through the years of learning to fly and maintain the -6, Rick has always been ready to offer words of advice. It was Rick that I talked to about my interest in starting to build the -12. We spent 45 minutes on the phone taking things over when it came time to list the -6 for sale.

I had a lot of trouble concentrating in that meeting.

I've since had updates on his condition and it seems that he will make a full recovery, but I can't push this incident to the back of my mind like I could with the P-51. Rick's RV-10 accident happened on a test flight of a recently completed airplane. Coincidentally, my flying friend Wingman Ted recently had a similar incident. This hits close to home - I will be test flying my own airplane in the near future. This is a sobering thought indeed, and it has been on my mind quite a bit this week. Faced with that, a broken RV-6 cowl that I don't know how to fix, and the daunting prospect of the canopy fiberglass work on the RV-12 on the horizon, my mood has been somewhat dark.

I'm feeling markedly better today. Co-pilot Egg and I did a few hours of volunteer work at the Mid-Ohio Food Bank this morning. We were assigned a position in the meat sorting area, and through the luck of the draw we ended up manning the pork table. It started slowly, but it soon became apparent that pork was definitely where the action was. By the end of the shift, we had sorted and boxed three full palettes of pork. The next closest was poultry with just slightly more than one. While it isn't (or shouldn't be, anyway, but I yam what I yam) a competition, it was gratifying that 5,000 of the 7,000 pounds of meat processed came through our station.

We were done with our second palette before Poultry was done with their first:

Tomorrow will see the resumption of work on the airplanes. Blunderbuss Pete (formerly known as Cadillac Pete, right up until the moment he showed up at sporting clays with skeet chokes in his shotgun) will be meeting me in the morning for a day's worth of repairing and/or building.

I think it will do me wonders.