The Jackson Two take the stage

Flashback:

Wednesday, January 13, 2010


Those were the last steps required before a large riveting job on the skins. The timing was perfect as soon-to-be RV-12 builders Don and Kyle were scheduled to arrive for a shop visit just a few hours later. Just let it be said that I have made good use of my high school literary studies, having often leveraged the lesson of Tom Sawyer's clever means of getting other kids to whitewash the fence that his Aunt Polly had instructed him to paint. As it turns out, the only thing easier than blind riveting is having someone else blind rivet for you!

And this is the beauty of the RV-12 in a nutshell. With a "normal" RV, potential builders worry themselves into a froth over not knowing how to drive rivets and wondering if they are even capable of being taught. They make pilgrimages to Oshkosh to attend riveting workshops. They spend hours practicing on scrap metal. The end up drilling out dozens of mis-driven rivets. They sink hundreds of dollars into tools. With blind rivets, if the EAA were to offer a seminar it would take longer to get everyone settled and go through the mandatory don't-blame-us safety briefing than it would to teach the actual operation.

I had each of the visitors pull a couple of rivets under my supervision and then simply turned them loose with a pair of cleco pliers and the air rivet puller. I went and worked on the RV-6, cleaned up the hangar a little bit, and generally made myself scarce while they riveted the entire tail cone. And the best part is, they acted like I was doing them a favor.



Oh, I am soooo good! I wasn't able to convince them to come back for my broom pushing seminar, though. I guess I have my limits.

All kidding aside, it's nice to have neighbors! Don and Kyle will be building their RV-12 down in the area of Jackson, Ohio. That's just a few minutes from Portsmouth, an airport I visit quite frequently. It'll be nice to stop by now and then to see how things are going for them. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure they have a good grasp of riveting fundamentals. They must have pulled a couple of hundred of them with no problems at all.

What started on a dark, frigid night two and a half years ago had its denouement today when The Jackson Two received a highly coveted Airworthiness Certificate for their RV-12. It's one of those oddities in the highly regulated world of aviation: without a pink slip of paper that's no more substantial than a Kleenex, an airplane is really nothing more than a hangar decoration. Without the blessing bestowed by the Federal Aviation Administration, presented in the form of the only pink slip you actually hope and pray to receive, an airplane is worth no more than the sum of the raw materials it is comprised of. This blessing is only given after an inspection by official FAA inspectors or designated representatives. To put it mildly, this inspection is stressful on the builder.

When Kyle, amplifier technician and cymbal custodian for The Jackson Two told me that his inspection had been scheduled, my first thought was "Damn! They beat me!" More laudably but no less self-centered, my second thought was "I need to see this!" I figured forewarned is forearmed and having seen one of these inspections being performed could only help when it comes my turn in just a couple of months. So it was that Silke (One of my friends was married to a beautiful German girl named Silke, so I have adopted that name for my new (to me) SLK 280 - look at it thusly: SiLKe) and I departed early this morning for the drive south.

The inspectors (usually there is only one, but in this case a trainee inspector was coming, accompanied by a more senior mentor) were due to arrive at 0900, but I conservatively planned an 0830 arrival. I wanted to get a look at some things on their plane that I'm currently working on, or soon will be, myself. That, and I wanted to marvel at the installed avionics:

While we were waiting, Don (snare drum tuner and lead singer) headed off for coffee and donuts. While he was gone, the inspectors arrived. The veteran inspector approached Kyle and said, "Hi, you must be Kyle." Then, to my complete chagrin, he came towards me and said, "And you must be his Dad."

That's it!! I'm shaving off this gray beard!

With the pleasantries out of the way, the inspectors got busy with looking over the airplane. They did a pretty thorough job of poking and prodding, eventually coming up with a very short list of very easily fixed demerits. With the physical inspection done, the much more complex inspection of the paperwork began. There are all kinds of forms to be filled out, checked for correctness, and signed. There is also the official reading of the Operating Limitations, which is the document that explicitly states what the airplane can and cannot be used for. For example, the RV-12 is explicitly prohibited from towing banners or performing aerobatics. The inspector was very diligent and thorough in explaining precisely what everything in the limitations document meant in the real world. Interestingly, I learned a couple of things that I've been doing wrong with the RV-6 for six years.

With no major problems found, the Airworthiness Certificate was signed by the inspector and presented to the band:

So, it's all over, right? Well, no. While the inspection was stressful, the next event is likely to be even more so: the plane is now ready for its first flight!

Constructive Destruction

I've spent a week with the new car and there are some observations that I've made. The first couple of days were mostly spent getting acquainted with the feel of it. The SLK is a little different from other cars that I've had in a lot of little ways, but in one rather big way it is unique from everything I've driven before: I cannot sense my speed. The ride remains smooth and rock steady from 25 mph to 80 mph, and at anything above 50 it gets very hard to judge the speed. The speedo helps with that, of course, but only when I can see it. Why wouldn't I be able to see it? Well, there are a couple of other things I've learned that have a bearing on that.

One is that the Mercedes seats leave much to be desired in the area of lower back support, at least when configured in a position that would feel most natural to someone that has spent the last year driving a four-door sedan. It was only a couple of days ago when I was enjoying the twisty and nearly deserted rural roads that I prefer to use when visiting the Schmetterling Corporate HQ that I decided to try for a sportier seating position. I lowered the seat as low as it would go (which is essentially all the way down to the floor), reclined the back position way back, and lowered the steering wheel down to a Formula 1 race car position.

Voilà, not only was the feeling far more sportier than it had been, but my lumbar was perfectly supported as well. The only downside was that the massive wooden steering wheel completely blocked the speedometer. Considering the difficulty in judging speed based on the ride and sound of the car over the road, this presented something of a problem. It wasn't much of a problem on the deserted and law-enforcement-free country roads, but it will be a problem on the highway. I suppose that's why I have a cruise control.

I also discovered throughout the first week the painful fact that the car gets dirty. This realization first manifested itself when I noticed the remains of a rather large and juicy inspect splattered across the front fascia. This despite the assurances from the Mercedes-Benz promotional materials that indicated that Wiccan pagan spells had been factory-installed for the sole purpose of causing insects and small birds to divert their flight paths to avoid such unsightly events. Also untrue was the claim that the paint, having been derived from ground Unicorn husks and the cores of black pearls, would repel all forms of dust. That falsity was most prominently displayed on the back of the car and on the front wheels, the latter being nearly black with brake dust after just one week.

The brake dust issue is well known and is, in fact, endemic to many German engineered cars. The non-ceramic brake pads used in the sportier cars are much preferred due to their excellent performance when cold, and for the terrific feel they give when driving spiritedly. And, I suspect, spirited driving is the norm for the SLK cars. For me, though, the problem was again related to my inability to feel how fast the car was moving. It's a heavy-ish car, and I found that I was having to use a lot more brake when entering turns than I should have needed. This was, I think, due to the fact that I was entering the turns in a quickly moving heavy car that I had failed to get slowed down soon enough. I'm getting a better feel for when I need to begin slowing now, so that problem is mostly resolving itself.

That said, I had to wash the car today. I guess there is a part of me that missed owning a car worthy of a weekly bucket, sponge, and chamois homage, but that part was most definitely not my lower back. This car is much like the Miata in that it's small enough that there isn't all that much to wash, but the parts that are most in need of washing are only inches off of the ground and a lot of bending over is required to get at them.

All of this is, of course, nothing compared to the pride of ownership one feels when driving such a fine machine. In fact, one must be careful to avoid any feelings of superiority over the multitudes of inferior motoring machines one must share the roads with. Unless.... unless you work in a ritzy neighborhood. If that is the case, and it is for me, it will not be long at all before you get put back in your place.

Meet the Lamborghini Aventador. 700 hp, V-12 engine. 217 mph top speed. You aren't likely to beat this guy if you're trying to get into his lane from a stoplight, either. He can go 0 to 60 in less than 3 seconds,  Gas mileage? Ha, you should be embarrassed that you even asked. I asked anyway: 13 mpg. And the other uncomfortable question? They start at $376.000.

I also received an interesting letter from Van's: please send the remainder of the balance due for your avionics kit. That means it's ready to ship! That changed the nature of the work I did on the airplane this weekend because now I know that I will be needing access to the wiring areas. That meant that I would have to remove a lot of stuff. Par for the course, of course. A hundred steps forward, ninety steps back. 'Tis the nature of the game. I don't mind it all that much since this is a brand new airplane. Why is that important? Because working on an older airplane is an exercise in frustration when it comes to removing rounded-out screws that some ham-fisted idiot put in.

In fact, the first screw came out with nary a turn:

That's one of the two screws that hold the flap handle stopper in place. Not a super critical screw, but somewhat surprising to find it in that state nonetheless.

Very soon thereafter, I came across a rounded-out screw! Who did that??? Oh, wait... it was me.

I went and found my trusty Harbor Freight (The Home of Worthless Screw Extractors) screw extractors. These are tapered, reverse-threaded bits that worm their way down into a hole drilled into the top of the screw and then dig in. Once they're set, you just remove the screw by twisting the extractor. That's as easy as can be, assuming that you can drill down into the screw. Unfortunately for me, the drill bit broke off down inside the screw. You know what a drill bit won't drill through? Another drill bit. It's some kind of professional courtesy, I suppose.

I ended up cutting a slot in the top of the screw with the Dremel cutting disk. That allowed be to remove the screw with a BFS.

I quickly became irritated with working around the dangling shoulder belts, so I took a break after removing the bad screw to get them restrained somewhere more or less out of the way.

Then it was back to removing the dozens upon dozens of floorboard screws.

I ultimately ended up having to use the Dremel trick twice more to remove rounded-out screws. I know what's causing the screw rounding problem (see photo above) - sometimes I forget to unlock the clicky-torquey thing on the drill before using it to drive in screws. When I forget, the screw bit keeps spinning in the screw after it has reached final snugness, thus almost instantly ruining the screw.

So at the end of the day, the airplane looks just like it did a year ago.

The Empty Nester

It has been quite an eventful week, but the net result of the days of frantic activity is that the Co-owner and I are now members of America's slowest growing demographic: Empty Nesters. "Slowest growing?" you ask? Well, yes, now that young adults graduating from high school and college have dismally few job prospects, more and more of them are staying home. Co-pilot Egg is fortunate in that her great grandparents were very firm believers in education and set her up with a nice little nest egg that she can apply towards the educational endeavor of her choice.

In Egg's case, that led to a move away from the bustling metropolis she grew up in to the slightly less bustling town of Lancaster, OH. Right on the heels of the devastating storms that blew through late last week, leaving 700,000+ Central Ohio residents without power for days on end, Egg packed up to move. Luckily for yours truly, she maintains a small stable of friends-that-are-boys that are willing and able to help her with physical tasks that are too much for her frail old Pa to deal with. And one of them even has a trailer!

Egg prides herself on her prioritization skills when it comes to complex tasks like moving and setting up a new household for herself. For example, step #1 is Open And Eat Snacks.

Having been rewarded with a treat, Mr. Case (whom you may remember as a friend-who-is-a-boy that was promoted to boyfriend but is now back to being a friend-who-is-a-boy) brought in her mattress.

Quickly determining the critical need for someone to step up to a managerial role, I fairly leapt into action to address the need.

It was hot. It was very hot. And the small apartment was filling up quickly with far more furniture than it seemed could ever fit.

Good thing, then, that I was there to provide guidance to the young, inexperienced movers.

Otherwise we'd have had a heck of a mess.

Again showing her mastery of prioritization, Egg sat in a corner.

I hadn't realized just how small the kitchen was until we tried to find someplace to keep cookware and utensils. Good thing every recipe she knows is limited to "Remove outer wrapper, place product in microwave. Caution: Product will be hot."

I had one of those "Oh my, how time has flown" moments when I saw Ray the Third (or fourth, I can't be sure) lying on her bed. I don't know if this happens with every baby, but Egg latched onto a particular toy as her absolute must-have companion and it was Ray. Sadly for Ray the First, Ray the Second, and quite possible Ray the Third, she had a habit of chewing on their tails until there was nothing left of them. Each time that happened, we had to scramble around town looking for an identical replacement.

She received this nice (albeit shaped in a somewhat awkward manner for modern widescreen TVs) entertainment center as a graduation present from some neighbors she has known since she was somewhere in the neighborhood of, but not quite, three years old. Our remaining family records are murky and many were lost during The Great Purge of 1997. The exact timing remains a family controversy to this very day.

As we were leaving her to her fate, I put a picture of Puppy Cabot on top of the furniture just to see if it would make her cry when she got to missing the cuddly little guy. Sadly, it did. Cruel trick, that.

Eventually we got everything mostly put away and she was able to revert back to her normal posture.

Her new place sure didn't take long to look like she's lived there for ages!

There followed a week of abnormally hot days, each day hotter than the one before. By the end of the week, we were as high into three digit temps as I ever hope to be. It seems odd to see people from Ohio escaping the unbearable heat by fleeing to inland Florida, but so it was. The hot, hot days combined with humid conditions ensured that we would have some more high-powered storms, and one of those big blows knocked out the internet service back at the Schmetterling corporate HQ. Given that roughly 99.998% of you reading this are doing so by using the internet, you can imagine what an outage like that means. We do have a tendency to become accustomed to continuous access to things there were science fiction only a few years ago, don't we? I know I do, so I could easily sympathize with the CEO's plight. Thus it was that we made a road trip house call to see if something could be done.

We were greeted by an insolent looking security guard who has recently taken to wearing the colors of Kentucky Derby winner I'll Have Another. If I knew with any certainty what colors he will be wearing this time next year, I could make a pretty penny!

The internet repair ended up taking far more time than expected. My hopes of a quick fix were short-lived and I soon found myself speaking with a pleasant enough tech support fellow down in Florida. He led me through a half hour's worth of trouble shooting that eventually led to his proclaiming that the problem was not his to solve and that something was clearly wrong with the computer sitting there at my side.

"Poppycock," we said. "Surely not!" The only thing that could be broken and cause this internet blindness is the NIC (the little card that translates computer-speak to internet-speak) and those never break, or if they do, they don't report themselves quite confidently as being "hunky-dory" when queried as to their present status. As this one had. I believed it.

Still... the tech support guy was in no mood to ship a new modem, and even if he did it would take days to arrive. And NICs cost something like $.19 these days, right? Heck, you can buy 'em at Walmart! So off we went to buy a NIC.

That was a complete waste of time. Apparently you can't actually buy NICs anymore, at least not in a physical store. Even Radio Shack, a formerly venerable electronics outlet, has completed its transition into being nothing more than a Best Buy without major appliances.

Being as we were in town, though, we stopped and had a very nice lunch. On our way back, we made an impulse stop at Bear's Mill. I enjoy taking pictures of the old equipment - it's an intriguingly eclectic hybrid of water-powered wood and iron equipment that also had a brief foray with that new-fangled elec-triss-it-eee.

Having failed to acquire a NIC and having no means to test the questionable one, we strategized on ways to convince the tech support folks to send a new modem. We came up with a foolproof plan: we would tell them that we tested the computer at a neighbor's house and it worked fine.

In other words, we would lie.

It seemed easy: how could they possibly know? It would be just like the time I was trouble-shooting my mother-in-law's computer and needed to get her password from the tech support guy. He wouldn't give it to me since I was clearly not the 83 year old woman that owned the account.

"Okay, hold on a sec and I'll get her."

Pause.

Adopting my best impersonation of a tremulous-voiced old lady, I said, "Hello? This is [insert name here] and I need my computer to work, please."

Worked like a champ.

So, I called the tech support number again, but got a different guy this time. I patiently explained that we had gone and tested the machine elsewhere and it worked, so please send us a new modem. He ignored me and walked me through a string of esoteric operations that would have left Bill Gates screaming for a smart teenager to come help him.

Darned if he didn't get us connected to the internet in a way that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the problem was a bad NIC, not a defunct modem.

At least he was gracious enough to not mention that he had simultaneously proven that I was a shameless liar.

To cover my shame, I quickly got off the phone and changed the subject with those who had witnessed my embarrassment. "Hey, we ought to test this connection and make sure it's really working." Somehow we got on the topic of the beautiful Mercedes SLK 280 that I had not been able to buy after being stood up by the prospective buyer (from whom I still have not heard a peep). Somewhat on a lark, I popped onto the dealer's web site to see if they still had it on the lot. Surprisingly, they did. That was a pretty stupid thing to do, though, because it ripped the emotional wound wide open again. Sigh. It had taken until Thursday to get over it last time.

Having fulfilled our mission, we headed back home. I was just starting to relax and watch Formula 1 qualifying on the trusty DVR when the Co-owner, who was reading email, asked me what "MB" meant. I asked for the context in which she was asking. Ah, it was an email from the CEO asking about the SLK. This prompted a discussion regarding the unfortunately timed discovery of a five year old car with less than a year's worth of miles on it, and right in our price range to boot. This in turn led to an analysis of our current finances and the egregious burn rate we were experiencing this year (we somewhat splurged on vacations this year, as you may recall) with the long-story-short net result that I left the house at 5:40 pm in hopes of making the twenty-five minute drive to the dealership before they closed at 6:00. We could have waited for Monday, but I would have been a nervous wreck from worrying that it would surely have been sold by then.

As you can see, I made it in a nick of time:

Note the lack of a front license plate mount. Not sure how the previous owner went five years without one, but it's not like he drove it a lot. Alas, I'm going to have to drill holes into that beautifully unmarred face to mount a license plate.

I even drove it over to the hangar this morning for a before-it-gets-too-hot work session with Pete.

All we really wanted to get done was to get the stab re-installed. We had tried it last time we worked, but simply didn't have enough hands available to get the stab into position cleanly. We kept breaking the super-glued washers off. That happened again the first time we tried it this morning and Pete had had enough. He suggested that we find a way to support the stab so we could concentrate on gently getting it aligned rather than having to concentrate on not dropping it.

Brilliant! We still had a few difficulties with getting it done, but having the stab on a solid platform made all the difference!

I also wanted to get the fuel filler tube drilled so I could remove the fuel tank (AGAIN!!) for its leak test. The drilling proved difficult. The filler tube is mounted to the fuel tank with a small piece of rubber hose and a pair of hose clamps. This proved to not be nearly enough to hold it in place while I tried to drill into the flange. Pete got stuck with the job of finding a way to keep the tube from moving while I drilled into it. A brute force method was employed.

It worked!

Pete also got the tail cone fitted back in place for further trimming.

I wasn't able to start the leak test after all. The idea is to put a small amount of pressurized air into the tank - just enough to expand a small balloon. A balloon, I must point out, that they did not provide. So, I have to go balloon shopping. What are the odds of being able to buy just one?