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.

Not much to cheer about

It's been one of those weekends. Driving home from the paying gig an Friday afternoon, I felt the usual small uplift in mood that precedes a couple days of not having to deal with the traffic and other associated hassles that come from having to interact with the rest of humanity. Nope, weekends usually offer up the promise of minimal computer help desk issues (supporting a handful of family/friends with their computer problems is so much easier than supporting three dozen), quiet relaxation around the house with the family, and a chance for some gratifying work on the airplane. It's the latter, I think, that clears my mind the most.

The paying job is probably better than most for providing some level of "job well done" satisfaction, but it's all so... intangible.  I'll spend hours developing an eloquent solution for someone else's work need, and every now and then spend even more hours re-doing it because they didn't like the result. I also spend hours adding in little convenience factors (remembering window sizes and positions, configuration settings, etc.) that they won't even notice as these little gems smooth out their work day.  That's all well and good, but at the end of the day I have nothing to show for it. There's nothing that I can touch and feel, nothing that I can step back and take a critical look at and think, "Nicely done," and to be perhaps overly honest, nothing that I can say that I did for myself. It is for these reasons that I look forward to the weekends.

All of that was torn asunder Friday evening when the Co-owner and I received a phone call from Co-pilot Egg as we were driving home from picking up dinner at a new restaurant near by. The dinner stop in itself was an exercise in patience-taxing frustration as they lost our order and we spent twenty minutes waiting for them to get their act together. Now that wasn't time wasted, mind you. It gave me plenty of time for one of my favorite things to do at a new restaurant, which is to find misspellings in the menu. In this case, I chuckled over 'Hot Gralic Chichen,' but I laughed out loud when I got to 'Garlic Fog Legs.' You know what they say about fog legs: they taste just like chichen!

Anyway, I pretty much knew what the problem with Egg was as soon as I heard her voice. Pretty much any time she's crying her eyes out, it means something has taken a turn for the worse in a relationship. Unfortunately, that was the case this time as well. Her boyfriend, Mr. Case, had called it quits. Some of the Dads of daughters reading this will understand me when I say that this was not one of the "Oh, good!" break-ups for me; no, this is one of the break-ups where I feel like I've been dumped too. I really liked this one. And I have to say, the kid had class. None of this texting or phone call stuff for him - he told her in person, and he stayed with her until we could get home. That could not have been easy.

So, it's a weekend of emotional turmoil in the house, a situation that I responded to in my tried and true manner: I got out of here! I escaped to the hangar with the hope of making some good progress on the canopy. I've been muddling through one of those little jobs that I always underestimate. It seemed easy enough (I say that so often that I ought to create an acronym for it): there are two little plastic blocks that get mounted on the front of the roll bar, their raison d'etre being as mundane as their appearance: they do nothing but ensure that the canopy isn't brought down so out of alignment by a careless pilot or passenger that the canopy skirts get caught up on the fuselage sides.

The little bit of fabrication required should have been trivial; all I had to do was drill two holes through each of the two plastic blocks.  The problem came from one of those little mistakes Van's makes in the plans and steadfastly refuses to fix. Consider this image:

Note that the width of the block is 1/2". Note that the holes are drawn as being positioned right on the centerline. Note that 3/8" from an edge is not going to put that hole on the centerline. Normally I'd just assume that either the drawing or the measurement was in error, and I was leaning heavily to the measurement being in the wrong. Just to be sure, though, I went home and checked on the Van's Air Force forum to see if any of my building peers had run into the same issue. I searched the archives for 'canopy blocks' and found one mention of them, but it had to do with how much material would need to be removed to ensure clearance from an inconveniently positioned nut on the side of the canopy.

I went ahead and posted a query and got a reply from one person that said he had faced the same issue and decided to position the holes on the centerline. All had worked out well for him. Safe in the knowledge that I could proceed without undue risk, I completed the drilling of the blocks. He also mentioned that he had needed to cut away quite a bit of material to get the needed clearance from the inconvenient nuts and he was right: I had to cut away quite a bit of the corner of the block. I tried removing a little at a time, but finally just bowed to the inevitable and sliced off the whole corner.

And, at long last, it was time to start the fiberglass fairing around the canopy. This starts out by shaping a couple of pieces of styrofoam into a shape that will provide a nicely rounded surface for the fiberglass to bond to and cover up the "coves" where the canopy frame forward arms reside when the canopy is closed.

The blocks get trimmed to fit into the cove. The bandsaw made short work of that:

There's going to be epoxy flying around and some of it will drip. So, masking is called for.

This block didn't fit like it was supposed to. The plans implied that this back edge would be flush with the fuselage skin. Not so much:

Pete and I had a meeting and determined that it was pretty safe to just cut away the offending material.

The bolts that the canopy pivots around must remain accessible, so a hole needs to be cut in the foam to allow access to them. The position of the hole is marked by pressing the foam against the bolt head.

The hole gets drilled out with a 7/8" Unibit. My Unibit only goes as large as 6/8" (3/4" for you mathematicians), but that was no problem. The foam is so soft that I was able to spin the bit by hand, then add the additional 1/8" with a small file. We're then supposed to use a Sharpie marker to trace the outline of the upper fuselage against the inboard side of the foam. We had two problems with that: a Sharpie wouldn't fit between the canopy frame, and we couldn't decide what precisely was meant by "upper fuselage." Looking ahead a few pages, it appears that the foam doesn't go any higher that the edge of the canopy frame. I just used a small screwdriver to trace the edge of the canopy frame.

The bandsaw did the rest.

One squirt each of the resin and hardener, plus a couple of tablespoons of flox made a nice paste that was used to glue the blocks in place.

A Tale of Two Canopies

Canopies: they are the best of airplane enclosures, they are the worst of canopy enclosures, they are works of wisdom, they are works of foolishness, the are the epoch of in-flight visibility, they are the epoch of build complexity, they provide gobs of Light, their construction brings days of Darkness, they are the spring of hope, built just before the winter of despair....

with abject apologies to Mr. Dickens. I have two to deal with, one being attached to a flying RV-6, the other being a recalcitrant detriment to an RV-12 ever taking flight.

The RV-6 canopy was not mine to build and has, if the truth be told, been pretty reasonable when it comes to maintenance chores. Basically over the years it has all come down to cleaning the bugs off of it now and then. Until yesterday, that is.

Yesterday was one of those days that you wish you could squeeze into a ZipLoc back and put on the snack shelf in the pantry to be parceled out as a tasty snack every now and then when the weather gets bad.

I had to fly.

I had to fly!

The choice of destinations was easy: my Dad's birthday is next week and through the accident of ordering a hand drill whose price was lower than the $25 minimum for free shipping from Amazon, I had on hand a book that just happened to be the Y in the equation X + Y = $25.01, where X = hand drill. And a good book it is, too, being one of the multitude of means available (yet ignored) to lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices to help them determine just exactly what the Founders meant when the plain English that they used in writing our Constitution requires "interpretation."  Of course, one cannot expect them to be in need of Amazon.com shipping charge padding in precisely the amount needed to pick up a copy of the Federalist Papers or, in my case, the thousands of words shared between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

So it was that I found myself descending into the pattern at Darke County (KTZR) International with 180 mph showing on the speedometer, wondering just what in the world that horrendous slapping/buzzing sound emanating from the bow of the canopy just behind me was. Upon landing I was quickly able to discern the problem: the airplane, which is mad at me for trying to sell it, had decided that it would quite willingly trade away some of the weather stripping around the edge of the back windshield simply in order to irritate me. A ten inch section of the stripping had worked its way loose and was flapping in the hurricane force winds that come with the awesome speeds the RV-6 can attain.

I didn't want to fly it back that way, but an interim solution was easily at hand: I "borrowed" a length of duct tape from the local mechanic. Here it is, still in place and unruffled after the return flight.

There is simply nothing that duct tape can't do, with the possible exception of surgical suturing.

Sunday morning dawned equally gorgeous and thus seemed perfect for the work of finishing up the mounting of the canopy to its frame, and if all went well, the installation of the canopy latch too. Pete was along to help again, so I figured we'd get these little jobs done in no time. The first thing to do was to rivet on the canopy skirts. That took very little time since, as is the norm when riveting, the job went three times as fast with two people working. After that we had to install the screws, nuts, and washers that attach the canopy sides to the frame.

I thought the same kind of division of labor as used in the riveting would ernder the same time-saving results, but it didn't quite work out as well. As Pete was on one side of the canopy getting the screws and nuts in place for me to tighten, I would be on the other side tightening the ones that he had already started. It worked well enough, but every now and then the movements of the canopy resulting from his work would get out of synch with the coffee palsy my hands get after a large McDonald's cuppa and I wouldn't be able to get the screwdriver aligned with the moving screw.

I had the shop radio tuned to the local NPR classical music station in an attempt to elevate the culture of the shop, but that only led to such high level discourse as:

Me: "You know, all of this classical music sounds the same."

Pete: Silence.

Me: "No, really. There's only one piece of classical music that can be readily identified by 99.999% of people."

Pete: "The 1812 Overture?"

Me: "Hmm, no, I was thinking Beethoven's Fifth, but you might be right about the 1812 Overture too. Although I imagine most people don't get it until the cannon fires."

See? More cultured already!

It was right after that burst of intellectualism that we noticed something. Pete pointed out that the directions called for me to "cut off the threads that protrude beyond the end of the nut " on the most aft screw on each side. Fortunately, we were all brained-up on classical music and recognized the word "protrude." Still, it seemed odd to cut off all of the threads, what with the standard airworthiness measurement being at least two threads sticking out protruding from a lock nut.

A closer reading showed that we were to consult the figure on the following page for more information. It's good that we did!

That was a job for the Dremel.

That finished the mounting of the canopy, so we pressed on with the installation of the latch. The first thing to do there was to insert the D-handle through the tube in the canopy frame. If the handle was loose enough in the tube that it could rotate on its own accord with no more motive force than the weight of its handle, I was to "carefully pinch" the ends of the tube. The handle did, in fact, rotate quite freely, so I proceeded to pinch the end of the tube, but apparently not carefully enough since the handle would then no longer fit into the tube at all.

This left me with the perplexing quandary of how exactly one goes about un-pinching a tube. As it turns out, that can be accomplished by inserting the end of a large drill bit slightly into the tube and using it as a kind of pry bar to separate the sides of the tube back out. It might also require a little cleaning up with a small file. After fiddling with it for a little while, I got it to a state where the handle would fit through the tube and turn only with physical motive force.

All that remained was to attach the handle, which I had placed somewhere where I wouldn't lose it. And we all know what that means. As we were hunting for it, I cupped a hand to my ear and said, "Oh, there it is! It's in the radio!"

 To which Pete, quite naturally, said, "Huh?"

"Oh, never mind," I replied, "that's Handel, not 'handle'."

And that was that for any hope of elevated culture.

That done, the matching latch parts needed to be installed on the roll bar. The first part is a Teflon-esque plastic block that will provide a soft-ish latching mechanism for the handle to latch into. The holes in the roll bar need to be tapped to 8-32 to provide two holes for the screws that will hold the latching block in place to screw into. This operation entails a number of steps that seem somewhat make-work and silly until you realize that the entire purpose of them is to get the tap perfectly straight as it works its way into the roll bar. One wonders why they don't just tell us why we're doing odd things now and then.

That was all going swimmingly (even though we had yet to figure out why we were going through all of the seemingly silly steps) until it came time to cleco the latching block into the two holes in the roll bar that were mysteriously left open wwwaaayyyy back on page 24-05.

I had left the wrong two holes open:

In my defense, when I was wwwaaayyyy back on page 24-05 I didn't have the drawings and parts that I have now, and the quality of the drawing that I had to work from was somewhat less than could be desired.

So, out came the mistakenly placed rivets and in went the new. Screwing and tapping and more screwing ensued.

We did a quick test fit of the latching handle and found that it wouldn't fit into the latch block. The plans allow a .020" removal of material from the latch, so I worked on it for a little while with a small file.

Upon a second test, I made an interesting discovery. I discovered that it is possible to get the canopy latch to latch, but to be completely unable to get it to un-latch. Luckily for me, I had a Sharpie(tm) marker in there with me and was thus able to communicate with the outside world:

The latch proved to extraordinarily difficult to get working properly, but we eventually tracked the problem down to the outside handle holding the D-handle up too high. That was caused primarily by a slightly off-center drilling of the screw hole that holds it onto the shaft of the D-handle. There were a number of possible solutions that we kicked around, all of which involved re-ordering parts or trying to remove material from the parts on hand. A consultation of the Van's online store showed the following:

Ruin this part:         Buy a new one for:

plastic block                $8.50
outside handle             $16.00
canopy frame              don't even ask

Neither of us wanted to be considered cheap, nor did either of us want to re-build the entire canopy on a new frame so we decided to concentrate our efforts on the handle. With that level of decision-making prowess brought to bear, we soon decided that I would remove 1/16" off of the bottom of the outside handle. The band saw was perfectly capable of that, although that handle got so hot that I was able to use it to finally defrost the little freezer portion of the hangar fridge. Still, it solved the problem!

Everything else fit perfectly and was in reasonable alignment. I was happy to see that the canopy skirts overlapped the fuselage sides perfectly and didn't require the installation of any spacers.

There are a couple of more little plastic blocks to install, and then the fiberglassing begins. This was the point where I had decided that I'd place my order for the engine, but I think I'm going to hold off for another couple of weeks. I don't foresee the fiber glass work going all that quickly.