Various Stuff

9/9/2012

Engine

I finally got an engine. It is a Lycoming IO-360A1A. It had a prop strike, but at least I have something as a foundation to build upon. After returning from the long road trip of picking it up from Arkansas, I eventually got it dismantled. All parts were sent away for inspection/repair, sans cylinders; they only have 820 hours on them and look good, but I will probably end up exchanging them so I end up with a zero time since major' engine. The case came back from Divco with a thumbs up. The cam and other small steel parts came back OK, too. The big one; the crankshaft amazingly also came back repaired and OK. Nice. Now I need to decide about the cylinders...

Landing Gear

I am using wheelpants supplied by Sam James, for the RV-10. The brackets were from Vans Aircraft, for their wheelpants, so I had to tweak the bracket angles to suit. I raised the plane off the ground so there was no spread on the gear, then set the pants to line of flight. I then reinforced the screw attach locations with thin steel plates and glassed them in. The pants took a lot of preparing. especially the mating of the two halves, which still need to be fine tuned/tidied up. I added a mud wall to the rear half of the pant utilizing 1 inch blue foam with a few layers of glass of it. They're butt ugly inside there, but no one can see them :0). As is common with the RV installations, the legs were dampened with wood, then wrapped with glass cloth and soaked with West Systems Epoxy. The leg fairings are from The F1 Rocket guys. These fairings were aligned with the line of flight with string lines running top and bottom to ensure no twist in the fairing. To secure them while bonding the trailing edges, I fashioned some temporary steel brackets to hold the trailing edges in situ, top and bottom. The next task is to spray builders foam into the fairings, then look at the pant to leg intersection fairing fabrication (modeler's clay).

Canopy

The emergency release cable system has now been completed and fine tuned and works consistently. I tried redesigning the release process from a 3 stage process to 2, but finally gave up; 3 it is. I am losing 1 second by using a 3 stage process, I'll live with it. A visitor noted that when the canopy was open, it would bounce around up there when windy, causing perhaps stress on the hinge, not to mention it could come crashing down. So I fashioned a stay made from carbon tube. The tough part was designing a grab mechanism for attaching the stay to the turtledeck; The stay has a ball shaped steel end (from a gas operated door closer), the stay is pushed into a hole in the t-deck, in the t-deck is a fitting that i made that is essentially a tube with a compression spring loaded piston. The end of the piston mates with the steel ball on the stay, holding the stay in place. On the front of the t-deck is a small plunger handle that I pull (thus compressing the spring) to release the stay. The stay stows away on a nylon clip (actually a piece of nylon tube with a bit cut out to form a c-shape) attached to the canopy frame.

Instrument Panel

I made a new panel due to later changes in the canopy and other factors. The panel is now ready for paint.

Plumbing

All plumbing aft of the firewall is now complete. Vents and drains for smoke and gas are complete.

My iPhone takes crappy pictures...coming soon