Main gear install, part 2

Tonight’s goal was to see about figuring out those outboard saddle bolts and the anti-rotation tabs. I started off with the one that just barely wouldn’t sit on the hole – that is, the easiest one. Just a bit of time on the bench grinder removed enough material for it to clear the adjacent nut, and I was able to get the bolt started. But as I tapped it into place, it stopped about halfway in, and…I saw that there was a nut in the way, from one of the batch of screws around the base of the gear tower. So I had to pull the bolt back out and remove that screw as well – but after that, I finally got the bolt installed.

With that lesson learned, I removed three more screws – one that would interfere with each bolt, and then it was just a matter of modifying the other three tabs. Two of them needed a decent amount of material removed, to the point that I sliced off a portion with a Dremel cutoff wheel before fine-tuning with the grinder. In the end, though, I got them all in, and with only a minimum of drama. I’m glad it went faster than the five hours the other guy said he spent on this.

To commemorate the occasion, I figured out a contortion that allowed me to both shine a flashlight on a pair of bolts and also point my phone in there, to illustrate the tab installation:

I haven’t yet reinstalled those four screws I took out, just on the off chance that I might need to remove the bolts yet again before this is all said and done. There’s also one more chore to do before actually installing the legs, which I’m glad I thought about last night. Since the legs include the brake passages, NPT-AN fittings need to be installed at the upper and lower ends of the legs. The upper fittings will be 90° elbows, and I don’t think there will be enough room to turn them with the leg in place – so I’d better install the fittings first. Fortunately, I found them on Amazon and they’ll be here tomorrow, so no delays from this.

Speaking of tomorrow, we’ve got other stuff going on, but maybe Friday evening we can get these things hung…

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Main gear install, part 1

It’s another one of those nights…I came into this one expecting to spend maybe a couple hours total in the shop and finish the evening with an airplane sitting on actual gear legs. It didn’t quite go like that, but not in any sort of horrible way or anything, just the usual unexpected stuff cropping up.

The first step was to get the inboard and outboard wear plates installed. These bolt up to the bottom of the fuselage, in assembly with the longerons (outboard) or gear element (inboard), and are the upper surface on which the gear leg rests. This is also a two-person job, since it requires one person outside holding the bolts while the other is reaching inside and tightening the nuts. No big deal once I recruited Josie’s help, though.

At this point, I thought I was ready for the fun part, to the extent that I went ahead and lifted the forward fuselage up nice and high using my engine hoist attached to the engine mount. Then, once I had it up nice and high…I remembered I needed to insert the outboard bracket bolts from inside the fuselage first. Well, I didn’t need to necessarily, but why not go ahead and get that done now? As it would turn out, it was a good thing I didn’t skip this.

This is a point where I’m diverging from the plans. These outboard bracket bolts are a very critical part of the gear mount, and their installation requires actually torquing them to a fairly low value, so as to not deform the outboard brackets. They also require periodic retorquing to ensure proper clamping of the gear leg. The plans call for all of these bolts to be inserted from below, and nuts installed above – which leads to many RV-8 owners providing horror stories of figuring out contortions to get a torque wrench inside the crowded gear towers each year at annual.

One way to avoid this is to simply reverse the bolts and inserting them from above, allowing the nuts to be torqued from below. The problem is, the bolts still need to be kept from turning at this time, so you’d still need to get inside the towers. For this, someone came up with a novel solution, namely little steel C-channel clips that slip over the bolt heads and then engage the weldment or a nearby nut inside the element to hold the bolts. I bought a set of these clips some time ago.

Anyway, after lowering the fuselage again, I got to work trying to install the bolts along with the clips, and quickly ran into issues. At first I’d fitted the clips to the bolts before hand, but I could see that they’d be interfering with other nuts while driving the bolt in. Whoops, guess I’ll have to lay the clips down in the channel and then slide the bolts into them. Except I couldn’t get any of the clips to line up with the holes – at their size, they all interfere to some degree (some worse than others) with the surrounding nuts and/or structure.

Bottom line, there’s no way these clips will work as provided. The question now is, do I modify the clips to fit properly, or just ditch them entirely and go back to the factory setup? That’s not a decision I want to make off the cuff, so I quit for the evening and retired inside to do some reading and thinking.

Update: Well, I don’t feel so bad about tonight. Found a build log I’d looked at previously for the bolt clip info, and now I see a couple relevant details: First, he specifically mentioned needing to modify the clips to fit. Second, he says he spent five hours modifying the clips and getting the bolts slipped into place. Here’s hoping I don’t need quite that much time…

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Tailwheel setup

Just another short session in the shop tonight. I went ahead and reinstalled all the tailwheel stuff I got repainted over the weekend, and as mentioned previously, I treated it like final assembly, complete with greasing everything as needed. When that was done, I couldn’t resist grabbing the steering link out of its box and getting that installed as well. The link is pretty easy to set up, just requiring a bit of length adjustment to ensure that the rudder and tailwheel are centered at the same time. It all looks pretty slick put together, and it’s fun to waggle the rudder and make the wheel swivel at the same time:

I also opened up the access holes on the forward bottom skins for installing the main gear wear plates – just need enough room to get a 7/16” socket in there. Hopefully tomorrow I can install the wear plates, and…maybe…even hoist up the fuselage and see about installing the legs themselves…we’ll see.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1

Finishing tail spring refinishing

More good progress this weekend. Over the course of yesterday and today, I finished redoing the tail spring and other related parts. Saturday morning was primer, Saturday afternoon was flat black, and this morning was matte clear coat. Everything turned out looking really nice and I really hope this is the end of rust issues forever. I’m giving the paint some more time to cure fully, but once that’s done I think I’m going to go for a final-assembly approach here – by which I mean greasing the mating surfaces between the spring and socket, as well as the fork swivel and wheel bearing, with everything getting torqued down.

The other thing I worked on today was some mud dauber nest eradication. I bought a small nylon brush set from Amazon with a long tail, with which I was able to thoroughly brush out the inside of lines that had been harboring nests. All in all I took care of both sets of brake lines (upper and lower) along with the fittings, plus a fuel line for good measure. I also uncovered the brake line ports in the gear legs and gave those a good interior cleaning, as well as scrubbing down the outsides of the legs. And of course, everything got capped off afterwards to prevent any further nesting activity.

Finally, I cleaned out the inside of the fuselage. There had been some tools in there, along with other random debris (wire insulation, aluminum chops, etc), and I wanted things pretty tidy before I lift the nose in order to get the gear legs attached. At this point, I think I’m ready to open up the access holes for the outboard wear plates and get both sets of wear plates bolted in. Once that’s done, I should be ready to lift the nose and bolt these things in place.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 3

Tail spring refinishing

More punch-list type stuff today. This isn’t strictly necessary for the gear installation, but it’s been bothering me for a couple weeks now. A while back, after having continuing issues with the tail spring rusting, I gave it a good thorough cleaning and than shot epoxy primer on it. I figured that ought to stop the rust for good, but…nope. I noticed some rust spots poking through a month or so ago. Turns out I should have topcoat the thing instead of just leaving bare primer…

So I figure I’ll give it the same flat black + two-part clear that the panel parts got. But first, there’s another bout of cleaning needed, and that was today’s work – going over the entire thing with a wire wheel until all the old primer and traces of rust were gone. I’m also going to scuff and paint the tailwheel fork, which is powder coated white, but that should just need a good scuff before adding paint.

Tomorrow I’m going to pick up some rust conversion primer to use as a base coat, and my plan is to try and get all this stuff repainted this weekend.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1

Random prep things

So nothing really worth sharing photos of today, but I got to working on some of the punch-list items prior to installing the gear. First up was actually pulling out the gear mount hardware – I knew that some of these pieces that are bare metal had a bit of rust, which I wanted to remove. So I spent a bunch of time with a wire wheel going over everything and getting the scale off. There were a couple spots on the wear plates that required more attention than that – I seem to recall knocking some mud dauber nests off of these a while back, and it seems that the residual mud from that caused a bit more corrosion. In those spots, I ended up needing emery cloth and a hardwood block to get things smoothed out.

Next up, I went back to looking at various lines. After taking a second look at the gear-tower brake lines, I was able to get them out using the wrenches I had on hand, though the stubby set I ordered will still come in handy for reinstalling. I also did some research on routing the connecting lines between the bottoms of the gear towers and the top of the gear legs – I was thinking I might need to modify the gear-tower lines to exit the floor in a different spot, but it looks like that won’t be necessary. That’s a nice touch and will save me some work.

After that, it was down to the fun of starting to clear out mud dauber nests from these lines and fittings. So far I’ve had good success by breaking up as much as I can manually, then soaking the affected area in a bucket of water to soften the remains, and finally blowing things out with compressed air. That at least gets rid of the blockage, but still isn’t going to do the cleaning job I want – so I ordered some brushes from Amazon today, which I’ll be pulling through affected tubes (sort of like cleaning a rifle) in order to remove any residue.

One final bit – I also cracked open the gear leg crate and pulled the legs out. I taped off the brake line passages a while back, but thought I remembered one or two of those bits of tape falling off and the mud daubers getting in – and sure enough, it looks like there’s some residue. So the legs are going to have to get the same cleaning routine that I’ve been giving everything else. And I’ll be a lot more careful to cap off any open lines in the future…

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 2

Panel labeling done

Oh look, another multi-day entry. This isn’t actually how I’d intended to do this, but I went to bed last night and completely forgot about writing this up. So yeah, anyway…yesterday was all about getting everything finished and topcoated. This involved a series of short work sessions over the course of the morning. First up was cleaning and relettering the main panel, then shooting the first coat of clear on it; at the same time, I shot the initial clear on the throttle quadrant parts from yesterday.

After giving those items a bit of time to flash, I moved them out into the sun in the hopes of speeding the curing up a bit. Unfortunately, while doing that, I saw that I’d gotten a little heavy with the clear on the quadrant parts, resulting in some crinkling. Those were going to need some more attention, unfortunately, but for the time being I left them in the sun and went back to shoot two-part clear on the switch console and panel wings.

While those were curing, I went back to the quadrant parts. My first thought was to try color sanding the clear to remove the crinkles; maybe there was a slim chance I could get away with doing that and then adding two-part clear on top. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the way things went; while I got the surface smooth by sanding, the clear was overly dull and even sanded through in a few spots. I decided to approach these by shooting yet another black coat on top, then just directly topping with two-part clear. There’s really no reason to add the intermediate single-part clear here, other then to be consistent with everything else…I didn’t think it was likely to affect the final finish.

So then there was just some more waiting for the black paint to set up a bit, before I finally went back and shot the two-part clear on the remaining parts – namely, the main panel and those pesky quadrant parts. By this time it was approaching midday and starting to get good and hot outside, so I switched to indoor activities for the rest of the day. I really wanted to start reassembling things, but it seems like poor judgment to not give the clear coat more time to cure – the can says it needs 24 hours to fully dry. No point in putting all this work and then mucking up the finish out of impatience.

So I picked back up around midday today, starting out with reinstalling all the switches in the console. I also spent some time last night thinking about how I wanted to color-code the switches. Way back when, I added colored switch covers which I wanted to use to visually differentiate things in addition to the labeling. So after getting all the switches back in place, I added the covers for good measure:

What I basically settled on for a system (and I use that term loosely) was:

  • Yellow: lighting
  • Red: things that shouldn’t normally be on – in addition to the alt feed above, the start arm switch also gets one of these
  • Blue: fuel pump (because 100LL is blue) (not seen above)
  • Green: ignition (because green means GO) (also not seen above)
  • White: everything else
After doing the switch console, I also reinstalled the switches and other component in the panel wings, but didn’t get a photo of that. Then, for the real fun, I went to town putting the avionics back into the main panel. Nothing complicated here, but it made for a nice progress pic:

Finally, I started thinking about other admin tasks before replacing the panel. The first things I wanted to look at were the gear tower brake lines. I want to modify these to use different holes in the floor, in order to better work with connecting to the fluid passages in the gear legs. I also need to remove and clean these anyway; I unwisely left them uncovered and they’ve got mud dauber nests that need to be cleaned out. All of this is best taken care of now, with the panel not in the way and the fuselage not on the gear. Unfortunately, full-size combination wrenches are too big for working down in the bottom of the towers, so I’m going to need to pick up some stubby wrenches before I can keep going here.

So instead I turned to remaking the network cable between the baggage bulkhead and the main panel. Previously, I made this too short, not allowing for sthe same service loop length that I have with the main harness. So I got to dust off my electrical stuff and remember the pinouts for a Skyview network cable.

All in all that made for a pretty good day’s work. Tomorrow I may do some more cleanup behind the panel (everything is dusty from sitting out uncovered) and maybe start working on installing the wear plates and other preliminary stuff for the gear. I think I also need to pull the gear legs themselves out and flush out those passages – if I recall correctly they got uncovered at some point and got some mud dauber attention. Better to clean that out before I install them…

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 5

Working on panel labels

So last time out I’d gotten the flat black base coat shot on all the panel parts, and was waiting on the two-part clear I ordered. That came in this week, and I’d kind of wanted to test with it, but the thing to think about is that these two-part rattle cans aren’t good forever. Once you combine the two parts, there’s a limited amount of time to use the paint before it cures in the can – in this case, they say 48 hours. With that in mind, I needed to carefully time things, so I waited until the weekend to really get started. The only thing I got done earlier this week was to shoot the first coat of single-part clear on my test coupon.

Today after work, though, I got going on things. I cracked the first can of two-part clear and shot a top coat on my test coupon, and while that was curing, I got started on applying the actual labels. I figured that worst case, the test coupon wouldn’t go well, but I could still shoot the initial top coat on the panel pieces.

I started with the main panel section, which only needed my tail # top center. The one downside to this application is positioning is a little prickly. All the other labels center up on switch mount holes, so positioning takes care of itself, but here I needed to set up some guides to get the label where I wanted. After some thinking, I put down a couple masking tape lines, so that the text itself would fit between them with only a little extra space – easy enough to center up. After that, the letters went on nice and easy, and I was happy – until I carelessly removed my tape guides and they pulled up some of the black paint. I thought I could just re-shoot the black in that area, but the spots where the paint had come up were obvious. After a couple different attempts to salvage the panel, I ended up stripping all the paint off and starting over again. Mildly annoying, but I want to get this right from the start.

In the meantime, I moved on to other spots. After the previous issues, I was a lot more careful with the tape – while I didn’t need guide lines anywhere else, I did still need a bit of tape to hold the label backer in place while I transferred things. But with that extra care, I had no more issues with paint coming up, and everything went on quite nicely:

 

After applying all the labels, I went ahead and shot the single-part clear on all those parts; I figure I’ll let that set up overnight before doing the final two-part topcoat. I put the main panel under a heat lamp to try and fast-cure the black, and my plan is to apply the letter again first thing in the morning, shoot the first clear coat, and then come back and topcoat everything after a couple hours cure time.

The other thing I wanted to do was to come back and topcoat the throttle quadrant parts that I sprayed flat black some time ago. These pieces don’t have any lettering, but I wanted to topcoat these parts with clear like everything else, for consistency of the final finish. They needed some cleanup after having been on the shelf for a while, and there seemed to be some crud in the paint as well, so I ended up giving them a light scrub and a fresh coat of black as well; they’ll get the same treatment tomorrow as the main panel.

So, assuming everything goes well tomorrow, I should have all of my first round of labeling done, complete with top coating, and ready to go back into the plane. The only other thing I want to get done before that is to remake one network cable, which I made too short the first time around – it doesn’t have the service loop length required for me to be able to pull the panel for maintenance.

Finally, in other big news, my engine came this past week, and is now merrily sitting on a pallet in the hangar. So now I’m really thinking in terms of a punch list before I get the gear legs mounted, and I may very well do my first engine hanging not too long after that.

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 2.5

Panel label prep

This is yet another one of those composite updates. I haven’t had a good long work session all week, but I’ve been trying to make a habit of doing some small thing each night – the age-old “touch the project every day” adage. This week, I’ve been continuing to get ready for doing the panel labeling.

Earlier this week I cut a couple test coupons from scrap to use for labeling experiments. Basically, I want to test my methodology for top coating things once the labels go on. I want to cover the labels with a good two-part clear coat, but I’ve read of builders who discovered that such a clear coat started dissolving the dry-transfer letters! Seems the best fix is to first spray a light coat of single-part clear, and then add the two-part on top for durability. In any case, I’m definitely trying this out on scrap before going to the real thing.

Also this past week, I took out the switch console and instrument panel parts, and removed all the components to get ready for painting. The main panel and console got cleaned and scuffed yesterday, while the panel wings needed a little more attention – I need to clean up some ugly marks on those before paint. And today, after a day full of events, I was able to go ahead and shoot primer and flat black on the panel and console. I figure I’ll let those cure for a few days before I do anything else – besides, I still have my top coat experiments to do.

In other news, my printed labels arrived today. I had a great experience with Luann at imagetransfers.com. Turns out the stuff I exported from my long-running Photoshop panel planner were not the right stuff for printing, but she asked me for the original PSD files and was able to recreate them as the vector art she needed – at no cost to me. Between that and having the labels in hand the same week, I’m pretty happy.

So the other fun today was doing a couple test applications on one of my test coupons. Everything on my label sheet has at least one duplicate to allow for mistakes and do-overs, plus as printed there’s some extra text – plenty of material for experimentation. The labels go on really easily, and look great. Now I just need to get the clear coat I need for top coating:

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 2

Label planning

So I’ve been in a sort of odd-job space when I’ve had time to work on the project, and tonight was yet another pivot from recent stuff. The main panel/switch console layouts, complete with labeling, have been established for a while, but I haven’t yet followed through in making the labeling happen. I’ve been intending for a while to just go with custom-printed dry-transfer labels for this, and I’ve decided that finishing up this labeling is a good digestible mini-project to take on.

The one thing I got to think about was potential labeling for the stick grip functions. At one point I’d planned on having a small reference diagram on the panel, but in the end I couldn’t find a good spot for it. It’s possible I could get away without labeling here, but some DARs are known to be sticklers about this…and being realistic, having the labeling is a good fallback in case anyone else flies the aircraft for whatever reason.

With that in mind, I decided to explore putting dry-transfer labels on the stick grips as well. The top of the grip seemed like a good spot for most labels, and to get a true trial I modified and then printed the label document I’d put together some time ago. I made sure everything had printed at the proper scale, cut out the pertinent parts, and just taped them in place to get a preview. I think this should work pretty well (the final labels will be white text, of course, and much more carefully positioned):

The one thing that doesn’t work for the top location is the autopilot disconnect on the side of the stick, but a one-line label fits nicely here as well:

And since I’d printed out the switch label layouts at the same time, I figured I’d trial fit that part as well. The idea is that when I apply these, I’ll cut out the whole strip and apply the entire console at once, which is only possible if the circles (which represent switch holes and won’t actually get applied in the end) line up with the holes. Looks pretty good to me:

My final act of the night was to finish off my label document, get it properly exported, and place the order for the labels. With any luck, those may get here by the end of the week, and maybe painting/finishing the panel and console can be a project for the next week or so.

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 1