| day |
notes |
hours |
| 3 |
10-32 x 3/8" socket head screws arrive from Tool Fast Direct. |
|
| 4 |
Check aileron travel limits. Re-adjust aileron pushrod to one and a half turns out from fully home, at each rod-end. This gives no restriction on aileron travel either by the bellcrank stop or by the inboard bellcrank hitting the transverse pushrod. While using a thin card feeler to check the outer bellcrank, lose it inside the wing and spend some time looking for it. A festoon bulb soldered onto the end of a length of twinflex and connected to the battery charger provides light and a piece of broken mirror held in a slotted piece of wood allows seeing around corners. The aileron LE is just touching the top skin at full up at the tip end. Remove aileron and file back skin LE at top, then straighten it with long Perma-Grit block - effectively doing a tapered removal right across the width. Fit aileron again (a procedure made much more convenient by the new screws) and it's still just touching at the tip with full up. Remove, and repeat filing and straightening of skin edge. Re-assemble and this time it looks fine - skin TE just clear of aileron all along and travel limited downwards only by horns and upwards only by aileron LE against wing lower skin. Travel is 26.5 to 26.8 degrees up and 24.7 to 25.0 degrees down, depending on how neutral is defined. The aileron is significantly below the top profile of the tip moulding when it is parallel to it. That's about the same angle where the underside of the aileron lines up with the underside of the tip moulding. 2 packs of Ampreg 20 arrive from Marineware. Expiry date on both standard hardener packs is 2009-09-29 and on both resin packs is 2009-10-10. Notice that although the internal paperwork and labels all show SP Systems, the outer boxes show
Gurut (UK) Ltd
at the same address and phone number. Put it all into resin cupboard to come up to working temperature. The pump still has quite a lot of resin in the tank, but proportionally less hardener. Will need to decide what to do with that when I empty it to give it a clean-out and fill with the new stock. Fit flaps and check for clearance in retracted position. Despite the vinyl spacer, it seems to be touching lightly nearly all along the length. Not sure how much ought to be trimmed off. Remove flap. Top skin overlaps the lower skin by about 10mm. Just about to try chamfering it when I knock the Racal dust mask onto the floor, breaking the headband on both sides. Stop and figure out how to fix it. Although it's some sort of plastic that might respond to solvent welding, the joint area is too small for a joint in tension. Decide to overlap broken ends and rivet. 3mm pop rivets leave barely enough meat on the parts, but it seems to hold OK when tried out. File back top skin slightly at outboard end of flap recess as that seemed to be the area of first contact. Re-fit flap. Still touching slightly at outboard end. Try to check flap up position with flap setting template, but it has several lumps of polyester filler where the top skin is now fitted that prevent good fit on the profile. Chip off the blobs of filler and repair the LE end which has got damaged at some stage. While that's setting, check the required flap travel in the build manual. The outrigger latches as required at about 25 degrees down from the most retracted position (probably less, as it's hard to avoid a bit of over-travel when the latch operates) and the maximum travel is over 30 degrees, so that should be adequate. |
857.9 |
| 6 |
Get 3 screw-in dog tethers on offer at 1.99 each for possible use as tie-downs. |
|
| 7 |
After thinking about possible clever ways to do it, finally settle on cleaning up the remaining excess Redux line along the spar with with a small Perma-Grit wheel used freehand in the Dremel tool. The rear skin is slightly higher than the front near the root, but pretty level with it further out. Get the beam balance down from storage and check the batch size in grams for various peg positions. Start to clean out some
plastic bottles
discarded by Wilma that had
Winsor & Newton
acrylic paint in them. They look ideal for metering out resin & hardener as they have a small sealable nozzle which unscrews to reveal a large aperture for filling. |
858.4 |
| 8 |
Check the M10 nuts used as beam-balance weights on the new scale with 0.01g resolution; they range from 10.48g to 10.65g. Although a check on the spreadsheet confirms they will keep the proportions within the 99% properties box, the new scale should allow me with little effort to find a better-matched set than that. Weigh up a couple of dozen or so nuts from the stock jar and find 5 at 10.07g and another 5 at 100.11g each. Return the original nuts I was using to stock and use the 10.07g set on the balance, keeping the 10.11g set as backup. Check the batch size in grams for all peg positions and make up a label for the beam balance. Clean out with water and then acetone the W&N plastic bottles, and dry them off. 18C, 73% RH so turn on fan heaters to thermostat setting 4. Open new standard hardener and decant about 200ml into the 250ml bottle. Open new resin and decant about 450ml into the 500ml bottle. With the lids off and the large throats of the bottles available, both are easy to fill from the supply tins. Mark area for UNI straps on top of starboard wing root and degrease with acetone-soaked tissue. Abrade with fine Perma-Grit sheet and degrease again. Cut 50mm wide strips of UNI 290mm, 430mm, 590mm & 710mm. Re-mark end points of each strip on wing outside bonding area. Mix a peg-1 batch (about 30g) of epoxy on the beam balance. The bottles work reasonably well for dispensing the components into the mixing cup, but the holes are slightly larger than preferred, allowing the liquids to pour out rather than be squeezed out, leading to some drips down the lids. Paint the bonding area with epoxy and lay on the UNI strips in turn,wetting out each layer with minimal extra epoxy on the brush. Just enough epoxy to do all 4 layers, leaving a tiny amount for a sample. Apply peel-ply tape and leave to cure; now 22C, 46% RH. At 23:00, layup cured; 23C, 41% RH; turn off heaters. |
860.1 |
| 13 |
Aluminium fuel filler pipe arrives from Tim Ward. |
|
| 14 |
9C, 67% RH. Turn on fan heaters to thermostat setting 4. Clear odds and ends off top of wing, hoist up and turn over. Have to remove air filter from ceiling to allow enough vertical space for this with flap fitted. Notice that the aileron is now rubbing, if anything, slightly more at full down. Mark out position of UNI straps on root underside and find the aft end goes past the W18 flap fitting. Presumably the UNI strip is just slit to go each side of it, but better check there's nothing more clever needed before proceeding. Turn off heaters again. Deburr ends of Tim Ward's aluminium fuel filler pipe and check how it matches the F18 plastic part and that the XFS07 rubber pipe will go over the ends of the aluminium one to act as a connector. |
860.8 |
| 17 |
Phone Roger at Europa factory re UNI Straps and W18. He says my assumption is correct, just slit UNI & lay it each side of the W18. Peel-ply at last delivered from Marineware - late because they put the wrong PostCode on it and it had been to Stroud and other places before getting to me. |
|
| 18 |
7C, 60% RH; turn on fan heaters to thermostat setting 4. Remove flap from wing, complete with brackets, to leave W18 clear. Degrease root bottom skin with acetone-soaked tissue. Abrade bonding area with fine Perma-Grit sheet, taking great care not to scratch W18, and degrease again. Cut 50mm wide strips of UNI 290mm, 430mm, 590mm & 710mm. Slit ends of longest 2 to clear W18. Mix a peg-1 (30g) batch of epoxy on beam balance. Paint bonding area with epoxy and lay on UNI, wetting out each layer with minimum extra epoxy. Add peel-ply. 20C, 37% RH when left to cure about 13:00. At 23:00, well, cured; 23C, 31% RH; turn off heaters. |
863.0 |
| 20 |
Put fuel filler stuff including new pipe back in box 9 in trailer. Print out photos of Peter Davis' trailer and compare, as well as possible, the spar support positions with the inside of my own trailer. Because so much would have to come out of the trailer first, decide it's too ambitious (and too cold - still frost on the outside of the trailer at mid-day) to try installing the proper wing storage stuff today. Re-fit fuselage supports to dolly. One M8 bolt has gone missing in its travels; can't find a long enough one (90mm needed) so use a piece of M8 studding and 2 stiffnuts. Move the jerricans, some of the carpets and other pieces so port wing is accessible. Remove peel-ply from starboard wing underside root UNI straps. Rub down the edge for safe handling. Remove the aileron. With help from Matthew next door, move starboard wing into trailer (back in cardboard box for now) and take port wing out of trailer. Remove top skin, put it back in the cardboard box and take port wing in to garage. Put it on the table with the tip towards the main door; this puts the main working area (ie the TE) on the other side of the table from before; this may not be the most convenient arrangement but we'll see how it goes for access to the epoxy and glass cupboards. To allow the TE to be next to the cupboards would require the table moved much nearer to the main door, and that entails moving sandbags and everything else on the floor at that end; the overhead hoist arrangements would need to be changed too, so it seems easiest to try it like this first. Unwrap port wing. Note that it has a 3D Mouldings label serial P416 (on both root and bottom skin) and that the spar is labelled 1088 RP 18-8-01 with a large manuscript B adjacent. Find the 3 W18s, with the bottom 25mm already primed and masked up. Drill and saw out the slots for them adjacent to the ribs, noting that most internal ribs are not handed (ie flanges are on starboard side of ribs for both wings) and so the middle W18 fits on the outboard face of the BL54 rib, whereas it was on the inboard face on the starboard wing. Drill W18s 2mm for cocktail sticks, then clamp them in position and drill through the ribs. Return starboard flap and aileron to trailer. |
864.8 |
| 21 |
Place bids for SL40 radio & PM1000 II intercom in Europa factory clearance sale with Ian Rickard. Wrap bellcrank studs with masking tape and parcel tape. On the piece of BID returned from David Corbett, mark out 7 strips 50mm wide at 45 degrees. Collect up pictures of other monowheel panels from various archives to help think about radio placement possibilities. Draw up SL40 & PM1000 II front panels in CADintosh and try them out for size on the radio panel. |
865.4 |
| 22 |
Check total lengths of BID needed from journal entries for starboard wing. Cut 1/4-width strip off polyethylene roll to length of wing. Drape over LE D-box and attach to spar flange with masking tape. Trim overhang to about 75mm and save offcut for wetting-out layups on. Mark up the rest of the BID with 50mm strips, to a total of 10-off full-length and 25 shorter ones. While looking for tools I made for applying BID strips into corners, find packet of BID & polyethylene strips left over from starboard wing and labelled-up for use on port wing. Find BID applicator tools and also some of the lurid green peel-ply. Journal entry of 2003-02-13 (what a long time ago!) says 18m of 50mm BID strips and 3.14m of 150mm strips needed per wing. A rough totalling of what's marked out on the BID roll comes to about 34m, so that should be plenty even without the leftovers from the starboard wing. |
867.3 |
| 28 |
Find mahogany spacers for aileron closeout. Mark hinge reinforcement positions - will have to check again with actual aileron. Trim W54 to fit. Mark out 50mm & 150mm tramlines on strips of polyethylene sheet. 2 off 1.5m of 150mm wide and about 11m total of of 50mm wide. |
868.7 |
| 31 |
Get out W19, W20, W21s, OR4, OR5 & FL9. Degrease OR5 & FL9, apply Loctite 638 & clamp between sheets of polyethylene with toolmakers clamp. Find clamping tool, and file edges of W19. Find that the hole in W20 is slightly undersize, with a nib from the water-jet cutting, so enlarge to 3/16". File edges of W20 & the W21s to a taper. |
871.2 |
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