N Numbers

I spent tonight priming the interior structure of the left flap. While waiting for the primer to dry I got a couple of other things done:

• I have been in email contact with South Florida Sport Aviation and I am seriously debating purchasing their front seat covers, rear seats, overhead console, and headliner
• I got my list of question together to talk to Rhonda at Barrett Precision Engines tomorrow
• I started designing my matco parking brake valve bracket
• I started designing my wingtip landing lights
• I reserved our N number! 5412K for 05/04/12 (Our daughters Birthday) K for our last name. Also I like how one-two-kilo sounds. I can't wait to make that radio call. The process was pretty painless. I thought I had to mail in a written letter, but there is a website that you can both check if a number is available as well as pay your $10 dollars to reserve an available number. Done!

Landing Lights

I probably have already written this, but one of the reasons of why I wanted to build my own plane was the intimate knowledge that I am have going to have about this plane. I hope to never have any in flight problems, but being able to visualize how a fuel molecule travels through every line and fitting in transit from the tank to the cylinder makes me more comfortable.

The second reason I went with building my own is the ability to setup the plane exactly how I want it. Per the name, this is an experimental plane. Yeah yeah, for all of you true experimental builders, this is really just a kit plane. Even though this is a kit plane, there are many things that the builder can experiment with. More so that I think I was actually prepared for before starting this project. There are the obvious things like avionics and panel configurations, propellor, seat materials, paint colors, etc. Beyond that, there are so many other things. Door handles, door pins, consoles, wheels, brakes, ignition, fuel system, etc. 

I have been looking at all of these things lately and I needed to narrow down my work to a manageable number of simultaneous projects. I am going to start planning the position and landing lighting.

When I picked this kit up it came with a Duckworks Leading Edge landing light kit. Thankfully the wing had not been cut yet. I am not afraid to cut the leading edge, but quite honestly I don't like the look of the leading edge landing light on the RVs. To me, the way the lenses end up always look, well, experimental. I would really like to get my landing light into my wingtip. I could probably just pickup some ZipTips, but I would really like to do it myself. 

I have seen a lot of adaptations of Baja Designs Pro Squadrons into the wings and wingtips. I have a special place in my heart for Baja Designs products because I have run many thousands of miles off-road behind Baja Designs lights. How cool would it be to get them into my plane!

The second thing that bothers me about wingtip lighting is most of it looks like boat designs from the 1970s. I am a computer engineer and I like raw circuit boards. The Cirrus position lights and the ability to see their raw LEDs really does it for me. I think it would be a nice touch to have a similarly designed wingtip setup.

I started down the path the other day of drawing up my own boards in Eagle, but then I came across FlyLeds.com. FlyLeds has a product line pretty close to what I was starting to design, so there is no reason not to go with them right now. They have two things that I really like. 1) They have skinny boards that area designed to work in conjunction with a landing light. 2) They give you the option to build your own boards!

The standard MR-16s that Vans sells for their wingtips sound fairly useless if you are actually making night landings. They draw a lot of current, they get hot, and they don't put out much light (relative to an actual landing light). Going back to the Baja Designs idea, it would be super cool to get some Squadron Pros in the wingtips for the landing light, and use the side FlyLED boards for anti-collision and position lighting. 

While digging through the BajaDesigns website to order a Squadron for experimenting I found out that they have a S2 version of their light:

 

The S2 is still pretty bad ass. It outputs 2450 Lumens, draws 1.66A, and only weighs 8 ounces. Did I mention it was Baja Designs and that Baja Designs is a bad ass company?

Now I have to do some work in CAD to see what I can all fit into that poor wingtip. From the looks of it, I think there is a fair chance to get the S2 in either a horizontal or vertical orientation into the tip alongside the skinny FlyLEDs board. (I don't actually know that I am just going off of someones previous photo of a Squadron Pro inside a wingtip)

I will obviously have make some brackets and probably cut away some of the existing bracketry, but this looks promising. Here are the S2 Pro dimensions:

The cool thing about this approach is that if I put lights in both of the wingtips I should be able to select and position the beams to provide both great taxi as well as landing lights. The S2 has many lens options:

I drew this up in Solidworks to get a rough proof of concept in terms of size and fitment. I don't have the exact parabola of the wingtip modeled correctly (I was lazy), but for a rough size this is pretty close. The FlyLEDs "skinny" board is supposed to be 1 inch wide. The wingtip gives me enough room to put a plate that is 6 inches tall at the tallest point and 4.5 inches wide. I haven't measured it but I think the curvature of the wingtip is a little more slim than I modeled. However, with these rough dimensions it appears that the S2 will fit into the wingtip plate in both the horizontal and vertical orientations. That would give me forward facing strobes from the FlyLeds board, a "racer" series landing light that would give great distance, and a shorter wider beam illuminating the nearby taxi and runway. That is the theory at least.

With the sizing looking like its going to work I think it is time to order some components to see if the theory will hold up. Worst case I have some small LED lights for my wife's jeep.

-To be continued-

Kitlog Pro File conversion

Back when I purchased the project I was given the printed manual with annotated work log notes on the pages along with a backup of the Kitlog Pro project. While I myself am not using Kitlog, I thought it would be nice to take a look at the project and archive off it's entries for historical record.

Kitlog Pro seems to be pretty popular amongst builders. I went over to the website, downloaded a copy, created a windows VM to run it in (unfortunately it only runs under Windows) and started to dig around. It seems like a pretty nice program, but with that said I still did/do not intend to use it. 

The backup looked to be some sort of database records with a TPS file extension. I tried importing these files into KitLog Pro 2.0, but it appeared that in version 2.0 the program changed to an XML format for its data storage. I emailed support and they were very responsive. They gave me the link to the 1.7.3 version of the program and proceeded to tell me that I should download 1.7.3, replace the installed database files with the ones that I had, and then upgrade to 2.0. I tried it (I didn't try that hard), but when I got 1.7.3 running and replaced the install files and rebooted, nothing showed up. I am sure this process would work, but I wasn't even intending to use Kitlog, so I went another way.

I really just wanted the data that was in the TPS files so that I could reference it at a later time in case there was something that I could not make sense of from the work logs in the construction manual. I started to see if my filesystem knew of this file type.

No luck. The second check was to see if there were any words that could be picked out of the file. i.e. was the file in some crazy binary format, or was it plain ASCII.

While that doesn't look that interesting, if you look further into the strings dump you start finding sentences!

So at this point I can at least figure out how to extract some data from this file and probably piece it back together. Developers rarely roll their own file data storage these days though in lieu of an already existing format. The next step was to figure out what sort of file this was. After a bit of digging in the hexdumps of the file I determined it was a Clarion Top Speed database file. Clarion TPS is proprietary file format that holds table based data, but with that said, people have already reversed the proprietary file format!

I ended up using the github tps-parse project: https://github.com/ctrl-alt-dev/tps-parse.git. Once you get that compiled, it is pretty straight forward to convert the files from TPS to CSV.

By giving the program the directory with all of the saved TPS files as input and an output directory to save the CSVs to, I now have all of the logs saved in a useable format. From here I will probably write a small python script to import these into my own worklog. For the time being, Google sheets provides all I need.

Flaps: Part 3

 Over the past couple of days I was able to finish up the de-burring, dimpling, priming, and riveting the Right Flap skeleton. It is always a much better feeling putting things together rather than taking them apart. All in all, awesome!

I don't know why, but I ended up priming the components in small batches. I started with the main spar. After priming the main spar I went back and re-wrote all of the placement numbers on top of the primer due to me not really paying attention during my MEK wipe down. With the main spar primed I went back and laid everything out on the table making sure the order was not disturbed.

If you have been keeping up with these posts, you will know that this is the first major component that I am really doing from start to finish. I had picked this project up from another builder... After internally debating my primer choices for weeks I decided to go with rattle can self etch primer. I remember reading a bunch of posts about self-etch rattle can primer needing a top-coat because it was prone to absorbing things like air tool oil (I am not going to weigh the pros and cons of primer choices here, but even the Vans manual specifically states that they don't think you really need to top coat primer on the internal structure [if you so choose to primer the internal structure with rattle can self etch]). I distinctly remember thinking to myself at the time of reading that, why do so many people call out air tool oil absorption? Well... Take a look at the photo below. This was the first piece that I riveted. I clearly put air tool oil thumb prints on it. So I guess I get it now. 

As everyone other builder has mentioned, a pneumatic rivet squeezer is the bomb!

There were two places in which were un-squeezable. The first I forgot to take photos of, but the center flap bracket with the 2 doublers in it was too wide to squeeze the -10 rivets that hold it together. I initially had heard that from someone else, so when I put my squeezer on them and they fit I was pretty excited. Then when I attempted to actually squeeze the rivet I learned that while the squeezer fits, the problem is actually that because the squeezer is so far extended it does not have the power in the beginning of its throw to squeeze the rivet. 

The second part that was problematic were ribs at each end of the flap. The pnematic squeezer can squeeze the middle rivet, but has a hard time getting in to the top and bottom rivets. While hard to see in this photo, you can see the slight angle on the setup. Even if you bend the rib inwards the bulk of the squeezer makes getting good alignment impossible.

 

 An alligator type squeezer would have been good here. Given that I don't have one I was about to buck these three rivets when I thought I would dig through my tools to see if a manual squeezer would fit. After all, I have never used it, and have heard people say that you should still get a manual squeezer if you intend to go with a pneumatic one. To my amazement, the manual squeezer was able to get a perfect alignment! I guess those things are useful.

While writing this, I realize something pretty dumb on my part. While squeezing the rest of the skelton together I ended up using a 1/2 inch flat set to get around the flange. I tried every configuration I could think of to get the manufactured head on the thinner rib material, but in the end put the shop head on the rib side of the spar so that I did not have to bend and stress the ribs in order to get the squeezer in place.

I don't know what I was thinking while doing this. This isn't a horrible thing, until you hear that I have a flanged yolk for my squeezer that is just sitting in the drawer. The flanged yolk would is designed exactly for this setup, but I completely forgot I had it. O well.

Just some photos:

More Tooling

It was another warm weekend and another great opportunity to spend time in the downstairs shop while I waited out the drying time on the flap primer. There have been two things that while I was building out the right flap that I figured I would build a jig for to make life a little easier when completing the left flap.

The first jig was a good way to machine countersink joggled flanges. The problem with doing this by hand is that even a small micro-step countersink has clearance problems getting into the angle of the joggled flange. That is, the cage hits the angle thus giving an uneven surface to countersink off of.

For this I took some 1/8" 1x2 rectangular 6061 and milled a .060 inset into it. From there I milled a 1/4 slot into that inset to accept the #40 holes (and thus the countersink pilot) from the joggled flanges.

With that done, I was able to remove the cage from the micro-step countersink and use the DRO of my mill to set a zero and accurately countersink each hole to a defined depth.

The results were just what I was looking for! Excuse the scratches in the flange bracket, this was a piece of scrap.

The second jig is for the countersinking of the Trailing Edge (TE) wedges. The TE wedges need to be drilled and countersunk perpendicular to the centerline of the wedge. This is kind of annoying because well, its a wedge. You end up drilling a lot of holes and it would be nice to do this in the drill press rather than with a hand drill in order to keep all of the angles as they should be.

I started with a piece of 1/2" x 2" 6061 bar. After facing the top surface with my SuperFly I milled a 1/2" slot 1/4" deep into the bar. 

Within the main slot I put another .020 deeper slot stopping roughly .250 from each end. The idea here is that I wanted to use a piece of the trailing edge itself set into the base of the slot in order to get the angles correct. Mainly, I didn't feel like re-tramming my mill after this project so rather than set the 10 degree slope with the cutter, I cut a 0 degree slot and used a short piece of trailing edge to be used as the base of the jig.

From there, I made a little cutout to accept the micro-step countersink, hand filed the radius of the base TE corners (to accept the 1/8" radius that was left from my end-mill), and finally drilled a hole through the TE to give some clearance for the pilot of the countersink.

With that complete I was able to take the TE that I needed to countersink and set it into the jig (with the wedge in the reverse direction of the base wedge). This brings the face of the surface I need to countersink perfectly perpendicular to the countersink!

Flaps: Part 2

Previous to this, I got both flap structures final drilled and began work on the right flap skins. I managed to get through the final skin to skeleton drilling pretty quickly. It took a couple of minutes to get into an efficient cleco move and drill pattern, but once I found my groove it was pretty mindless fun work (although repetitive).

There were a couple of  things that needed a little special attention. The first was the Trailing Edge final drilling the second were 2 holes on each nose rib, the third was the match drilling on the Flap Brackets.

The nose ribs come with 4 placed holes in them. The nose skins have 5 or 6. As you can see from the photo below a little of my confusion when I was blindly placing clecos and a couple holes did not line up at all. When constructing the flap I went back and forth to the manual and ended up just clecoing around those holes figuring I would find out if I had something mis-placed later (while it seemed pretty weird, I was pretty sure I had things in the correct place.

 You can see a little better from the end rib the issue at hand.


While it looks like there is a hole there, that is just a reflection of the hole that is on the vertical structure. The one thing I did not like about drilling these out is that the nose rib tabs are pretty flexible. I originally started match drilling one of the holes with my cordless drill and an older bit. You can see that it flexed the tab a little off of the skin because I was pushing a bit too hard on the drill. I went back and switch over to a brand new drill bit and my 4000RPM air drill and that made some really nice holes with no flexing on the tabs.

With all of the skin to structure holes complete I drilled the TE wedge to skin holes. This picture looked good in my mind, but is having a hard time depicting the perpendicular drill line to the centerline of the wedge.

With all of the skin holes done I started work on the Flap Brackets. This was pretty straight forward other than the bottom hole of each bracket is pretty close to the skin. Thankfully my Sioux .3HP drill motor fit into this space just fine.

Spacing out the bracket alignment with some AN4 hardware.

 That was it, all holes in the right flap are drilled. Now for some disassembly, deburring, dimpling, priming, and re-assembling!

Workshop Bench Leveling

A couple of years ago I picked up 6 benches off of craigslist for basically the cost of moving them. They are 1 3/4 maple top 30x60 benches. I have had these benches in my downstairs workshop and when I started setting up the plane workspace I brought two benches up.

When I originally setup my downstairs workshop I broke one of the feet off of the table. The tables had cast feet on them and they were really brittle. Thankfully, my basement floor was dead flat so I just took off the feet and rested the bench legs straight onto the concrete. Additionally, I previously used the benches as independent work benches so I didn't really care about them lining up perfectly to each other.

Now that I have building things that fly I really wanted to make sure I could put two 60" tables next to each other and have a full 120" of solid straight and level table. Surprisingly I could not find any

"pipe feet" on McMaster. I learned that "threaded tube insert" was the search term of choice for this part. I finally found the tube inserts (search for tube not pipe) on Amazon for a decent price coming from JW Winco.

In the excitement of finding the part I was looking for I hurried through measuring things. I measured the OD of the pipe and it was 1.660".  (Looking back on this, yes, why wouldn't I measure the ID of that pipe...) I quickly hit the order button on Amazon and then went back to McMaster to order some swivel leveling feet (in retro-spect I probably didn't need the swiveling function, but they looked nice).

Two days later everything arrived. I threaded the feet into the plugs. I cleaned off the benches. It was pretty amazing how excited I was to have this level of adjustment on my tables. I tilted the benches up to put the feet in and there it was. Defeat. As in, the tables beat me yet again. The legs are thin-wall galvanized. The ID is large enough to accept the entire OD of the tube insert.

To be continued...