Saturday 4
Today I did one of those tasks I try to do only once every 5 years, I rebuilt my PC. It seems to take about five years for me to get up enough energy to go thorough all the backing up, building, reloading and re configuring. The CPU is now exactly 10 times faster, but the PC hardly seems twice as fast as the old one, oh well.
I put all of the nut plates on the hinge, coated the hinges with some wax and put a little more Redux under them where I had missed a few spots previously.
Sunday 5
I hunted around for the aluminum plate for the retract gear. The manual described a plate with the slot already cut, but I could only find a trapezoid shaped piece of plate. I set about making it parallel and then cut the slot. Its times like this when I miss my milling machine. I ended up making a jig for my router and running a 6 mm tungsten carbide cutter through the plate, it did quit a nice job too.
I cut out the bottom gate, but I couldn't retract the gear to mark out the top end, so I called it a day.
Friday 10
I decided to put the bungee cord in temporarily so I could retract the gear and mark out the top end. It was quite easy to do, it was in and working in about 30 minutes.
Saturday 11
Most of the day was used up working on the aluminum gate for the gear retract mechanism. Once the bungee cord was in place I cloud retract the gear and mark out the top of the retract plate. I used a router to do the cut again, but in retrospect I would have done the operation by hand. The next task was to cut the Tufnol bearing surface for the lever and fit it up. I had to take the retract lever on and off quite a few times to get the correct amount of bend so that it would run parallel and sit in top and bottom sections for the gate.
I put the instrument panel in to make sure that the lever still cleared and things were still generally happy. With the gate in the correct spot, it wanted to run off the edge of the tunnel, so I made up a small wedge of blue foam.
Sunday 12
I worked for some time to get the gap wide enough on the rudder to make sure it will clear when swinging to the port side. I also set the gap an even width between the rudder edge and the stern post.
I discovered I had the old style brake plate and I had to order the new type from Europa. It arrived in the post during the week so I rolled the fuselage on its side and set about fitting it. The gear wouldn't retract anymore because the brake cylinder now hits on the underside of the fuselage. This will mean that the hole surrounding the wheel will have a bit of a gap, so I think I will put a bit of glass back latter on.
Monday 13 ~ Friday 17
I didn't do much of anything this week. I seem to have pinched a nerve in my neck which hasn't been much fun at all.
Saturday 18
I had my first try at doing some filling today. I have decided to use West Systems epoxy and Expand Cell filler. At the recommendation of Graham Singleton I used a mix of 1:4 Expand Cell mixed with Carbosill.
I had the fuselage rolled on the port side, so I decided to have a go all of the spots I could get to. The approach recommended to me was to mix up the material as dry as possible and put a thin smear of epoxy onto the surface before applying the filler. Another suggestion was to spread the filler out with a putty knife on a piece of board to try and get as many of the air bubbles out as possible.
Well, based on a first try at it, it doesn't seem too difficult to put on, I suspect the fun part will be sanding it off !!.
I had quite a problem with the alignment of the rudder edge with the leading edge of the fin. What I decided to do was to fit the rudder and put a layer of filler across both surfaces at the same time. To achieve this without having filler sticking to wrong things required covering the hinges & hinge holes. To stop stuff sticking in the gap I put in a thin strip of aluminum coated with wax.
I laid on a good coat of material with a 150 mm putty knife, and let it cure for a couple of hours. When the filler had nearly set I ran a knife down the slot and around the hinges. All in all it was pretty successful.
Sunday 19
I live between two airports, Waukesha where I keep the Comanche and Capitol Drive. The Capital Drive airport is one of the fast disappearing "Old Style" airports and today they had their "fly in" in the form of an ice cream social. I went down and had lunch and met up with a lot of folks from the local EAA chapter, looked at a lot of nice home built aircraft and told a lot of airplane stories.
I had a try at sanding in the afternoon and it was quite apparent that I had not put near enough filler on.
Saturday 25
I mixed up a batch of filler and laid it into the port side to build it up some more.
Sunday 26
Well I should have worked on the Europa, but I went flying with Marty instead. I was long over due to do some IFR practice for holds and approaches so we made a day of it. I didn't spectacularly embarrass myself, but I sure needed the practice. Marty flies single pilot IFR professionally and he had some great tips on cockpit management for me.
Monday 27
I did a little more sanding and a little more filling.........
Tuesday 28
It was my local EAA chapter meeting tonight with lots of tall tales to tell from the Air Venture air show.
Wednesday 29
My family returned home from Australia after a two week holiday and everyone was weary, but glad to be back.
Thursday 30
John Hurst from Europa Aviation came by and I took him up to Oshkosh to collect the Europa Trigear. He stopped by Waukesha airfield and I took N912EA flying for about 40 minutes. The flying characteristics of the Europa were outstanding. I haven't ever flown anything that has the same combination of responsiveness to positive stability. It seemed to be able to land short and get off in a "hop skip and a jump". I only had time to land it twice and I found it a bit hard to come in slowly enough after flying an aircraft that comes over the fence at 85+ knots, but I think I would have got it down pat after 5 or so landings.