Week ending Friday June 6, 2008

This week I made the cuts on the elevator for the hinge brackets, and then prepared for our composite workshop that we were performing at the GoldenWest Fly-in at the Marysville airport.

Here are the two elevators with cutouts where the hinge brackets will be attached.

Thursday, I loaded up the jeep with our vertical fin, rudder, an elevator and most of our gear for our composite workshop at the Golden West Fly-in at the Marysville airport. That evening I drove to Chuck’s house so that we could get a early start on Friday.We got to Marysville around 1:00 in the afternoon and pitched our tent in the vendor campground area.

 
Our tent is on the far left and the airport tower is in the background.
If you look carefully you can see Darryl talking with Martin Hollmann.
Martin is another aircraft designer and builder. Chuck took a finite
element analysis (FEA) workshop from Martin in 2006.

Chuck applying flox to a demo part during our composite workshop.

Darryl looking on as Zeke Smith does his vacuum infusion demonstration.

We ended up doing about 6 hours of demonstration/workshops duing our two days at Golden West. As usual, we had a great time and got to talk to a number of aviation and aircraft homebuilding enthusiasts.We hope that the 20 or so participants of our workshops enjoyed the experience as much as we did.

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Week ending Friday May 16th, 2008

We continued to make steady progress this week. Saturday, we hotwire cut the port elevator. 

                
                 Chuck is positioning the elevator template in preparation for
                 cutting out the port side elevator.


After cutting out the elevators, we cut the leading edges off of both elevators.

            
             Chuck and I are using a hotwire tool to cut off the leading edge
             of an elevator.



             
              Chuck rounding the edge with coarse sandpaper. This will
              allow the fiberglass to make better contact as it folds around
              the corner.


We marked the areas on each elevator where the hinge brackets will go. we also cut steel counter-weight rods and potted the weights and wooden spacers on the two elevator leading edges. The wood areas will be removed so that the hinge brackets can be riveted into place later on. 

            
             This is a view of the two elevator leading edges. The dark
             areas are the steel rods used as counter-weights. The light
             areas are wood dowels used as spacers. The dowels will be
             cut out at a later step.



            
             This picture shows the same leading edges after the counter-
             weights have been bonded with micro.



On Wednesday, I made 6 backing plates While Chuck cut out the areas on the elevators where they would be placed.

     
Inboard backing plate.         Middle backing plate.            Outboard backing plate.


Chuck made a channel on each elevator leading edge for the torque tube. He also cut out an area for the trim tab servo access panel.

   
This is a view of the leading edge                    The square area is where the trim tab
showing the trough that Chuck cut out.           servo will be located. Chuck cut out this
The elevators will be rotated by the                 area and Darryl will make a backup plate
torque tube that will be located in this             that will be embedded next week.
area.


Thursday morning we attached two wooden shelves to the side of the table to hold the two elevators (2008)05_17P19,30). We then mounted all the brackets with dry micro. We also fiberglassed the two torque tube channels (2008_05_17P12). Later in the morning we drove up to Napa to visit Zeke Smith and to talk about the upcoming workshops at Marysville’s GoldenWest fly-in.  When we got back in the afternoon, the morning’s epoxy had pretty well hardened. Chuck razor trimmed the two tunnel’s fiberglass.

  
The two elevators are mounted to the side of the worktable using 5-minute epoxy.
Note that the backup plates are in position. We have placed short pieces of duct-
tape below them so that excess resin will not stick to the foam surface.



Friday morning, Darryl went to the Hayward airport to watch the Hayward Air Rally start. Here is a picture of fellow EAA’er Bruce Cruikshank’s RV9-A. It is a beauty.

         
          Bruce Cruikshank’s RV9-A, preflight inspection before the Hayward Air Rally. 
          He is a member of Experimental Aircraft Association’s Livermore Chapter 663,
          to which we also belong. He finished this plane late last year.


Later in the morning Darryl drilled out the backing plate tubes so that they could be filled with flox on Saturday. Chuck received the LED tail light from SteinAir. We will be mounting it on the top rear edge of the rudder.

  
Off ……………………………………..and……………..On!

Week ending Friday April 4, 2008

Chuck and I did not get together at Center Street hanger this week. I made an plaster of Paris mold and cast an elevator counterweight.