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Garage prep, chapter three

Yesterday I built a storage rack on the back wall of the garage. I call it the back wall; it’s the “back” only from the perspective of the door from the house to the garage. It’s the side of the last garage space. Anyway… Three 8′ 2x4s and an hour or so with a chop saw, pocket hole jig, glue, and screws, and I had the three wall brackets. I spaced them 32″ apart and screwed them to the wall studs. Each bracket has three 18″ horizontal supports on which I can stack lumber or whatever.

Going through my stock of random left-over lumber from previous projects, one of the things I found was a 1×12 board about 10′ long. I suspect it was left over after disassembling and old Van’s Aircraft shipping crate, though it may have been something else. It’s a pretty crappy board, and I can’t imagine using it for anything else, so I cut it to length and used 67″ of it to screw to the bottom supports as a shelf for shorter stock.

One task remains – finishing up the “gossip bench” – before I can get a work table built and get back to building. I discussed the general plan for the work table with Stu yesterday, I just need to figure out exactly how I want to build it.

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Garage prep, chapter two

Tool boxes have been swapped, a cabinet moved, more cleaning and organizing done. I’ve made a calculated decision to take a side trip to disassemble, sand, reassemble, and refinish an old “gossip bench” or telephone that belonged to my wife’s grandmother. It’s been sitting in the garage for many years, rickety and falling apart. The top portion is an enclosed shelf made with a curved piece of plywood with maple for the top and bottom – you know, to hold a phone book. The plywood got cracked by something long ago, so I’ll use some new birch plywood and bend it to make a replacement. I figure a week to finish this up, then it can come inside the house for my wife to make a new seat cushion and find a place for it, which she has assured me she can do. As long as it’s not in the garage, I’ll be happy.

Now on to figuring out how to wedge in some wood storage.

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Garage prep and planning

I’m getting really tired of not being able to get any building done. This has really been driven home for the past few weeks of non-building. During the summer there’s plenty of yard work and other projects to fill int he gaps and keep one from getting bored. When it’s this cold, though, it becomes obvious that something has to be done. Rather than dive into a “just do something, anything” mentality that invariably leads to a big stalled mess, I’ve been taking the time to figure out exactly what the obstacles are and how they can be overcome.

Obviously, one of the biggest factors is space. There wasn’t any. The garage is packed pretty full, but a lot of it is just clutter. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning things up, putting things away, figuring out what can be tossed, and just generally rearranging things. I have a day or two left to go on the big parts of that effort. Right now I have about half a garage space completely cleared, and will extend that another couple feet as I get rid of some junk that needs to go. I also plan to move the riding mower from the garage to the back patio, and cover it with an all-weather cover I bought for it. I have some rodent repellant balls I’ll use to try and keep mice and squirrels out of there… we’ll see how that works. The balls are strongly scented with peppermint and some other stuff; it’s non-toxic and doesn’t stink. I’ve also got two tool chests that I’m swapping around and getting all of the tools organized. I’m terrible about not putting tools away, and as a result they tend to end up scattered everywhere, and I’m trying to fix that.

The next issue is climate control. It’s a garage. The temperature out there is more moderate than it used to be, since we insulated the walls and ceiling several years ago when the new siding was installed. Still, it gets too hot to work out there during part of the summer, and too cold in the winter. Epoxy won’t cure properly when it’s 40 degrees in the garage, and working in 90-plus heat or refrigerator temps leads to careless and sloppy work. I’ve got a 1500W infrared space heater going out there now to keep it at sweatshirt temperatures just so I can get the cleanup done, but a betters solution is going to be required. I’m looking at installing a ductless mini-split heat pump. That will require a new 220 V circuit installed, and some cabinets will need to move, so as one might imagine it just leads to a stream of new projects and complications. I do have a. plan, though, even if its implementation is not as quick as I’d like. I’m also going to need to seal up the garage doors better than they are — the rubber seals are old and leaky. I suspect we’ll probably end up with new garage doors, which we’ve been wanting for a while anyway.

Then there’s the work table situation. There is none. I’ve been looking at what I’ll need for tables to assemble the upper wings, tail, and fuselage. I have full size prints for everything, so I know that a 3′ wide table will be enough or everything. Wider would be good for wings, but 36″ will cover the distance from the trailing edge to the main spar, so it’s enough. I already know I’ll need at least 10′ for the wings. That will also be enough for the tail’ the biggest piece is the horizontal stab and elevator at 8′ span. So, a 10 foot long table will be enough for everything up until I start the fuselage. For that, I’ll need 14 feet (I just checked the drawing; it’s 13′ and change). That’s probably a year out, though. After discussing with Stu, I’m currently planning to build a work table with folding wings on each end, similar to the one in his shop. He’s suggesting a 36 x 60 inch table with 36 x 30 inch wings; that will end up 10′ long when fully extended. When it comes time to build the fuselage, I’d need to add a second, smaller table to extend it to the length required. A standard 24 x 60 inch EAA 1000 table should be enough for that; I can build one if nobody has one I can borrow for a couple of months.

Lastly, there’s storage. Right now, in order to move everything home I’ll need a place to store wood and parts. The longest pieces are the eleven-foot-long upper wing spars. There’s a lot of 6- to 8-foot stock, a stack of wing ribs, and so on. I need to set up something accessible on one wall of the garage to store that stuff. Also, I’ll need other load of lumber for the tail and fuselage; that will need to be stored as well. I’m thinking I may place an order with Aircraft Spruce and drive out to Oshkosh this year to bring it home in the truck. I haven’t been to Airventure since 2018, I think, so it’s about time for another trip out there anyway. I’m also scouting for lumber yards tat would carry good quality southern white pine, as that can be used for a good portion of the fuselage and tail according to Fisher.

Onward. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garage getting things cleaned up, organized, and re-organized. I want to get this under control and get back to building ASAP.

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Wing stand built

A little different sort of woodworking today. I got a wing rack built so I will be able to move the two lower wings to the airport for storage.

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Splitting up the build

I heard from Stu today that he needs his shop back. I didn’t ask for how long — I suspect he may be not quite as enthused about having a large part his shop taken over with what seems like an indefinite project, especially when I’m not there for a week or two. I’ve been dealing with a bunch of other things that have been deferred on the house and cars, and admittedly a couple of those days have been just inertia – and trying to figure out the best way to deal with the aileron/bracket interference. I did tell him it would take 2-3 years to get to the point where I was ready to take it to the airport for assembly, but being told that and actually seeing the impact are two different things, of course.

At this point I’ll build a movable wing storage rack for the two lower wings, and move them to the hangar at Millard as soon as I have the left wing varnished. Those wings can live there while I figure out my next move. My garage is not currently in a state suitable for building. It’s too cold in winter to work with epoxy, and unbearably hot for much of the summer. It was workable for aluminum construction on the RV-7, but the epoxy used for this plane is less tolerant of temperature extremes while working on assembly. I’ve been planning to install a mini split heat pump in there for heat and A/C; I think I’ll move ahead with that.

Tail surfaces can be built on a single 4 x 8′ sheet of MDF. I think I can free up enough space in the garage for that, and once done they can hang on a wall either at home or at the hangar. I need to review the fuselage plans to see how much workbench I’ll need for that — with any luck, a 2 x 16′ bench would do, so maybe I can just split the 4 x 8 down the center and make a single long bench for the fuselage. The upper wings will be the challenge. I really need at least 11 x 4′, so I just need to do some planning.

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Aggravating complication

So, I found the plan supplement that talks about the aileron interference. Written in 2010 — seven years before I bought my plans — it notes that the rear spar was changed at some unknown point in the past, by someone, but never really documented, and the “updated plans will be sent out as they are available”. Which, apparently, they never were and probably still aren’t. Then it talks about plans delivered electronically (which they weren’t, and to my knowledge weren’t offered) having an updated sheet with new dimensions for the ailerons. It also says that this is only an issue with the upper ailerons hitting the CAW9 bracket. Uh, no. The lower aileron hits the head of the bolt holding the CAW3 bracket. There is one sheet that seems to show an upper aileron, with no dimensions to be seen anywhere. Wonderful.

So what’s their brilliant solution for fixing an already built aileron? Simply move it rearward to clear the bracket – this means take a hole saw to the wing to move the torque tube back in order to move the aileron. Then just cut off the trailing edge to match the rest of the wing, and sand all of the aileron ribs to match the contour of wing at the new location. Oh, and that’s probably going to remove enough rib cap material that extra bracing will be required… How many ways can this be wrong?

I get the impression that whoever wrote all of that has never actually built a Celebrity wing with 3/4″ rear spar caps. Meaning, whoever it was hadn’t built a Celebrity wing to check this stuff out since 2010. Come on.

I’m currently evaluating whether notching the lower leading edge of the aileron is an option. The actual aileron spar wouldn’t be affected, and the torque tube runs the entire length of the aileron, so it’s not like it could fold up and depart the aircraft. Still, I don’t want to weaken the thing and take the risk of cracking or anything, especially since this structure will all be under fabric and not easily inspected. Stu seems to think it wouldn’t weaken the structure, but he’s a carpenter and cabinet guy, not an engineer (and neither am I).

I’m going to have an actual engineer look at this and give me his opinion. I could always add a layer of 1/32 or even thicker ply if needed, but my gut feeling is that it’s not going to weaken anything enough to matter. In the mean time, I’ll keep pushing on, but this is kind of a kick in the nuts, to be honest. I’m sure a year from now I’ll look back and marvel at how little it actually mattered. I would feel sorry for anyone buying a set of plans now at over $3K and probably still not updated… I hope the new owners of the Fisher IP take the time to fix this kind of stuff.

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Nearly there…

I keep finding little things that still need to be done on this wing. At least it won’t take as long to do the next one. I’ve been getting over there nearly every day, but the little bits of work here and there didn’t seem worthy of a complete build log post. But since the last update:

  • Cleaned, primed, and drilled the fittings for the upper/lower aileron pushrods
  • Located and drilled holes for the aileron bearing block screws
  • Managed to punch a hole in the aileron LE skin, and glued a patch over that (will need to smooth it out with some micro)
  • Worked to trim the upper aileron bay piece to get full UP travel on the aileron

I also found that the aileron DOWN travel is restricted by one of the bolts for a fitting on the rear spar. I recall reading that the rear spar thickness was changed from 1/2″ to 3/4″ at some point, and that causes interference. The aileron should have 22 degrees travel in both directions; I get about 15 – 17 degrees down right now. It would be less if the aileron and wing were covered. I need to dig though the plan supplements and find the section that talks about that and see how to fix it. The obvious choice would be to notch the lower front corner of the aileron leading edge to clear the bolt head, but I’d really prefer some other solution… it sure would have been nice for whoever did the plan changes along the way to have properly documented this stuff on the drawings themselves, rather than just tacking on random pages with these “Oh, by the way…” notes (which are themselves occasionally wrong).

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Brackets in place

What I thought would be an hour’s worth of work this morning turned into 3-1/2 hours, but I’m feeling good about the end result. I went over to tighten up the bolts on the wing root brackets and install the brackets on the outer portion of the wing, for the N struts and landing wires.

Snugging up the bolts at the wing root went fine. They’re not torqued to spec, I’ll torque all of the bolts during the initial assembly and mark them all with Torque-Seal or some other witness marking paint. With those done, I moved on to the other brackets. I found that with the very slight variations in hole locations, some of the brackets needed a hole adjusted slightly to get everything lined up properly. It was also a real bear getting the bushings back into their holes after varnishing. Let’s just say there’s no play there… they’re fitted nice and tight.

In the end, I got all of them installed and everything lines up the way it should. I need to find one more AN4-16A bolt, but I think I may have one at the hangar. Next step, I think, will be to cut and fit the cover plates for the brackets where the fabric will be glued down where the brackets come through.

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Storage during the build

As I approach the end of building two wings, I’m faced with the prospect of needing to store large assemblies for a while. Stu’s shop is large and climate controlled, but it’s also Stu’s shop, not mine. There isn’t room to store everything until it’s time to move the plane to the airport and start assembly. I’ll need to store these wings while I build the upper two, and then will need to store all four while I build the tail and fuselage.

Fortunately, I do have a hangar. I will need to build a rack to store these wings without damage, then figure out how I’m going to cover them to keep dripping water and dust off of them for a year or two (or three). I had toyed with the idea of covering them with fabric, and I am not yet ruling that out. It might at least provide some protection for the geodetic bracing. There are several valid arguments against it, though. Either way I’ll need a rack, and I’ll need to figure out exactly how I’m going to transport the wings to the airport. Fortunately, it’s only a couple of miles.

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Wing fittings and aileron work

I’ve spent a couple hours this week getting bolt length sorted out and getting some of the wing fittings attached.

My strategy for the wing attach fittings was to make one of each type of fitting, pilot drill the holes with a 1/8″ bit, and use those to mark the location of the holes in the wing spars. Those holes got drilled on a drill press using Forstner bits. Then I cut the rest of the fittings, used the first ones as templates for drilling them, and figured all of the holes should line up.

Well – they’re close. I’m not a machinist, nor am I using tools techniques of suitable precision to produce perfect parts. For example, when looking at the CAW2A wing root mounting brackets, the holes are not perfectly aligned – so there’s a top and bottom to those, meaning until I figured that out it took a few tries to get everything lined up right. No big deal.

Then I discovered that one of the holes isn’t drilled perfectly square. It’s only off by maybe .010 total, but just enough that you can’t run a bolt through the forward bracket, the bushing, and the aft bracket without interference. If the bolts were just going through holes drilled in the wood of the spar, it would be fine – but the bushings are a snug fit, I had to do a little adjusting of that hole to get everything to fit properly.

We finally got the bottom of the aileron leading edge routed so that it’s now in its final state. When fitting the aileron and checking travel, I discovered that I’d messed up just a little when up finishing out the aileron bay. On the first wing, I’d positioned the top beveled strip with the aileron in place, and checking clearance per the plans. On this one, I just measured the first wing and matched it. I don’t have enough up travel on this aileron. After a little more investigation, it’s just the ends that interfere, so easily cleaned up with a couple minutes of work with the razor plane. I’ll need to pay closer attention on the next two wings. I’m thinking just use a length of 1/4″ shim stock to set the spacing with the aileron solidly fixed in its final location.