More Doors - Almost to 10,000 views!

Haven't posted an update this week since we got the R door glued and situated on the fuselage to cure. Really, we haven't done a whole lot more with the plane other than repeating the same steps with the L door, and then removing both doors for an initial trim.

L door glued and clamped in the same manner as the R door previously

Heat lamps set up on the L side of the plane

If I could do this over again, I might recommend increasing the number of clecos holding the door to the fuselage, especially around the most pronounced part of the curve from the side to the top. I tried to keep the same spacing as with the fuselage side skins (which is around ~4" spacing) but around the curve to the top I'd recommend more. If you look closely at the raw, untrimmed doors, they developed a slight crease at every point where the cleco held it tight, and I feel like these would be less pronounced if there were more clecos to spread the load. It shouldn't be a problem though, once the doors are trimmed to size most of the creasing will be trimmed away, and whatever remains can easily be filled. But still... something to consider.

Other than that though, We've gotten about 30-40% done with the initial trim for the R door, and the L door hasn't been trimmed at all yet. We'll get to that as time permits!

In other news, we're nearly to 10,000 views of this blog! Dunno if 10,000 hits in just under two years really counts as a "high volume" site by most standards, but we're still pretty humbled and amazed that we've come this far and have been able to share our journey with a number of folks from all over the world. Google Blogger statistics tell us that we've had visitors from not only North America but South America, Europe, Africa, Russia, China, Australia, and more! Truly awesome.

So, since December represents the "season of giving" and we feel like being a little silly, we'd like to reward the 10,000th visitor to our blog and send them something from our shop. Don't get too excited now, it's not going to be anything of too much value, but we'll try and make it meaningful in some way, and it will certainly be RV-10 related! So, if you're reading this page and the "Visitors" counter on the right says exactly 10,000, send me an email at [redacted] and let me know. If you can attach a screenshot or something that would be even better, but I realize that can be difficult at times. Honor system applies... no cheating!

Hopefully this works! If not, well, happy holidays from us both anyway... and stay tuned for more fiberglass and door work!

Doors Continued

Continued with the doors this weekend... so far so good! Followed the procedure in the plans for preparing the door halves for joining together, and everything went pretty smoothly. I'm finding that the orbital sander connected to a vacuum cleaner makes quick work of the sanding tasks and makes little to no dust.

We did run into one snag along the way... we had decided to insulate the doors with spray foam, and our first attempt at doing this didn't go so hot. Basically, I had the idea to fill all the voids in the inner door shell (except for the areas where the door latch mechanism will go) with Great Stuff foam and then cover the exposed, wet foam with wax paper.

Covering spray foam with wax paper to help mold it into place - Don't do this!!!

The thought in my head was that if I had it all covered with wax paper, the foam would expand underneath and nicely fill any gaps, and once it cures I could just peel away the paper and magically have perfectly contoured and textured foam beneath. What really ended up happening was the foam didn't cure properly (it needs plenty of fresh air to cure, and the paper denied it that), and so it ended up as this reduced, goopy mess that stuck to the wax paper better than you would believe! It was a nasty disaster that took a while to clean up. At least I only did it to one door as a test!

We then figured out we could just spray foam the doors and let the foam expand way beyond where it needs to be, and then cut it down to size with a hacksaw blade and the orbital sander. It's pretty wasteful-- we ended up using about 2-3 cans of foam per door and cut away most of it-- but once it was done it looked pretty neat and definitely added some "substance" to the otherwise hollow and flimsy door halves.

Sarah liberally applying spray foam while the doors are clecoed to the fuselage

First pass of foam, curing in place on the fuselage

The door halves after the first pass of foam was cut and sanded down

Close up of R door, showing masked off areas for door linkage. Also, we filled some of the bigger voids (like near the lower front corner of the window) with a second pass of foam

Final pass of foam, Sarah decided to get cute with the leftover and wrote our initials in the respective doors :-) Most of it would be sanded away, but you can still barely see it...

So by this afternoon, we had both right and left doors ready to join their halves together! The next steps involved cutting some pieces of Parabeam fiberglass that was included in the finish kit. Each door needs two 5" x 9" pieces to sandwich between the door halves at the upper and lower pockets. I had never heard the stuff before, basically it's a three-dimensional fiberglass weave that is about the thickness of a piece of scotch brite, and feels kind of spongy. Each 5" x 9" piece absorbed about two pumps' worth of West System epoxy!

The four cut pieces of Parabeam fiberglass weave, two for each door

So with the fuselage door openings masked off, and everything prepared and ready to attach, it was time to mix up some epoxy. We mixed three kinds, measuring in West System dispensing pumps as a unit of measure: (1) a total of 4 pumps' worth "neat" epoxy for the two Parabeam pieces; (2) a total of 4 pumps' worth of micro slurry to slather over the exposed spray foam; and (3) a total of 10 pumps' worth of Cab-O-Sil/Flox mixture to spread around the window and outer perimeters. The Cab-O-Sil/Flox mixture was made to about a "thick oatmeal" consistency, where if you held the cup sideways for a while it would just start to pour, but just barely. Sarah and I established a system where I'd mix up batches of epoxy and stir in the necessary additives, and she'd slather it on to whatever it needed. In this way, it only took us about 15-20 minutes from the mixing of the first epoxy batch to the time we clecoed the door to the fuselage.

R door clecoed (and clamped) to the fuselage

Set up two 250W heat lamps to keep the door warm during curing

We thought about starting on the L door, but we were using all of our spring clamps and heat lamps on the one side. We'll do the other side tomorrow!

Begin Doors

Ahh, the dreaded doors. I haven't met many folks who've said they enjoyed building the doors of their RV-10. Apparently the plans aren't the greatest, the scribe lines aren't very useful, and the parts themselves need a good amount of effort to make everything work properly. We do have the benefit, however, of following in the footsteps of many before us who documented what they did (or should have done) to make things easier during this process. Hopefully, that will help bigtime. So, here we go...

Wait... why aren't we continuing with the overhead console? Well, partially for a reason, and partially because why the heck not? The reason is that we want to do as much drilling and cutting as we can to the cabin cover before fabricating the overhead console, so we have a better understanding of what's going to go where and how all the parts fit together (hinges, strut, etc). Also, I wanted to take some more time to get even more experience with fiberglass, and I'll probably make one or two little things here and there as side-projects in order to become more familiar with the process. This isn't something a person can learn overnight!

In the meantime, I also built a crude "oven" (it's more of a "warmer" really) for our assortment of West System Epoxy. It turns out that epoxy is very temperature-sensitive and works best when just above normal room temperatures, like in the 80F-90F range. Especially as we head into the winter months here, the garage is going to be at the "bare-minimum" epoxy curing temperatures of 65-70 degrees, so the warmer the epoxy is, the better. I got the idea to make the oven originally from reading Rutan's Moldless Composite Sandwich Aircraft Construction manual, which is a highly recommended book geared towards builders of the many fabulous composite Rutan aircraft (Long-EZ, Cozy, etc), but is also very helpful for us rivet-bangers when it comes time to make fairings or custom bits for our RV's. Then, I saw one of these ovens for the first time in real life at my friend Chad's place the other day and thought, man, I gotta have one of these! So, I built one:

The EZ-Bake Oven (pun intended)

Oven from the outside, with other fiberglass-related goodies assorted all around

The oven is made from 100% genuine recycled Mikey J Scrap Material and is by no means the strongest or prettiest thing in the garage, but it came out just fine, works great, and I'm happy with it. It measures 24"L x 16"H x 16"D and is made of 1/4" plywood (thicker would have been better), some 2x2's at the corners, and 2x4's reinforcing the door. It was then lined with 1/2" insulation board, and all the cracks filled liberally with Great Stuff spray foam. The heater element is a standard 100W light bulb, and the thermostat is a Honeywell CT-410B line voltage thermostat. There's also a cheapie thermometer in there to ensure everything is working properly. The thermostat was an interesting piece, it is only rated to go up to 85 degrees F, but I was able to modify it to go higher. It turns out that all you have to do is pop the knob off the front of it, and the remaining part of the shaft will turn farther than the 85 degree stop, and will heat to at least 95 degrees or better (that's as high as I tried, but there was still more to go on the dial). Awesome! Now all of our epoxy-- except for the 205 "Fast" hardener-- is stored and incubating at around 80 degrees... we'll go higher if/as needed.

Now, on to the doors. We're going to start with the right door, and hopefully get to the point where the two halves are glued together, and then repeat with the left door. First thing to do is draw a couple lines around the window openings, and trim away the excess. Note: the plans aren't very clear about what exactly to trim, and the referenced figures show large crosshatched areas filled in around the door openings. Typically, this crosshatching in the plans means "cut this part away" although that is NOT the case here! Not very much trimming is needed at this time at all, just the middle of the window leaving a ~1-3/4" perimeter is fine. To draw the lines, I made a little "tab" out of scrap aluminum and drilled holes at the 3/4" mark and the 1-1/4" mark.

Measuring tab to aid in drawing spacing lines

3/4" and 1-1/4" lines drawn around the window opening. Another 1-3/4" line was drawn later and rough cuts were made along that line.

So far so good! Next we drilled a few index holes and sanded the inside surfaces (referred to as the "bag" side of the parts) where they will mate. The idea is to glue the door halves to each other while they are still oversize and can be laid over and clamped to the side of the fuselage. This way, the doors will match the contour of the fuselage exactly, and can then be trimmed to perfectly fit inside the door opening. Before long, we had the assembly clecoed to the side of the plane using the two index holes!

R Door laid over the cabin top for the first time, and a happy Sarah!

R Door from the inside

Neat! Next, we match-drilled a number of additional holes around the perimeter of the door. The holes along the bottom third of the door (that overlap the metal side skins) required use of a hole finder to match-drill into the holes previously left un-riveted in Section 29. I had always wondered why they had us leave those holes open... now I get it!

#40 Hole finder being used to match-drill the open holes in the side skins

Then, we departed from the plans and joined with several other folks who had a pretty smart idea to match-drill clecos just like this all the way around the rest of the door to hold it just perfect in place and shape. The holes will be easily filled later with some micro or flox, and if all goes well you'll never be able to tell we drilled a bunch of holes all around the door openings.

R Door match-drilled to fuselage

Close-up of upper aft side of door, formed perfectly to the cabin top

This is kind of cool! Now, everything has to come back apart and we have a few more steps to complete before epoxying the two halves together for good! I think I want to run a small conduit down the inside, as well as shoot some Great Stuff insulation into all the voids. We'll get to this hopefully this weekend!

Overhead Console 2

Continued working on the overhead console yesterday and today. Formed the mold for the rear seat vent duct, part of which lays over the front air duct made previously. It's coming out "okay"... definitely learning a lot about fiberglass!

Front and rear vent ducts laid in place after being removed from their molds

View from the rear looking forward

The idea would be now that the ducts are laid, to form up the shape of the overhead itself over the top of everything and have these ducts hidden behind it. I'm happy with the design, in fact I think it will work out to be very slick, but I may very well attempt to make these ducts a second time. Tonight we actually went over to our friends Chad and Kim's place, who are building a Cozy Mark IV together in their garage. A while back Chad had offered for me to stop over and learn a bit about fiberglassing technique. His timing was perfect by getting ahold of me today and saying now was a good time to stop over! Funny coincidence for sure... or, maybe he saw pictures on this blog of how terrible the fiberglass is looking over here and thought geez I better help this guy... haha.

We most certainly learned a few things tonight that I think we can apply to these ducts (and especially the overhead itself). First of all, Chad recommended to always cut the fabric on the bias (at a 45-degree angle) so that it would lay better over corners and complex shapes. I knew this already but I didn't realize you can "always" cut it that way, I thought it was more for special layups. He also demonstrated a technique where you wet out two layers of fiberglass together at a flat work table, on a piece of clear plastic. Then, once the glass is wetted out, you can lay the whole works on top of your form, making it much easier to have consistently wetted glass and speeding up the whole process significantly. Also, he recommended a peel ply fabric that works better than dacron and is available at the local fabric shop, called "underskirting" fabric material (EDIT: After going to the local Hancock Fabric Suppy, it's called "Poly Elite Lining", P/N 3516226, $2.39/yd). It's a white, sort of satin type fabric that is much finer and thinner than dacron, and apparently it works just the same but better (as a side note, I should have also used peel ply to make life easier but did not on these first two sessions). There were a number of other little tips and tricks I gathered from just looking around his shop and watching the master at his craft. I'm by no means an expert now, but I feel like I at least more than doubled my knowledge with one night in the shop with these guys... thanks Chad and Kim!!!! (And your Cozy IV is looking awesome!)

So, I think the next step will be to set these ducts aside and try again. For round two, I think I want to spend a bit more time on the molds, employ the new techniques I've learned, and try circular vent pads instead of square. If it all goes sideways, well, it's another learning experience then! Stay tuned for [lots] more fiberglass!

Overhead Console

So we're going to build our own overhead console for the cabin cover, and this requires a significant amount of design, planning, and fiberglass work. I've spent hours online looking at the many excellent RV-10 build sites, getting ideas and inspirations on what we can do. While in the end this overhead is going to be our own design with a few unique things we haven't seen elsewhere, there will be a number of ideas and themes "stolen" from other builders. Basically, I'm envisioning the baseline of this console as being a kind of mix between those built by Justin Twilbeck (link here) and with a front switch panel similar to the one built by Ed Kranz (link here).

Some differences in the design I'd like to include are using automotive-style overhead vents, and some homemade DIY red/white eyeball light fixtures for each passenger. I'm also going to be separating the front and rear vents with ducting so that they can be independently controlled (much like the heat selectors). There will be a number of stages involving fiberglass work, and hopefully if everything goes well, we'll have one hell of an overhead console that will be just "perfect" for what we want. That's the hope, anyway. Time to nut up and become a fiberglass expert.

First thing to do was mount the visors. I wanted to see the areas that they would cover, and tailor the design of the overhead around them so it looks like it's all part of the same design. I chose the Blue Sky visors based on a few reviews, the fact that they are half the price of the Rosen units, and finally bit the bullet after reading Brian and Brandi's post here about them.

Mounting them was pretty straightforward, although I did run into one snag. The plans included with the visors say to install the mounting blocks 14.5" from the centerline, however, this isn't far enough away. The front channel hasn't yet "met up" with the door channel at that location, and so drilling through there would require a 1.5" - 2" long screw as opposed to the 3/4" screw included in the kit. I pondered whether to use the specified location and just get a longer screw, or go another inch and a half over and use the included screw. I went with the latter, and I think things will work great in this location. Again, at least for our setup, our mounting blocks are installed at approximately 16" (maybe 16-1/8") from centerline.

I'd like to "close out" these A-pillars as well, which means that these mounting blocks for the visors will be permanently installed. I'm also going to run some conduit up each side, and then cover it all up with fiberglass. So, I mixed up some flox and glued the mounting block and conduit into place:

Blue Sky visor mount and 3/4" conduit running down L side A-pillar (the mount is attached via a screw coming through from the door channel, but it is also now floxed into place)

R side A-pillar with visor mount and conduit

Next, it was time to start on the overhead itself. The first step will be to create the ducting for the front and rear vent systems. The idea here is to have two vent outlets coming from the tailcone. The left vent will provide air to both front passengers, and the right vent will provide air to both rear passengers. A pair of servos will control airflow independently for each system, and flow to some standard automotive-style air vents located in the overhead. Time to get started with fiberglass layups!

Foam cutouts wrapped in packing tape, forming the mold for the front air ducts

A similar duct will be created to take air from the right side of the airplane to the rear vent locations, and will "layer" on top of the vent you see here. That's "phase two" though... for now, we have to lay up some glass here!

First fiberglass layup of the build! Not too bad, all things considered...

It's pretty ugly up close, and I learned a few things about cutting and placing the layups that hopefully will make the next layup go better. But... I think it will work!

Now to let it cure while keeping our fingers crossed! Hey, worst case, we rip it apart and try again. I guess that is the one nice thing about fiberglass...

More Cabin Cover - Avionics Order

Today we finished all (or at least most) of the prep work on the cabin cover according to the plans! Unfortunately, there is a LOT more prep work to do on this piece that is not mentioned in the plans. We need to build an overhead console, figure out the lighting and ventilation systems, and finish off the fiberglass in all the areas that will be exposed. This will be some fun work, but it will likely take several months before it's all complete. We'll just have to make sure we keep at it!

Anyway, the first thing we did was match-drill the aluminum strip set aside from back in section 10 (tailcone). I had to think for a second where I put the darn thing, and eventually found it.

The aluminum strip set aside in 10-12 Step 1. I wrote "SAVE!!" on it in a number of places.

Match-drilling this, along with the two side strips was fairly straightforward, maybe just a bit boring and tedious, but we got through it pretty quickly. Next, we had to countersink all the holes in the cabin cover that we had made. I whipped up a small 0.032" spacer as recommended in the plans to hold the microstop square with the flange on the cover.

Countersinking the cabin cover, using a 0.032"spacer

I dimpled the other side of the spacer with a #30 dimple to trial-fit the countersinks

Otherwise, that's basically it! The next part of the plans basically has you final-install the cover to the fuselage. We're not quite ready for that yet, now we still have to design and fabricate an overhead console and all kinds of other stuff. Hopefully we'll get started on some of that this weekend.

In other news, we placed our order for avionics today.... OUCH. Biggest single purchase I've ever made, short of buying a house. I've been talking with Jed at Stein Air for a couple weeks now, narrowing down my options and figuring out what exactly we're going to do. Here's the short list of components we got:

• Garmin G3X Touch 10" Dual Display w/ EIS & XM
• Garmin GNS 750 Touchscreen NAV/COM navigator
• Garmin 3-axis autopilot with GSA-28 servos and GMC-307 control panel
• Garmin GTR 20 COM radio (for COM2)
• Garmin GAD 29 ARINC interface
• Garmin GAD 27 integrated controller (brand new product just announced last month)
• Garmin GMA 350c audio panel w/ Bluetooth
• Garmin GTX 23ES transponder with ADSB-out, paired with GDL39R ADSB-in
• Grand Rapids Mini-X backup EFIS system
• All the connectors, wiring, sensors, antennas, and more needed to get all this wired together

By the time I added everything up, I wanted to cry. Hopefully, I won't regret this purchase decision, or Garmin won't announce their new line of avionics in January or something that are twice as good and cost half as much. This really was the time to buy though, for a few reasons: (1) Garmin has their "stack up the savings" holiday rebate program going on right now through the 15th, that will give me $1000 back in rebates; (2) my credit card is giving me a 2% cash back deal through the holiday season, which for this kind of purchase is a good chunk of change; and (3) Stein Air gave me a heck of a package discount price... I couldn't come within $500 anywhere else.

As nervous as I am about the purchase, I'm pretty confident that this is the right system for me though, after lots of careful consideration and research. Excited to get started wiring all this stuff up! Quick plug for Stein Air, they have been awesome to work with so far and I'm very happy with the experience up to this point. With a reputation like theirs, I'm quite sure the rest of the experience will go just as well!

More Cabin Cover

So today we continued with the cabin cover, this time drilling the four holes in the top of the cover to hold the WD-1043 Center Cabin Brace. This series of steps presented a few unique challenges, the first of which was to figure out how in the world do you precisely determine the centerline of the cabin top? The fiberglass is very rough and uneven, and there is no obvious way to determine where the middle is. We finally figured out that the middle can be found on the exterior side of the top, and you can then extend that center line forward and around to the inside.

Once you've marked the center line, you have to match-drill the brace into the fiberglass all the way through to the exterior. The plans are kind of scary here, warning you to ensure you drill perpendicular to the parts. Since the cabin cover is so thick in this area, even a small variation can make the four holes look like they were marked off on the exterior by a drunk person. No one wants that! I ended up doing pretty good I think... not perfect, but pretty good.

Once the four holes were drilled, we removed the cover from the fuselage and began cleaning out all the dust and chips. I fabricated four small tubes as called out in the plans to insert into these four holes we just made in the top. The idea is that these tubes reinforce the attachment point and allow the screws to grip a little better. They also look pretty cool after countersinking them into place:

The four F-10106 spacers before countersinking - don't spend an hour like I did making four spacers EXACTLY to the correct length per the plans... you're just going to whittle them down anyway when countersinking. Just make the interior end nice and leave the exterior end rough.

After countersinking-- looks pretty neat!

Word of advice to future builders: be careful when countersinking these! While running the drill with the countersink, it can grab the spacer and begin spinning the whole thing inside the cabin cover. If your finger is on the other side holding the spacer flush, the spacer basically acts like a mini hole saw and you'll end up with a small, perfectly circular piece of skin that used to be part of your fingertip. Ask me how I know :-)

Next on the agenda is match-drilling the backing strips, but we'll save that for another day... stay tuned!

Cabin Cover

Well it's been an interesting week so far! Been putting together our avionics order, and started fabricating a mount for the circuit breaker panel to go on the lower left side of the forward fuselage, under the air vent. We've also gotten a few short sessions of sanding the cabin top in here and there, but it kinda dragged on over a number of days with no real feeling of forward progress. Finally though, the cabin top was sanded enough to fit properly in place, and allow the aft top skin to be clecoed in place over it. This is easily one of the top 10 most exciting moments so far in the build, because all of a sudden it strikes you-- hey, you've got a roof!

The next thing to do is match-drill a number of holes along the mating parts and begin to cleco the cabin top to the rest of the structure.

Drilling the forward-most row of holes in the aft top skin into the aft flange of the cabin top

Drilling the row of holes along the top of the mid fuse side skins

Clamping the door frames into place to get everything aligned properly for drilling

That's pretty much it for today... lots of sanding and drilling. Stay tuned for more sanding and drilling!

Long Weekend

Unfortunately this weekend marked a rather sad moment in our lives. We had to say goodbye to one of our two beloved four-legged friends, Dag, a.k.a. "Daggles" "Dagelope" "House Horse" "Bignose" and a number of other nicknames. Over the last few months he was battling a fight with cancer, and on Friday it was time to put an end to his suffering. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him, and has left a void in our household that won't soon be filled.

Although we did get a few odds and ends done on the plane this weekend also, nothing really worthy of mention at the time being has happened, and I'll fill in a few of the blanks as we continue. For now, I'll end this post with a pic Sarah put together for the one and only Mr. Daggles. He didn't always wear a costume, but when he did, he owned it. We'll miss ya buddy.

R.I.P. "Dag" 2007 - 2015

Cabin Cover

Happy Thanksgiving! In between sleeping in this morning and getting ready to go do the family thing this afternoon by making my spinach and artichoke dip, we found some time to wander into the garage and continue on the cabin cover.

Lots of sanding and mess-making! Wow the sides along the door sills need to be trimmed down to almost nothing. Like many builders before us, we are unimpressed with fiberglass work. It's dirty, it smells funny, and you have to wear breathing masks and eye protection and all that stuff. In the end though, we were able to sand away enough material to get the cabin cover to slide all the way down and into place... ok, it was worth it!

Cabin Cover fits in place for the first time!

Still LOTS more sanding and fine-tuning to do, but this is pretty close at least for the initial fit. Definitely worth stepping back and admiring our work!

Ok, now on to more important things for the day... gotta go make that dip and go eat some turkey. More building to come this weekend!