Quick update today... got some decent work in over the weekend but really doesn't feel like much has changed. I guess a lot has been accomplished, but nothing can really be checked off yet, and it feels like everything is in a half-completed state (I'm finding this seems to happen periodically). Also, I'm really finding out what a specialized skill fiberglassing is. People who are good at it make it look so darn easy, and there are plenty of beautiful examples that can be found online of parts people made for their airplanes from fiberglass... I wouldn't say mine fall into that category yet. The good news, though, is I feel like I'm learning a lot, and eventually I'll be able to make the parts I need for this project.
I was able to re-make the ducting system for the overhead console, using a slightly modified design and an improved method of actually laying the glass. It came out much better this time, but it certainly still has its flaws. The good news is, of course, these parts aren't structural in any way, so as long as they don't fall off the ceiling in flight or something, I think we're ok from a safety standpoint.
Version 2.0 of the overhead ducting system
It's pretty similar in theory to the first one-- the duct on the left side brings air to the front two vents, and the duct on the right side brings air to the rear two vents. There will be a pair of servos in the tailcone controlling flow to each of these two ducts, and in this way we can control the amount of fresh air going to the front and back.
Now, the idea is to cover these ducts with the actual console itself. Since these ducts will be mostly hidden beneath the console, I'm not too terribly worried about how perfect they look, as long as they are airtight and have a good bond to the cabin cover. If all works out like what's in my mind, the final product will be a seamless-looking console that has four vents, four spotlights, some access panels, and some recessed accent lights to serve as dome and cargo lighting. Oh yeah, and the switch pod. Still at square one for that... also need to build a center console for the armrest and throttle quadrant. Sheesh! Lots more fiberglass to do.
In between epoxy curing sessions, I also started work on the panel. I had previously purchased a 24" x 48" sheet of 0.070" aluminum from Aircraft Spruce and intended to cut out my own (slightly larger) version of the instrument panel Van's gives you. I began by tracing out the original instrument panel and marking all the attach holes that go along the upper edge. Then, I drew a straight line across the bottom that is about a half inch below where the standard switch bar ends, thus making the panel about a half inch taller than stock, and all in one sheet. Lastly, I drew in lines for the center console and side vents and began cutting everything out. I used a combination of a jigsaw, dremel, belt sander, and an array of files:
New instrument panel after initial cut
Looks good! I sat down in the left seat and discovered there was still plenty of room for my knees too. The extra half inch of height really isn't noticeable at all from a comfort side of things, but it totally gives the appearance of having WAY more panel space...cool!
So now comes the fun part: laying out where all the instruments are going to go. I've agonized over this for months now... so many options, each with their advantage and disadvantage. It's time to make my mind up and just go for it. If I end up hating the layout, I guess I can always try again. Hopefully that won't happen.
The basic idea for the panel layout is to have the 10" G3X touch screens centered for each pilot/copilot, and the Mini-X backup EFIS in the center. The GTN750 and GMA350c audio panel will be mounted into the console (a bit low compared to many other configurations, more on this later), and the GMC307 flight control panel will be mounted high and center. This layout seemed to work the best so that the aircraft can be piloted just as easily form the left seat as the right seat-- one of our main requirements. So, I did some more measuring, tracing, and cutting, and ended up with this for a panel:
Instrument panel after cutouts for avionics
Good stuff! I found it wasn't nearly as hard to cut it out as I was thinking it might be. The hardest part was drawing all the lines to be perfectly straight and square. If you look super close there are a few cut lines that aren't perfect, but the mounting of all the instruments covers it all up nicely. So far so good... now it's on to switches!
I'm struggling a bit with the layout of the switches, but I think I have a general idea of where things are going to go. I'll post a diagram at some point when I finalize the layout, but right now I'm at the point of figuring out exactly what model I need for every single switch, indicator, and potentiometer. Kind of a fun task, but very tedious too. Also, turns out quality switches aren't the cheapest thing in the world. I'll be placing a pretty hefty order with Digikey in the coming days that should cover most of our immediate needs for switches and the like, then we will go from there.
That's it for now! Next up, more work on the overhead and panel...
Well, I've been waiting for some decent weather to fly up to Farmington, MN (on the outskirts of Minneapolis) to pay a visit to Stein Air to pick up my avionics order in person. Of course, visiting in person wasn't explicitly required for any reason, but it actually worked out to be the same--or even slightly lesser--cost to fly up there myself instead of having all the stuff shipped to me. Plus, it was a great excuse to fly, and I wanted to meet and shake hands with the folks I'd been dealing with!
The only problem we had was that it seemed as though the weather was continually conspiring against us for the last 2-3 weeks in a row, keeping us from making it up there. Although I do have an instrument rating, the Archer we currently fly isn't really cut out for it. Plus, most days the weather wasn't even good enough to fly IFR in a small plane... freezing fog, ice, snow, gusty winds... all the stuff we pilots have nightmares about. Better to be on the ground wishing we were up in the sky rather than the other way around, right?
Anyway, today we FINALLY got some good weather to make the relatively short ~1hr trip up there. Unfortunately Sarah was stuck at work, but I was able to enlist my friend Derek to tag along and keep me company on the journey. So, we hopped in "Julie" the Archer and blasted off to the north!
Negotiating through the outermost rings of the Minneapolis Class B airspace and landing at Airlake Airport (KLVN) proved to be very straightforward and made for an easy flight. Upon landing, I gave Stein a call and Jed picked us up in Stein's really nice BMW SUV... I'm not used to fancy vehicles like that! We had a great visit, but like a doofus I forgot to take any pics while we were there. We got the "nickel tour" and met most of the employees, who were all hard at work wiring up avionics, making harnesses, cutting panels on the CNC mill, and drafting schematic diagrams on a giant computer monitor. Jed even showed us their new laser etching machine that they apparently just started using within the last month or two. Neat! It was definitely a clean, well-organized facility, and everyone was clearly hard at work doing "real stuff" putting something together for an assuredly happy customer somewhere around the world. They were all happy to take a minute out of their day though to say hello and show us what they were up to. It was really cool... I felt fortunate that we live close enough to have been able to make the trip up feasible... if you ever have the opportunity to visit, I definitely recommend it!
!!!Thanks again to Jed, Stein, and all the other employees at Stein Air for a great visit!!!
With that, and a short ride in the Beemer back to the airport, we carefully packed up our mother load of boxes into the Archer and blasted off to the south. As the sun started to set, I had to snap a couple photos:
Southbound from the Minneapolis area
Crossing from Minnesota into Iowa - pretty rural, but still a very serene beauty.
Passing over New Hampton, IA... this town looked almost "fake" from the air because it was so pretty with the sunset!
Touching down at KIIB, we drove back to Marion, dropped Derek off and finally got home. Sarah was eagerly awaiting my return with "the goods," and after a quick unloading and sorting session we had an intimidating pile of avionics to go through!
N165MJ avionics (with a few goodies from Stein) after unloading and sorting... love the red "We're not happy 'til you're broke" keychains in the middle! A dose of reality... ouch.
Had to unbox the GTN-750 and one of the G3X Touch displays to have a look... it's like Christmas :-)
Anyway, with all that it's time to finish up some things at work and then call it a night... coming soon, more work on the overhead console!
Man, it feels like I haven't posted an update since LAST YEAR. <groan>
Well, we've made some forward progress, but not really anything too terribly note- or photo-worthy. Additionally, I've been working on a side-project in the garage, swapping a transmission out of my old '77 Impala for one that has an overdrive in it (TH200 for a TH200-4R for all you gearheads). It's kind of tough doing a tranny swap working around all the airplane parts that are in the way, but hey that's life I suppose. It's almost done now, just have to figure out the necessary modifications to the crossmember. Anyway, as for work on the plane itself, the doors and cabin cover have come back off, and this allowed us to tie off a number of loose ends that remained on the fuselage itself. Namely:
Completed securing, attaching, and tightening all of the fuel system components. Now the only part of the fuel system that remains are the connections to/from the tanks and of course FWF.
Completed assembly of the control system, including measuring the pushrod lengths for the elevator controls and safety-wiring the appropriate rod ends. Fabricated a small "washer joust" out of 0.032" aluminum, drilling a 7/16" hole at the end, and then sanding the end off until only half the hole remains. This way you can push washers in between the different control system components as necessary without fumbling around with your hands.
Attached nutplates along the mid fuse longerons by the rear seat area. This was a leftover task from the "access covers" section because I had experienced significant difficulty setting rivets in this area. They are at kind of a funny angle and I didn't have anything that seemed to work to buck these. Ultimately, I was able to succeed using a swivel flush set and an array of different bucking bars.
Swapped out all the hardware attaching the rear seat belt anchors in the tailcone with stainless bolts and custom stainless cables. This is a recommended procedure for any ferrous metal located within about 3 feet of the magnetometer, per Garmin's instructions. I had previously attempted to do this, but had a terrible experience with galling and broke a number of bolts. I was able to succeed this time by lubricating the bolts first.
Installed a few of the access covers and began test-fitting some of the Aerosport interior panels that I have. It's cool to get a glimpse of what the interior is going to look like!
So basically, the fuselage is getting pretty darn close to "done" status. Items still on the "to-do" list include rudder pedals (still holding out for some Control Approach pedals... it's not the funnest waiting game in the world but I figure as long as I have other stuff to work on we'll keep dragging it out) and dimpling/riveting the upper forward fuselage, which I'm going to lump in with work on the panel. Hopefully, we'll be able to get started on the panel sometime soon too! Still need to make it up to the Minneapolis area to pick up my avionics from Stein. Of course we can have them ship all the stuff but I thought it would be fun to get up there in person and pick it up (cost would be about the same or even a little cheaper than shipping with insurance). It seems like the weather has been conspiring against us making a flight up there for literally weeks now! We may have to just break down and drive up there. Maybe as a test drive in the Impala once the tranny swap is done... hmmmm.
Other than that, the work that remains now is to finish up the cabin cover, which mostly involves fabricating the overhead console, and get it final-installed on the fuselage. After that happens, we can finish with the doors, and then we can proceed with the rest of the finish kit items. Stay tuned for all that!
So now that the doors have been trimmed and had their hinges attached, it's time to get started on the latch mechanism. Here's where it gets fun (and complicated). A friend of mine is just ahead of us in his RV-10 build and has just completed his latch mechanism within the past couple of weeks, and used the same combination of modifications we are using (the Planearound 180-degree latch and Aerosport low-profile handles). He's mentioned more than once that it's kind of hard to wrap your head around all the different things going on in the door, and it's a pretty time-consuming process. Installing the latch mechanism involves a slightly different set of skills than either metalworking or fiberglass work, although a bit of each is also required. In addition, we have to follow three different sets of plans simultaneously (the standard Van's plans, the Aerosport plans, and the Planearound plans) and figure out what order to do everything in. We look forward to the challenge!
To get started, I poured a big ol' day-after-Christmas cup of coffee and sat down in the office to watch Ed Kranz's video on installing the Aerosport low-profile door handles. I'd seen it once before when he originally posted it but at the time we weren't far enough along in our own build to really understand the process or how it would all go together. Now, with all the same parts in our shop ready to be put together, this video was extremely helpful in helping us understand the big picture of how everything would go. Huge shoutout and thanks to Ed (if we haven't already) for his awesome build site and especially these videos!
Ed's video on installing the Aerosport handles (with the Planearound 180 latch)
With that fresh in my mind and the coffee kicked in, I wandered out into the shop and got started. I decided to start with the doors by assembling and installing the handle mechanism, which involves reading both Aerosport and Van's plans. I tried to take a bunch of pictures, so I'll catalog our process with captions here as we go:
Laid the Aerosport strike plate into the latch pocket in the door
Match-drilled #30 and clecoed the plate to the door
Start-drilled #10 through the Aerosport delrin spacer to make marks in the pocket for drilling #12 holes
The "start-drills" just enough to make a mark, now drill these #12
Drilled #12 holes top and bottom
Reinstalled strike plate, traced holes for handle and lock mechanism, drew an "X" for the lock
Marked center of large hole using the "X" and other existing holes as a reference, drilled #30 pilot holes in the center of each
Enlarged the latch hole to fit the Aerosport handle inner ring
Removed the strike plate and enlarged the three trim ring holes to 1/4"
Enlarged the lock hole to 3/4" using a Unibit. It's possible to put lateral pressure on the unibit as necessary so that the next "step" steers the hole closer to center. Make sure you keep as much distance as possible between the hole and the two 1/4" trim ring holes nearby!
The lock fits into (but not through) the 3/4" hole in the fiberglass. The lock needs to actually pass *through* this hole, so it will be further enlarged. Trace a line around the perimeter of the lock
Lock removed, showing area that needs to be enlarged.
Hole enlarged, now lock fits through the door
Next, file out the lock hole in the striker plate to fit the lock. Note that the lock has a slightly fatter portion just under the head, the plate must be filed to fit this too.
Strike plate attached with lock installed and beauty ring set into place... looks really nice!
Accomplished same steps for L door
Assembled Door Handle Plate per plans on 45-10, except without C-1006C delrin block, since that is replaced by the Aerosport delrin block.
Assembled handle lever and slide per plans, additionally trimmed C-1007 to a total length of 2.22" per Aerosport plans. (The WD-1022 handle, not pictured, was also trimmed by removing 0.820" from its shaft per Aerosport plans).
Gear racks were cut in half to two 5" lengths, per Planearound plans
Aft door pin blocks have wider spacing and offset pin hole. Planearound block on left, Van's block on right. Each block is cut and sanded to fit in the door as required. The Van's block is installed first so that holes can be match-drilled from the stock blocks into the door per plans on page 45-12. Then, the door pin hole is enlarged to fit the Planearound block with its pin extension protruding into the door. The #12 holes in the skin are then match-drilled from the door back into the undrilled Planearound block. Finally, the #12 holes in the block (not the door) are enlarged to #10.
Forward door pin blocks have narrower spacing and pin hole centered between the mount holes. Van's block on left, Planearound block on right. Similar process as with the aft pin blocks.
Closeup of forward door pin block being held straight with respect to door edge using a ruler
Aft door pin block installed flush with aft door edge. Tip: I later realized it's much easier to use 3/16" (gold) clecos to hold the door pin blocks during installation so they can be removed much more easily when needed.
Cut out the opening for the Planearound gearbox per plans that came with it.
The opening in the cutout reveals little runs of epoxy and the parabeam fiberglass used when mating the door halves. At this point, little square reinforcement blocks are glued on either side of this opening to provide structural support.
After gluing the structural supports in place (using West 105/205 "Fast" hardener and flox), I repeated the most of this process for the other door. By the time the second door was done, the first door was done curing and I could proceed with installing the actual mechanisms. It actually wasn't too bad putting all the rods together once I had a good mental image of how it would all work.
Basically, the process is this (borrowing methods from Ed's video, Planearound's plans, and Van's plans, adding a bit of my own take):
Start with all the door pin blocks removed, the Planearound gearbox screwed into place, and the door latch handle assembly removed.
Take the aft factory door pin (the long one) and attach it to the aft end of the Planearound gear rack (the side with the small hole, teeth facing down) using a pin and safety wire.
Using a precise 70/30 combination of black magic and wizardry, stick the pin/rack combo into the aft door opening and get the rack to slide into the Planearound gearbox, seemingly 10 feet away. Turn the Planearound gearbox shaft to pull the rack through the gearbox to the other side.
Now, from the forward side, stick the Planearound mid-pushrod in through the latch pocket and mate it with the rack you just stuck in from the aft end. You'll be using the 3/8" peephole you drilled per the Planearound plans to see what you're doing.
Using safety wire, stick the 3/16" Planearound pin into the mid-pushrod and gear rack, fastening the two together.
Now, you can install the latch mechanism by first installing the lower gear rack as you screw the latch mechanism into the door (you may need to push the mid-pushrod out of the way).
You can now turn the handle towards (and beyond) the "closed" position to feed the gear rack out into the aft portion of the door, with the mid-pushrod still out of the way.
With the aft (lower) rack fed out from the handle gear, "clock" the handle to a point approximately 120 degrees beyond the closed position, insert the lower rack, and bring the handle back to the "closed" position.
Now push the button and bring the handle 180 degrees to the "open" position. The attach point between the lower rack and the mid-pushrod should be visible in the handle pocket.
Temporarily connect the lower rack and the mid-pushrod with a pin and turn the handle back to the "closed" position. The aft pushrod should operate smoothly and allow full travel into this position. If the Planearound gear rack bottoms out before reaching the closed position, you'll need to readjust.
Now attempt to turn the handle *beyond* the "closed" position. The Planearound gear rack should bottom out and reach the end of its travel very quickly, maybe 10 degrees or so beyond closed at most. If the handle turns more than this, you need to readjust your clocking.
Once the lower gear is clocked properly, remove the pin between the lower rack and mid-pushrod in order to turn the handle again past the "closed" position but not far enough to disengage the lower rack gear. I believe the proper position is about 70-80 degrees beyond "closed" (the lower rack won't disengage until about 120 degrees)
Now, attach the forward door pin (the short one) to the upper gear rack, teeth facing down using a pin and safety wire.
Insert the forward door pin/rack combo through the forward hole and feed it through into the latch pocket, engaging it into the door handle gear.
Turn the latch to "closed" position, and then 180 degrees to the "open" position. The upper gear should just barely NOT come into contact with the elbow pocket as you reach the 180 degree mark. Turning beyond this point should begin to feel resistance as the rack starts to hit the fiberglass there.
Reattach the lower rack and mid-pushrod.
After following these steps, I had a latch assembly working like this (keep in mind, the door pins are still WAY too long and still need to be trimmed):
RV-10 Door Latch in operation for the first time!
Finally, you can attach the exterior handle components for the Aerosport low profile handle, and sit back and have yourself a tasty beverage!
The Aerosport low-profile handle... spiffy!!!
That's it for now. We've got the R door done to this point, and the L door to the point where the reinforcement blocks were glued into place. Tomorrow's agenda: get the same thing done to the L door... hopefully now that we have the process figured out, it should go much more smoothly!
Merry Christmas! Wishing for peace and happiness to all.
Merry Christmas 2015 from Mike & Sarah-- no pic from the factory this time. And sorry about the socks... a dude's gotta stay comfy, ya know?
It's been a busy week in the factory leading up to this point! My apologies for not posting an update in a while, but rest assured things have been continuing along.
First order of business, we hit 10,000 views today on Christmas Day itself... cool! I received one email from #10,002, so I'll be in touch with that person shortly. Excited that this silly idea of ours seems to have worked!
So let's see, we left off when we had glued the two door halves together and clecoed everything to the fuselage for curing. Trimming the doors was a painstaking process, and one that is by no means complete yet. Basically, you only need to trim the doors enough so they fit flush inside the door opening, but ideally they should still be a bit "oversize" at this point. This is because until you install the hinges, window, and latch mechanisms the door won't find its final position. Once all that occurs, then you can trim the door down to its final (hopefully perfect) fit.
The first part of the initial trim is to make an "edge finder" out of two narrow strips of aluminum. The door is placed on the fuselage, and one half of the edge finder slides under the door skin, between it and the fuselage, and has a little tab on it that goes into the gap along the door opening. The other half of the edge finder has a small hole drilled in it to allow you to hold a sharpie in there while you slide the edge finder around the opening. In this way, you end up with a line drawn around the perimeter of the door that should very closely match the opening in the fuselage!
I should note that the plans have you make more use of the provided "scribe lines" visible in the outer door skin itself. However, as you'll see here, the lines are not very accurate or straight when compared to the actual cut needed. A number of builders before us have recommended not even paying attention to these lines as they are not very useful, so this is the route we took... we now see why!
Marking the L door for an initial cut (note the line drawn to leave an "ear" out for the alignment tab)
Scribe line visible here just above the blue line, quite a little ways away from (and not parallel to) the actual cut needed
Cutting the door is itself a pretty straightforward (albeit messy and time-consuming) process that basically involves cutting all the big portions away with the air cutoff tool, performing any finer-detail cuts with the dremel, and then finally sanding right down to the line using the belt sander. The real hero in this process, however, is the shop-vac. If it wasn't for the vacuum hose always being held close to our work, we'd probably have something reminiscent of the Pompeii disaster going on in our garage.
Anyway, once the cutting of both doors was completed (this took several nights' worth of work), we had two doors that fit nicely inside their openings in the fuselage.
R door nested inside of and flush with the cabin cover
Forward side of the R door - the line isn't laser-straight yet, but it doesn't have to be at this point
After this was complete, the next step is to get the door hinges installed to secure the top edge of the doors to the cabin cover. This was pretty straightforward and we followed the plans here with no real deviations. For the hinge pin, they have you cut the threads off a long AN3 bolt which seemed kind of cheesy to me, but actually worked out pretty slick. For just a touch of extra style, I put the bolt in a drill and held it to the grinder to get rid of the hex-shaped head and ended up with a much nicer-looking, rounded-head hinge pin.
After a bunch of careful drilling, countersinking, and screw installation, we had our fist glimpse of the gull-wing doors in action!
RV-10 Gull-wing doors (broomstick sold separately)
Same doors, with the optional "human broomstick" upgrade
Neato! I have to say so far, this hasn't been as difficult as I had imagined it would be. Some of the steps are a pain to be sure, but really it's not too bad as long as you can let patience prevail. We got into a rhythm of working until we got either tired or frustrated, and then just left it for another day. Sometimes this took a few hours; other times we had had enough in 30 minutes. Whatever it was though, it always seemed easy enough to pick it back up the next day and continue. I don't have an "hours-so-far" count for you, but whatever it is, I'd say it's reasonable given the work required.
So now that we have the door hinges attached, we can start on the latch mechanism... yay!
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!
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!
