Page 42-F: Installing the ACK Emergency Locator Transmitter

Installation of the ELT seemed straight forward, not even requiring a blog post.  The only semi-difficult task involved stripping and soldering four small wires onto an electrical connector.  The hook up was done by following the instructions in the KAI and looking at the diagrams in the booklet which came with the ELT from AKC.  All the wires and the unit itself along with the enunciator box and a mysterious RJ-11 connector, were then neatly zip tied onto the ELT tray previously installed.  Easy peasy, I thought. One of the previously installed wires, an RJ-11 phone wire, goes from the display/switch unit on the instrument panel back to the ELT behind the passenger seat.  When everything was hooked up, the enunciator box starting emitting a ticking sound and a red light on the display unit on the instrument panel started to flash.  A call to ACK revealed that the RJ-11 wires and connectors are either straight through (polarity preserved) or crossed (polarity reversed).  According to ACK, they should all be straight through, but on all Van's aircraft the long wire from the instrument panel display unit back to the ELT is always crossed.  Something needs to un-cross the wire.  It turns out that the previously mentioned mysterious RJ-11 connector was supposed to be crossed, thereby fixing the problem.  Mine was not.  Amazon's aviation department to the rescue.  Problem solved.  I waited until the big hand on the clock was straight up, activated the ELT, tuned my hand-held radio to 121.5, and was rewarded with the irritating peyow, peyow, peyow sound that an ELT makes.

Build delayed by more broken bones: A while back in North Carolina I fell on my bicycle, breaking my left femur and having a titanium rod installed from the ball joint to just above my knee.  This joined titanium already in that leg from the knee to the ankle.  The Spousal Unit and I always go roller skating each Monday night at a local rink.  Confirming the expectations of my friends, I'm now recovering from surgery to install a titanium plate in my left wrist, fixing one of the most common roller skating injuries (broken wrist).  It's hard to work on the airplane one-handed.

Off topic: more Colorado wildlife

When I moved to Colorado from North Carolina, I often said that I wanted to see a Mountain lion in the wild.  Since arriving I'd seen bears, bobcats, moose, thousands of elk but no mountain lion.

 A couple of months ago the Spousal Unit awakened me at the butt crack of dawn, telling me to come see a mountain lion eating an elk behind the house.  Pretty exciting but a couple hundred yards away.

Then a trail cam on my back patio got a picture of one much closer to the house.

Then this.  Probably the same guy trying to cover a deer less than 100 yards from my front door.

No more pages in the build manual!

 As I approached the end of the build manual I was expecting the last part to contain instructions for loading the software into the Skyview HDX, adding the fluids, and doing the first engine start.  None of this was there.  There were no directions for finding additional documents that would walk me through this stuff.  Turns the documentation is there and I had to find out about it by reading other blogs and digging around on the RV-12 forums on vansairforce.net.  The first thing I should have gone to is called the Production Acceptance Procedure (always referred to as the PAP) which only exists because the RV-12 can also be had as a factory-built S-LSA airplane.  Other experimentals, E-LSA or EAB, don't have this document.  Early in the PAP another document is referenced, a read-me file on the downloads page at vansaircraft.com.  

This read-me file contains all of the steps required to download the Skyview software, settings files, databases, sensor definitions and current TFRs. It explains how to tell the software what equipment is installed and how to calibrate this equipment, including how to calibrate the stabilator position for takeoff, how to calibrate the fuel system, ADAHRS, AOA, autopilot servos and other stuff.  In other words, this is an absolutely vital document.  I went as far as I could in this, then came to some stuff that required the engine to be running.  Somewhere in here I discovered the PAP and everything started to become clear.

The reward for completing the steps in the read-me file was that I got to see the Skyview HDX all lit up in all its glory.  This was pretty exciting for me and I spent quite a bit of time staring at it.  On the right in the picture is my iPad running Foreflight propped up on the map box door.  I'm planning to mount it approximately in this position but standing off the instrument panel a bit and tilted toward me in the left seat.

At this point, with some fear and trepidation, I tried the landing light, navigation lights and strobe lights.  They all worked!  After patting myself on the back for doing such a great wiring job (prematurely, it soon became evident) I proceeded to test the Garmin GTR-200b radio.  This involved plugging a headset into the jacks on the pilot and co-pilot sides, which resulted in a loud squeal in both and an even louder string of swear words from me.  A wiring problem!

I'm convinced that 95% of all wiring problems involve a faulty ground, but where?  Since managing electrons is not something I'm good at, I enlisted the help of my EAA Technical Councilor, Dan Berry, to help track it down.  Like me, Dan is a mechanical engineer, but unlike me, Dan is a wizard with electrical things.  After studying some electrical diagrams that he pulled up on his phone from somewhere on the internet, he decided that the fault must lie somewhere in the wiring at the left wing root.  To get to it, I had to pull the wing.😡  This task is not as onerous as it might first seem since the RV-12 is designed for easy wing removal, very similar to that of a glider.

 I see a lot of talk on the forums about systems that allow one person to remove a wing unassisted.  Mine is simple: a 4x8 sheet of plywood with legs on casters.  The top of the table is just below the inboard end of the wing.  Moving blankets get stuffed between the table top and the bottom of the wing, accounting for dihedral.  When the spar pins are pulled, the table and wing can be easily pulled away from the airplane.

After removing the mountain of crap that had grown up atop my wing table, I pulled the left wing just enough to allow the wiring to be accessed. The tube seen going from the wing root into the side of the fuselage takes a pressure signal from the AOA port on the wing leading edge to the ADAHRS box mounted in the tail cone.

After Dan made some measurements to confirm his original diagnosis, I discovered that two of the seven wires going into the Molex plug shown had pins which were not properly inserted.  I still find this hard to believe since my standard procedure with Molex or d-sub pins is as follows: crimp the pin, tug the pin on the wire, insert the pin into the female plug, tug the wire to ensure proper insertion.

The blue connector shown automatically connects the wires from the fuselage to the nav and strobe lights and the stall warning vane when the wing is installed.  A corresponding one on the right side also has the wire for the landing light.  With the headset plugs hanging out in the air as shown and the blue plug not connected, the radio worked great.  Problem solved!  Turns out, one problem was solved and one was yet to be revealed.

Happily, I re-installed the wiring in the fuselage, re-installed the wing and plugged in the headset: loud squeal.  As Tom Cruise's sidekick said in the movie Risky Business, sometimes you just have to say WTF (abbreviated here due to the family nature of this blog).

Somehow, when the two halves of the blue plug came together, the squeal starts.  The nav and strobe lights work fine, which leaves the stall vane.  Turns out that by moving the stall vane around, I could make the squeal start and stop.  In its relaxed state, this normally-open switch was closed.  This new "squeal" I was hearing was the stall warning horn!  The switch/vane assembly can be reached (barely) by removing an inspection plate.  Sticking my phone in the wing, I got a picture of the assembly (shown).

The assembly consists of the microswitch and vane sandwiched between two plates.  When I built this thing I remember fearing that if I over-torqued the bolts I might crack the plastic housing of the switch.  The result was an assembly which was no where near rigid enough.  I could grab the outer plate and move it relative to the inner one.  Another self-inflicted wound.  Nothing to do but remove, re-torque and re-install.  Turned out to be one of the more challenging and frustrating things I've had to do on the build. 

The really maddening thing is that most people with AOA disconnect the stall vane after certification, which no doubt I'll do, making all this a waste of time.  But, being an E-LSA it must be built exactly like the ASTM prototype.  Right?

Off topic: more Colorado wildlife in my back yard recently.  Look at the rack on that one guy to the right.

Page 49: Cooling system

The Rotax 912 is an odd duck in that it has water-cooled heads and air-cooled (finned) cylinder barrels.  The water is actually a 50:50 mixture of antifreeze and distilled water.  From an engineering standpoint this is superior to the more typical air-cooled-only (Lycoming, Continental) arrangement.  Of course all the rejected heat ultimately goes to the air.  It just takes a different path with the Rotax.  

The components of the system which must be installed are the fiberglass duct which directs the ram air from just aft of the prop to the heat exchangers (shown again from the previous post), the oil cooler (air-oil heat exchanger), the "radiator" (a poor name since there's negligible radiation heat transfer) which is an air-water heat exchanger, a cabin-controlled door which can divert the hot air downstream of the radiator into the cockpit for heating (definitely needed here on the Front Range), and various hoses which transport the oil and water to various places.

The oil cooler is first bonded with high-temp RTV to an aluminum frame to which nut-plates have been riveted, allowing it to be attached to the bottom cowl.  The aft (left) end of the duct interfaces via a rubber seal (shown on the pic) with the radiator.

For the bonding process, the instructions call for a 20 lb weight to be used to ensure proper contact while the RTV cures.  I searched around the hangar weighing various things to use for this.

It turns out that a jug from a R-985 Pratt & Whitney radial from a twin Beech weighs almost exactly 20 lb.  I put the corresponding piston in the picture to show the beating it took when the engine swallowed a valve.  The jug (with cracked head) is sitting on a wooden plate atop the heat exchanger

The radiator (which doubles as a heater core) is also bonded to an aluminum frame which provides a flat surface against which the aft edge of the cooling duct interfaces.  The instructions specify that a 1/8th-inch gap should exit all the way around between the duct face and the aluminum frame.

A separate fiberglass piece bonded with epoxy (and RTV as a backup) to the duct itself makes this do-able.  The gap, which can be seen in the pic at right, was achieved by temporarily gluing inch-long segments of paint stir sticks from Lowe's (not Home Depot, too thick) around the aluminum and clamping everything together while it cured.  The rubber gap seal is bonded to the duct face later.  The seal can be seen in the first pic.

Hooking up the oil lines turned into an unexpected problem.  One line goes from the sump on the bottom of the engine to the oil tank (shown) at the top.  The ends of this particular hose are "clocked" by the supplier and the angle can't be changed.  The instructions warn not the twist the hose.  Looking at the pic at left, you can see that the female end can't possibly fit on the nipple on the tank without  significant twist.  I ordered a replacement ($288!) which fit perfectly.  The Mothership did give me a refund when I sent the bad one back.

Installing the oil lines, water hoses, gas lines and a couple of vent hoses in the tight quarters of the engine compartment was, in a couple of cases, a challenge.  Van's commonly requires the use of double Adel clamps, where one clamp attaches to a structural member, the other to a hose and the two are attached to each  other with a bolt, creating a sort of standoff.  I hate single Adel clamps, but two together requires the invention of new, stronger swear words.  In one case I didn't have a 3/8th-inch socket small enough to fit into the available space, requiring me to fabricate the wrench shown at right.  I've had to use it several times now.

In July I made my 33rd trip to Mecca (Oshkosh).  There I encountered this RV-12 with the best quality paint job I've seen on a -12.  If only I had a spare $20k!  As I've said before, I'm going to fly for a while with no paint, then wrap it in vinyl.  With wrap I can do it a bit at a time and if I screw something up I can easily remove the wrap and redo it.

Page 38: Finishing the cowling (good riddance!)

Cowling Par Deux

At the end of the previous post I described how I'd managed to somehow over trim the fiberglass, in spite of countless trial fitting iterations, along the seam where the top and bottom cowls join.  For a while I thought I'd come up with a solution.  Before drilling the rivet holes for the piano hinges which hold the

two halves together, I used clear packing tape to hold the cowl halves in alignment while drilling the upper cowling and piano hinge.  The pin had been inserted into the two hinge halves, holding everything in place.

It seemed to work well, drilling and clecoing front to back

With the drilling done and all the countersinking done in the fiberglass, I squeezed all the solid rivets and proceeded to install, for the first time, both cowlings with all pins inserted.

Since everything was riveted in place now, with no room for adjustments, the two curved pins along the aft edge of the top cowl were, to put it mildly, a (suppressing the urge to swear) problem.  They had been difficult before but now seemed impossible.  Dry Boelube helped, but not enough.  I ended up inserting some spare pin material into the hinges, chucking it up in my drill, and spinning it a bit.  This opened up the holes in the hinges enough to allow insertion of the curved pins.  The gaps between cowl halves looked good as did the gap between the prop spinner and the front face of the cowl.

What a clever builder I am!  I got to enjoy this fantasy until doing the next step: Fiberglass in the cooling duct.

The cooling duct as supplied is of necessity too large, requiring another iterative session of fit-mark-trim-fit-repeat.

The duct takes in the ram air just behind the prop and directs some of it to the oil cooler, which attaches to the duct, and the rest to the coolant heat exchanger which doubles as a heater core for cabin heat.

The fit between the duct and the lower cowl doesn't have to be perfect since the duct is epoxied to the cowl along with fiberglass cloth, making it easy to fill any gap.

The hard part is getting the duct to interface correctly with the face of the coolant heat exchanger which is attached to the airframe. A deformable rubber seal helps a little.

When the duct is satisfactorily fiberglassed to the lower cowl, before the epoxy sets up, the upper and lower cowls are attached to the airplane with all piano hinge pins and screws inserted.  This is supposed to ensure that the final fit is good.  The problem is that the duct is a large, rigid piece which inevitably distorts the lower cowl a bit, screwing up the perfect fit which I bragged about earlier.  Now the seems are no longer perfect.  C'est la vie.

At this point I fabricated and riveted in the oil cooler door, using the RV-12iS plans which include a nice holder for the oil cap riveted to the inside of the door.

The NACA duct used to cool the voltage regulator was fitted and glassed in.  I'm siffck of fiberglass.

Off Topic: more Colorado wild life.

My home in North Carolina was waterfront on beautiful Badin Lake, a 5500 acre reservoir 25 miles east of Charlotte.  There were quite a few nesting pairs of Bald Eagles there, so seeing them fly by was common, but never got old.  I never had one land on my house, however, until I moved to Colorado.

Page 38 (Page 37 iS): Cowling

From the start, I realized that the instructions in the build manual for the cowling installation made no sense to me.  I was supposed to fit the cowling before installing the engine, fitting the bottom cowl first, independent to the top cowl.  Most of the group wisdom contained in the Van's Air Force forums advised to install the engine first, which I did, so the cowling could be installed relative to the engine.  To me, the most visible indication of a good-fitting cowl is the way the top cowl fits relative to the spinner.  Any lack of concentricity is immediately obvious.  At this point, I was still following the

build manual for the ULS engine (my engine) which has the builder trim the top and bottom cowlings to the factory-marked scribe lines (marks in the gel coat) and proceed from there.  I did this and it turned out to be OK since trimming beyond the scribe lines was required in all cases (otherwise I'd have been screwed).  

I first trial fitted both top and bottom with duct tape to get a general feel for what had to happen, then proceeded with the top cowl first.  I leveled the top cowl as described in the manual, using a long spirit level and plumb bobs hanging from the front corners of the top cowl.  Amazingly, the floor in my hangar turned out to be level, making this part easier.  I checked that both main tires were pumped to the same pressure and that the wing tips were the same distance off the floor.

At this point I decided to check the procedure for cowl installation for the newer 912iS (fuel injected) airplanes and discovered that this new procedure closely mirrors what I had just done: engine first, top cowl next, then bottom cowl.  I wish I had read this before starting work on this section!  It would have spared me the unease and frustration I was feeling for making such a large deviation from the manual, only to find that I was unknowingly following the new procedure.

After leveling the top cowl, the next task was to set the gap between the front face of the cowl and the rear bulkhead on the spinner.  I decided to set the gap at 1/8th inch, which allowed me to once again use the handy 1/8th inch spacers provided free by Lowe's in the form of paint stir sticks.  Thin double-sided tape worked great here.

If I had wanted a slightly larger gap (the manual recommends 3/16th inch) I'd have used stir sticks from Home Depot which are a bit thicker.

I love the way the small gap looks.  At Oshkosh 2022 I checked the gaps and general fit of the cowls on all the -12s in attendance (and other RV models, as well) and found mostly larger gaps.  Supposedly, larger gaps make for easier cowling removal, but I haven't found it to be a problem (yet).

The small piece of aluminum angle clecoed to the top of the cowl forces the vertical alignment of the cowling and the spinner, although a hangar neighbor who built an RV-7 says the cowling will sag a bit after a few hours of operation screwing up that perfect alignment.  

The Sharpie drawing just in front of the pilot seat is where I'll make the cutout for the NACA duct used to cool the voltage regulator.

Next, the aft edge of the top cowl is block sanded to match the forward edge of the aluminum skin covering the instrument bay.  All the #40 holes for rivets attaching the cowl to the soon-to-be-installed piano hinges are marked and drilled.  One errant #40 hole is shown.  I could've staunched the bleeding with a cleco in the finger tip, I suppose.

The cowling is held in place with duct tape throughout this procedure.  As with anything dealing with fiberglass on this airplane, it's an iterative process: trial fit (with tape), mark, remove, sand, trial fit, etc.  All of the marking is done with Vis-a-Vis Wet Erase.  The marks stay on well until rubbed with a wet finger tip (or paper towel if you grew up somewhere other than South Carolina).

The aft part of the piano hinge to which the finished cowl attaches was installed much earlier in the build (in my case probably seven or eight years ago).  The forward half of the piano hinge, to which the fiberglass is to be riveted, was fabricated (fluted to match the curvature) and installed with its pin.

At this point I fabricated all the piano hinges and pins.  There are two on top (one shown in the pic), two on each side which attach the aft edges of the bottom cowl to the airframe, and one on each side which attaches the top cowl to the bottom cowl.

With the aft half of each hinge installed, I proceeded to trial fit the bottom cowl.  Lots of on, mark, off, sand, fit, repeat.

It all went fairly well once I switched to the 912iS instructions. My only screw-up so far in this section was sanding off too much fiberglass from the interface between the upper and lower cowling (shown with the hinge clecoed at left) on one side.  I'm trying to decide how to recover from that and I'll describe it in part II of the cowling writeup.

Off topic

More Colorado wildlife: A few elk showed up behind my house recently.

A few large males cut through my front yard.

They better be glad I no longer hunt!

Page 47-03 Spinner

The spinner comes as a fiberglass cone with no cutouts for the prop blades and a bit too long.  The first task is to trim the length and cut out the slots for the blades.  A previously discussed bushing for the Pitot must be glued into the tip.  

After all the fiberglass cutting I've done for the project I've reached the conclusion that nothing beats a Dremel tool with a fiber cutting wheel.  With all the cutting for the cowling (coming soon to a browser near you) I bought Dremel's knockoff of a Fein tool (vibrating blade rather than rotating or translating), thinking it might put less dust in the air (and in my lungs -- I think facial hair prevents a good seal with the dust mask).  The Fein tool was overkill.  If there were a smaller, battery-operated version of this tool it might be perfect.

After that trimming, the spinner was trial fit as shown, being careful that the prop cutouts allow the inside of the spinner to press firmly against the forward and aft bulkheads. It was immediately obvious that the original cuts to the scribe lines were not enough.   Clamps held the spinner in this position for drilling.  As received, there are pilot holes in the front bulkhead for the nut plate center holes to be drilled in the spinner. 

At this point I checked the runout in the Pitot tube referenced to the sharpened nail pressed into the stationary board shown.  The point was centered immediately in front of the Pitot and the prop was rotated 360 degrees while checking for movement of the Pitot.  I did this with considerable trepidation, not knowing how I would fix it if the runout were unacceptable (>1/16th inch).  I could see no movement.

The center holes for the nut plates attached to the aft bulkhead were drilled using the drill guide that I cobbled together (shown below).  The lower plate rests against the aft edge of the bulk head flange, the middle plate is a spacer for the fiberglass, and the upper plate has the guide hole for the drill.  I made these out of scrap 4130 and held the sandwich together with vice grips.  This assured that all the holes were drilled in the correct axial location.  The aft edge of the spinner fiberglass extends a bit beyond the aft edge of the bulkhead flange and will be sanded flush once the nut plates are installed and the spinner is attached.

The holes for the solid rivets which secure the nut plates to the aft bulkhead required use of my TiteFit drill kit (shown below).  As I've said before, there are quite a few holes I couldn't have drilled without this thing.

The nut plates are held in place temporarily with a #8 screw while the #40 holes are drilled and attached with solid, counter-sunk rivets.

The final step is to construct the "gap fillers" which go behind the prop roots, ostensibly reducing drag.  These are made from the fiberglass pieces cut out in the first step.  I didn't realize this so I didn't make any attempt to make the cut with the Dremel tool as thin as possible.   This lack of reading ahead caused me to end up with a much wider gap than I'd like.  I'll probably fill it with micro later.

I hate setting solid flush rivets in fiberglass.  The countersink has to be made with the rivet head sitting a little proud of the fiberglass surface before setting.  Otherwise you'll crush the fiberglass a bit.  (Side note: When a part which should be flush with a surface instead protrudes a bit above the surface it is said to be a bit proud of the surface.  I'm trying to introduce a new term to the lexicon of aircraft fabrication: If a part which should be flush ends up a bit under the mating surface, it will henceforth be described as being a bit ashamed of the surface).  

There's definitely an art to getting solid rivets squeezed perfectly, even in metal.  With several of the solid rivets attaching the gap fillers to the flange I had the opportunity to exercise my considerable skill at drilling out solid rivets and re-doing them.  This hard-won skill is a testament to the number of times I've screwed up a rivet.

Off topic: Another one of my new Colorado neighbors.

page 47-07: setting propeller pitch

The propeller pitch is set by loosening the six bolts shown going through the front prop bulkhead into the hub, twisting the blades by hand, then re-torquing the bolts.  This obviously is an imprecise, trial-and-error process, made worse by the fact that the act of bringing the bolts up to the proper torque causes a very slight rotation of the blades.  The build manual says to set each blade to a specified angle within plus or minus 0.1 degrees (!?).  This is to be accomplished using a supplied steel bracket placed at a particular radial position on each blade and a digital level with a magnetic base.  The prop is leveled horizontally and the level is referenced to (zeroed on) the longeron.  Sensenich supplies different diameter metal "pegs" that are to be inserted into a hole in the hub to set the pitch to three different common angles but Van's says these can be off 0.7 degrees and therefore shouldn't be used.  

Here's the problem: The commonly available digital levels, most of which advertise accuracy of plus or minus 0.1 degrees, actually deliver this accuracy (if you read the fine print) only near 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees.  Otherwise, it's 0.2 degrees, and I doubt it's actually that good.  

Since having each blade at the same angle is far more important than the actual angle itself (as long as you're close to the desired angle), I decided to use the laser built into my level to project a line on the floor (hard to see on the blue tape).  

My procedure went like this:  Use Van's procedure to get as close as the digital level will allow to the prescribed pitch angle for the first blade, mark the laser line on the floor, rotate the prop 180 degrees, transfer the bracket and laser to the second blade, twist the blade until the laser line is on top of the mark for the first blade.  Tighten. Tweak. The blades are at the same angle.

Off topic:  For the past nine months I've been having a house built in the hills west of Loveland.  There's lots of wildlife there so I've had a trail cam set up in the back yard (you can see the house in the distance).  During the cold months elk come down from the high country and hang around until spring.  Here's one pic.  My neighbor who lives about 1/4 mile away trumped it by showing me several video clips of two mountain lions at once in his yard.  Another neighbor had two moose in his yard and a bear rummaging through his trash can,  Ah, life in Colorado.