Day 8--12 hours of airplane-building justice!

Hey everyone, welcome back!

Today was a big push for us, with a full 12-hour day.  We made up some good time and are leaning towards a taxi this Saturday, July 20.

Today was long & extremely productive day.  Our team lead, Ben, put a couple extra hands into the fray and we knocked out a ton of items.  Here they are:

Tracy is putting the Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) in behind the bulkhead.  The ELT is activated in the case of a crash (it has an accelerometer that senses a crash).  We can also activate it manually with a switch in the cockpit.  It has a battery that lasts about 7 years…then we can replace it ourselves (more work we would likely be unable to do if we had a certified airplane).

Here is the ELT installed, looking back towards the tail.  It will be covered by the bulkhead panel soon.

Here’s the ELT antenna on the aircraft spine.  Again, the disadvantage of the carbon fiber airplane is the exterior antennae…to us, small price to pay for an extra 150lbs gross weight capacity.

In this picture, Tyler is showing Tracy the work we’re about to do to get our seat pans fit.   It involves shaving it to fit the roll cage and putting an inspection hole in the middle.   I took over this work from Tracy…carbon fiber dust and pregnant ladies don’t mix!

Here is the right seat pan finished & seated flush, with the inspection hole in place.  I don’t expect to see it again for a few days ‘til we finish all the electronics and flight controls—but it’s ready to go minus the plexiglass cover for the inspection hole  The small round hole in the front is actually not the port for the flight controls--it's the main gear port for the airplane's taildragger configuration.  The control stick will curve up from under the seat.

Wait—why do our seat pans have an inspection hole again?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  There’s a lot going on under there.  This is our parking brake.  The brake lines haven’t been installed yet.  The concept for this one is very simple—the lever holds the hydraulics in whatever position they’re currently in…so, depress the brakes, pull the lever, and you’ve got a parking brake.  No power required.

This is an example of the electrical connections we were working on today.  The wings (which were previously wired) get electrically attached to the avionics panel under the seat through these connector pins.  Once finished with the harnesses, they line up neatly under the seat—so we can easily check for issues during pre-flight by lifting up the seat.

Today we also hooked up the flaps!  We now have full flap actuation, with a little work left to tension them just right.  This photo shows the work we were doing to Nico press the cables together.  You can see how the cables attach to the flap lever—one to deploy and one to retract.

We also got the elevator rod all connected today--the horizontal tail & elevator are close to done.   You can see the wires above the pushrod—we still have to hook up the elevator trim.

Bryce is helping me (or I am helping Bryce, to be more exact!) putting in the piano hinge rods that hold the elevator to the horizontal stabilizer. 

Here is one of the hinges—there are three of them and together they span about 70% of the seam between the two flight control surfaces.

Under the hood it’s getting pretty intense.  Ben is doing a good job trying to explain everything.  When you break each component down to its individual functions, the airplane is pretty simple—trying to digest it all at once is the only thing to make it complicated.  This is the left magneto.  Magnetos provide ignition to the engine without any external power supply.  The two wires are important—the smaller one is a magneto ground.  It is hooked to the ignition—when the airplane is off the magneto is grounded; when the airplane is on the ground is removed.  If you have heard of ‘hand propping’ an airplane (dangerous, but executable), this is why it works.

These are the Cylinder Head Temperature (CHT) probes.  In this photo I’d just put some engine oil on the threads to make sure we can get them back out of the engine for inspection at a later date.  Engine temperature is very important in small airplanes because the engines are run so hard (imagine running your car continuously at red-line RPM for hours on end).  The main method of ensuring you’re not doing damage to the engine is keeping CHT down.  CHT is one of the continuously displayed items in our avionics layout.

Amongst the mass of wires you’ll see red, white, and blue plastic tubing (patriotic!).  This is our pitot-static system (measures airspeed & altitude).  The red line is pitot in, the blue is static in.  They first go to our Dynon D10, which is our primary Instrument ‘don’t hit the ground” display—constant artificial horizon, altitude, and airspeed.  It then splits to our manual airspeed indicator, and to our Advanced Flight Systems primary flight display.  It also goes to the autopilot.  So, we’ll have airspeed displayed in three places in the cockpit, and altitude displayed in two.  Hope we can keep up!

Our battery, starter, and alternator solenoids went in today.  I didn’t even notice…just looked under the hood and bang, there they were.  Man, this airplane-building stuff is easy here at Glasair!

 Okay folks, that's all I've got today!  Got another big push tomorrow so we'll see what we can get done!  Cheers, -zen