Last 2 weeks' recap: Flying & Fixing

Hello everyone!

Bottom line up front--this will be the last airplane Blog until October, when we will be back in Arlington to pick up our plane.  When we get it, it will be complete--fully painted and ready to go.  Tracy and i plan to fly it from Arlington to North Carolina.  I'll resume the Blog in October to show the finished product, so check back then if you like!  You should be able to 'subscribe via email' to the blog if you want an alert--or better yet, just give either of us a shout to let us know you're interested, and we'll let you know!

Sorry I've been offline for awhile, but our last two weeks have been even busier than our first two!  We have been working towards getting the FAA-required 40 flight hours flown off our airplane, as well as fixing some "squawk" items--things that weren't quite right about the airplane that are within our control to fix.  Don't worry, mom--squawks are normal and our airplane is still very air-worthy!  Just think of it as fine-tuning the machine.

Our biggest squawk, unfortunately, was a leaky engine.  Our engine, built by Superior Air Parts in Texas, is a modified Lycoming.  It works great, but we found that some of the silicone gaskets in the accessory case were leaking.  It took us awhile to get to the cause...

This is the fuel pump with its gold-colored  heat shroud—coated in oil.   When we first got down to troubleshooting leaks, we estimated we were leaking about a cup of oil an hour—certainly not enough to impact our available oil (6 qts) but enough to make a nice mess in the engine bay.

This is the oil sump—the camera flash shows the sheen of oil and you can see the drips at the bottom.  We weren’t sure if the sump was a collection point for leaking oil or part of the cause—so we took out the plugs at the bottom, resealed them, and put them back in.  This required a full oil change with only 3 hours on the engine.

Over time the leaks built up a sheen of oil on the bottom of the plane.

Luckily, Glasair is a great company (and our engine has a warranty!) In this photo Jim is inspecting the engine with us.  With his help (along with Preston, Matt, and Ben!) we were able to reduce our leak to about a tbsp. per hour.  Glasair will have the leak entirely stopped when we come back to pick up the airplane.

The only other engine problem we’ve had is a one-time occurrence of a backfiring cylinder.  The culprit is this small piece of debris that worked its way into the fuel injection nozzle (the nozzle opening is about ball-point-pen-sized).  We cleaned out the injector line and haven’t had any more issues.  We’ve been confident enough in the motor to take it into mountainous terrain…see below!

 In addition to fixing our engine issues, we've still been working on getting the plane finished and ready for paint.  Here are some of our rainy-day modifications:

This piece of metal in the tail is our “tail pull”—basically a handle for moving the airplane around easily once it’s in tailwheel configuration.  Tracy and I cut the holes and fiberglassed this into place during a rainy morning this week.   Sorry I don’t have a picture of what it looks like from the outside…I’ll try to remember to get one in October!

While we were working on that, Jim put the cable covers & headphone jack inputs into the roof. 

 And of course--we did a lot of flying!!

Troubleshooting the avionics has been part of the 40 hours of flight test.  We had some problems with the magnetometer in our EFIS—in this picture I was shooting an approach to Orcas Island and the magnetic heading and GPS ground track are 40 degrees divergent because the magnetic heading kept drifting in the EFIS.  This requires a magnetometer calibration to fix—just the right digital wizardry.

This is a picture of everything going right!  For you GA performance junkies, this is the rough performance we’ll see from our finished product—about 135kts True Airspeed (145-ish MPH) on 10gallons per hour.  Quick math says around 15mpg.  Gadget & Holly, don’t know if we can quite keep up with you…but we’ll carry your gear.  Those figures are still good at our 1100lb usable-load limit.  :-)

When we’re not troubleshooting—well, we’re sightseeing!  It’s beautiful here.  This is Olympic National Park at sunset.

Point Roche at the San Juan Islands.

Mount Rainier—stunning.

Okay, that’s it—the last picture of our new toy before it goes to paint.   In the next two months, Glasair will fix all our squawks, weather-seal the plane, take it apart for paint, and put it back together for us to fly it away.  How’s that for a good deal?

It’s been a life-changing experience here and we look forward to sharing our stories with you!  Thanks for keeping up with the blog—hope you’ve enjoyed it!   We’ll run a few more posts in October, including our cross-country trip to take the plane home to North Carolina.  Hope to see you then!

Blue Skies,

Tracy & Eric

Day 16--we have liftoff!

Hello everyone & welcome back!

16 work days ago, our little airplane looked like this:

Now, it looks like this:

And today, it did this (sorry, video won't play on your iOS device...but trust me--our plane flew today!):

Although we flew today, we have a long ways to go.  We still have to calibrate all the avionics and fine-tune our engine.  We also have a lot on the airplane to finish prior to painting: rear seats, speed fairings, cargo pod, hatch cover bodywork....  So the 'blog doesn't end here, but we may slow down a bit.  Our last week and a half in Arlington includes flying the FAA-required 40 hours off our airplane and fixing all of our 'squawks' (any minor issues with the aircraft). 

Thanks to all the awesome people at Glasair Aviation for helping us make our airplane dream come true!

I'll write a couple more posts while we're here to show you the continued work, and perhaps some of the places we fly in our 40 hours.  Please keep checking in!

Blue Skies,
Eric & Tracy

Days 14 & 15--we are "airworthy!"

Hello everyone!

Today was a big day--the FAA inspectors came and issued us our airworthiness certificate!  The funny thing is, we're still not quite ready to fly yet...
...there's a saying in the Kitplane-building business: "You're 90% done, with 90% to go!"  That's not quite true, but the finish work to get the last details on the airplane sorted have taken most of the last three days.  We've worked 12-hour days all week this week, and still have work to do before our first flight tomorrow!
 Here are some pictures of the progress we've made:

This is the tunnel cover that goes over the boost pump and rudder cables.

We have seats!  The seats are about 9” of foam—extremely comfortable!  We didn’t have to fabricate these—all the leather work is done here in the facility.

Tracy spent a lot of time today working on the horizontal stabilizer tips.  These little pieces keeps a tight airflow in front of the elevator counterweights

Here is a picture of the completed left tip.  Again, it doesn’t look like much once completed, but it’s got to be perfectly measured, then Tracy installed flush-riveted nutplates in the horizontal stabilizer by dimpling the metal.

Meanwhile, I was working on the landing light lens covers, which required a similar process.  Grind them to size, flush-rivet nutplates inside the cove, then countersink holes for the flush screws into the fiberglass.

Our fairings are now one piece, joined by Cabo, which is a fiberglass paste.  Tomorrow morning we are going to reinforce the structure with a fiberglass layup.  The fiberglass cures so fast once it sets that we can glass at around 0830 and be flying by 1130.

The hatch inlays on the fuselage also require flush-riveted nutplates.  You can clearly see the gold-covered rivets in this picture, bracketing the hole for the hatch cover screws.

The leather crew brought us our bulkhead cover—nice!

Yep, we have to have a tail number to go fly!  This is temporary vinyl, but our Sportsman’s tail number will forever be N7815E.

Every airplane is required to have a placard on it with the builder’s name and serial number.  This is ours.  We didn’t get to choose the number—just lucky I suppose!  Fortune Favors the Bold…

While we've been finishing up, it's been a madhouse around here with a whole lot else going on!  Here are some other photos we took yesterday and today:

Our friends the Skeesicks came by to say hello!  Thanks you guys!

Another Sportsman owner stopped in to get help with a modification to his floats.  He put an electric kayak motor on the back of his left float, in order to water taxi under power.  Another modification that makes complete sense but would be very difficult to get done on a certified airplane.

Here is the kayak motor up close.  It will push the Sportsman—backward or forward—at a leisurely 2-ish mph.

Glasair is extremely busy with Oshkosh prep.  At the end of the day the hangar looks like a full aircraft carrier deck.  Ours is the one closest.

Well, folks, according to the FAA, we’ve got ourselves an airplane!  Now it just needs a name…and to go flying!  First flight is tomorrow--we can't wait!!

Day 13--Hatch covers, engine coolling, and inspection prep

Hi everyone!

Well, it looks like yesterday was our first day of building with not too much to report.  We have some big items to finish yet as we get the airplane ready for first flight, so we did a lot of work on those.  I was working on the hatch covers and Tracy worked on the final cowling baffling.  All afternoon yesterday we did a full aircraft inspection--basically a tip-to-tail, rivet-by-rivet aircraft inspection to double-check our work over the last couple of weeks.  It took over three hours!  It was great to do, however--it gave us a lot of appreciation for the attention to detail we'll need to exercise on our future annual inspections.

Here are today's photos:

Here is the bottom section of the left hatch cover.  the hatch covers are carbon fiber and form-fit to the fuselage and wings to complete the aerodynamic shape of the aircraft.  If we had a big gap here between the wing and fuselage it would increase our stall speed by about 5 knots.  Instead, our plane stalls at 42 knots in level flight in landing configuration.

Here are the top of the hatch covers.  They take awhile because they require precise fitting to the fuselage gap.  I spent most of the morning marking them and sanding them to get this gap to look right all the way around.  Tomorrow's work is to fiberglass the top and bottom halves of each hatch together.  Once installed, the hatches will be a removable feature on the aircraft--they need to be off to fold the wings.

Meanwhile, Tracy was working on the engine cowling baffling.  These rubber strips complete the air circuit under our hood.  When the cowling is on, it pushes down on them and creates a seal of sorts--it doesn't catch 100% of the air but it does divert most of it straight down through the engine cooling fins.

Here's the baffling up close.  The rubber strips are attached with big pull rivets and washers--easy.  The hardest part, like the hatch covers, is getting the right shape.

Meanwhile, it's a beehive of activity at Glasair!  There are actually 6 airplanes in this picture--3 of them are in the hangar!  3 are getting ready to go to OshKosh on Thursday, one is ours, and one is the Two-Weeks-to-Taxi build that started behind us this week, a nice couple from Wyoming.  The red one in the middle is the factory Demo plane, which we will fly Wednesday to get ready for our own flight on Thursday!

Okay folks, that's it for today!  Tuesday we expect to finish the hatch covers and baffling, and Glasair will follow up our inspection with one of their own.  Wednesday and Thursday are big days--on Wednesday the FAA comes to inspect our plane for airworthiness, and Thursday (maybe Wednesday afternoon but unlikely) we will take our first flight!  Stay tuned!  -zen

Yesterday's trials & triumphs--learning to troubleshoot

Hello again all!

As we posted last night, yesterday was ultimately a great day thanks to some awesome work by Matt and Ben buttoning up the airplane.  It took a while to get there, though, due to some hiccups along the way.  Our new little airplane came out of the hangar kicking and screaming a little, with some minor issues in the brakes, fuel system, oil system, and engine start (but she still started on the first attempt, so we win that bet!).  At the end of the day, we had a perfectly functioning powerplant.  Here's how we got there:

We started with putting brake fluid in the brake system and bleeding the air out of the lines.  Brake fluid goes in from the bottom up, there’s a valve at the bottom of the brake stack.  The white bottle in front of me is just a yard sprayer you can get at Lowe’s with pressurized air and brake fluid in it.  It has a tube on the end made for fitting to the brake line valve. 

The first tantrum our new airplane threw yesterday was a brake leak…this is the aftermath.  It turns out one of the fittings we used had a manufacturer’s defect.

Here is the male end of the fitting after we removed it.  Everywhere you see silver is bad—the male end got scoured by the female end, which had a misshapen countersink.  The two pieces need to match exactly—the seal is a metal-on-metal seal.  We replaced the parts and didn’t have any more issues.

We also had some final engine prep to do: routing the cooling hoses, putting the spark plugs in, doing final checks on all the routing & fitting of parts.  Here is the alternator belt on—the safety-wired bolts hold the belt in the correct position.

Tracy is putting the spinner on the prop.  In the background, Matt is putting heat tape on the inside of the cowling.

While Tracy & Matt were working on the engine, Ben and I were testing the fuel system.  Here is the resultant fuel leak—whoops!  This was our only big builder-induced error of the day.  We wait to put the sump valves in the bottom of the aircraft until right before we check the fuel.  Today…well, we forgot to put the valves in.  In this picture my finger is holding the rest of the fuel in the right wing as we get a gas can and funnel.  The fix for this is simple, of course—put the valves in, dummy!  Besides that our fuel system works perfectly.  We did an entire fuel flush to check for any debris or lack of flow at all the critical points in the system up to the engine.

After the engine was prepped and we had fuel loaded, it was time to pre-oil the engine.  Our engine holds 7 quarts, plus an extra quart that is used by the variable-pitch propeller and the oil cooler/pan.  Before we start the engine for the first time, we pre-oil it to push oil through all the engine components.  In this video, I am turning the starter while Ben checks the oil.  He is waiting until oil comes out of the port that goes to the oil cooler.  When it does, the engine is pre-oiled.  You may notice the motor spins freely in this video—that’s because the spark plugs are out so the engine isn’t fighting any air on its compression cycle.

Once everything was buttoned up, our airplane saw sunlight for the first time!

  Our first Engine start was successful, but the engine was running rough and the #4 cylinder was behaving badly—our Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT) was about 400deg higher that the rest of the cylinders.  Uh-oh!  We shut it down and Ben went to work.  Ben is a wizard with engines—one of the previous customers calls him ‘Obi-Wan.’  He was able to isolate the problem to some debris in the #4 injector port left from the factory.  He pulled it out with a flashlight and a magnet while the engine was still too hot to touch. The engine started right up again with no issues.  Success!  Thanks, Ben!

We’d also like to say congrats to Ted Setzer, one of the Glasair Founders.  After 30 years of building them, Ted’s finally got a Sportsman of his own!  Yesterday he put it on Alaska Bushweel tires with his own custom-made bush gear, and took his wife flying in it for (we think) the first time.  This plane is guaranteed to make all the Super Cub owners at OshKosh jealous this year.   Great work, Ted—she’s beautiful!

Day 12--0 to taxi in 12 work days!

Hi folks, Happy Saturday!

We had a landmark day here in Arlington--our airplane's first power-up and taxi, just as the program says!  We have a lot of stories from today--getting our bird to taxi wasn't textbook--but right now it's about time to go catch up on some sleep, so...

...the taxi for us is just the beginning.  Here's our rough schedule from here on out:
--Mon-Tues: Prepare for flight
--Wed: FAA Inspection & airworthiness certificate
--Thurs: First flight
--Thurs-Jul 29-ish: fly the required 40 hours for the FAA test phase requirements
--29 Jul-02 Aug: finish remaining airplane components: Wheel fairings, rear cockpit seating, cargo pod, etc. 

So what I'm saying is: if you're an avid follower of this project, there's still a lot more to go, and a lot more to learn.  I'll recap the stories of today's drama tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's the result of our last two weeks' experience here at Glasair Aviation:

 

As Tracy's dad  says: "it's alive!"  Yes it is...and soon to be airborne!

See you tomorrow, Tracy & Eric

Day 11--Prop, Avionics, Cowling, & Fairings...taxi tomorrow!

Hi everyone!

We had a really exciting day today with a ton of work done on the aircraft.  Glasair put all hands on deck to help us get ready for taxi tomorrow.  It was especially fun because all the parts are pretty much on the airplane now--which means we were in a fight for elbow room all day!

Here's some of the major stuff we worked on today:

Tracy spent a good portion of the morning on cables.   The cables for our GPS antenna had to be hand-cut and have the fixtures put on the end.  Who knew we would learn how to put a coaxial cable together here?  In this shot, Tracy and Ryan are affixing the GPS antenna (the little white bubble antenna) to the top of the roof.

Here’s the GPS antenna mount from the inside.  Tracy affixed the antenna fittings by hand.

In addition to the GPS antenna, Tracy and Ryan ran both radio antenna wires today (the antennas are external and on the wings).  After the wires (gold-colored) drop through the strut they converge in the floor seam and are routed up to the avionics panel.  You can see it’s starting to get pretty busy in there!

While that was going on, Matt put together our exhaust.  The exhaust is a 4-into-1 system that collects exhaust air from each cylinder in a single exhaust tube.

Here’s the exhaust mounted on the airframe.  Just bolt it on—pretty easy for the most part.

We also mounted the prop today!   Our propeller is a 3-blade, 72” composite propeller built by MT propellers.  A three-blade prop is actually slightly less efficient in cruise than a two-blade prop—we will see about 5mph slower top-end speeds on our airplane than we would with a 2-blade prop.  On the other hand, with a 3-blade prop we get better climb performance and reduced noise & vibration—so longer flights will be less fatiguing.  Well worth it to us.  On a side note, over Bryce’s head you can see one of the wing-mounted radio antennas Tracy cabled today.

Bryce and I are tightening the prop bolts in this picture.  Getting it right is like a very meticulous version of changing the tire on a car.  There are six propeller bolts that are tightened in a star pattern, torqued to a specific torque value, then safety-wired.

Well folks, here’s our ‘complete’ panel—minus the backup iPad that will go on the right side.  From left to right, top to bottom:

-Advanced Flight Systems Electronic Flight Information System

-TruTrak Autopilot (does altitude find & hold, course following, and instrument approaches)

-Dynon D10 Electronics Attitude Indicator with Airspeed & Altitude

- Old School Standby Airspeed Indicator…for tradition!

- Garmin Intercom—controls the radios & intercom setup

- Garmin G650 touch-screen Primary Flight Display

- Backup Radio

- Transponder

Here’s the panel with the EFIS and the ADI booted up.  Today we did a full avionics run-through to make sure the entire electrical system on the airplane works.  Everything worked with only one hiccup…when we turned on the landing lights, the left fuel boos pump came on instead!  Ryan was able to trace it to a mis-labeled wire in the cockpit connectors—he fixed it in about 30 minutes and we are all set for tomorrow!  In this picture, notice the EFIS shows us in about 60deg of climb and 35deg of right bank....

…that’s because we haven’t attached the Attitude Heading and Reference System (AHRS) to the airframe yet—it’s attached to one of our inspection port covers but not screwed in yet.  Notice the diagonal tilt to the bracket the AHRS is on—this bracket is specifically designed to be perfectly level and forward facing once it’s installed for aircraft startup.  Right now it’s hanging…so our EFIS looks wonky!

Well, tomorrow is the last day of the "Two Weeks to Taxi" Program.  I am betting our engine will start on the first attempt...any takers?  Have a great weekend!  -zen