Author Archives: Michael

Canopy Stops

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Time: 1 Hour

In between fiberglass work I try to accomplish any task I can. One thing I wanted was a canopy stop. The idea of this is that the stop will keep the canopy from sliding back to far allowing the inside canopy latch handle to hit the aft bulkhead as it slides back scratching the paint. There are several ways to do this one of which is a rubber stopper slid into the canopy rail. I thought for a while of where to get the rubber to do this and an idea came to me as I was sanding my fiberglass. I was using a 3M sanding block which is made out of hard rubber to work on the canopy skirt. It was fairly inexpensive, three or four dollars, so I thought I’m going to cut this up and see what I can come up with.I started with 1/2″ wide by 7/8″ tall and around 3″ long. I trimmed and sanded so that the stop would fit nicely with an angle in the aft end. 

I will eventually trim this down for the length after I install the handle so that it will just clear the bulkhead and give me the most open position I can get. 

Floors

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Time: 4 Hours

I also started the process of installing the floors since all my work under them is done (I think). You start with the left and right sections of the passengers floor. Then you install the aft baggage floor with the lip on top of them however I decided to do just the opposite and put the baggage floor under that way if I do need to remove the floors under the passenger seat I won’t have to remove the baggage for as well.  So I needed to start with the aft baggage floor, but before I did that I needed to run a vent line for the smoke tank.  This line allows for expansion and contraction of the smoke oil so that it does not damage the tank and will be expelled overboard. You use a large pulled rivei to create a vent hole and attach the rubber hose to it. I decided to run mine straight underneath the oil tanks left side. That way the line would run straight down from the filler port. It has to run all the way up to the filler port so that it is the highest point in the filling process. Otherwise oil will run out of it anytime you fill the tank full. I then but the baggage for in place sliding the vent line, electrical connections and pressure line through their respective holes that I put in the floor.I then grabbed the rivet puller and went to it. For you RV-8 builders reading you may notice that the center rivets are countersunk, I did this so they wouldn’t interfere with the smoke tank brackets. I finished up all the baggage floor rivets and put the passenger floors in place with cleckos. Then it was just a process of going down each row and riveting all the floors. A few needed reaming out so that the rivet would fit otherwise they all went well. There are eight nutplates at the forward end of both sides of the floors that needed riveting to the floor and rib that allow for the foot wells to be screwed down. I had to use the bucking bar and rivet gun for these. When I was done I replaced the flap control rod and bolted it down as well. I put the foot wells in place and just used four screws to hold them in for now. I have a carpet kit from Flight Line Interiors and wanted to see how the side peices looked as well. The carpet is held down with heavy duty Velcro and I will wait to install them but just wanted to see how it looked. 

Empennage Fairing

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Time: 4 Hours

While I was waiting for fiberglass to dry on the canopy skirts I worked on the empanada sharing over a few days. Basically just consisted of filling with epoxy and micro and sanding filling and sanding filling and sanding too I got to the perfect shape that I wanted. I used a filler primer to find all the pinholes, the voids left by air bubbles in the fiberglass epoxy, so that I could fill those which seems like a never ending process.


After filling 90% of the pinholes I primed and put into place. I will do some more finish work on this later down the road prior to painting.

As you can see it has a nice tight gaps all the way around and only a few screws to hold it in place which prevents the faring from puckering. I’m very happy with how this turned out and I can’t wait to see how it looks once painted!

More Canopy Skirt Work

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Time: 4 Hours

So I removed the left skirt after making the cuts and still had major shape issues. After scratching my head and asking for Glenn’s advice he noticed that the bend at the top edge of the skirt was up a 1/4″ higher than the right side where the meet the canopy. Wow how did I miss that? So off it came and I filled in all the holes I drilled with micro and waited a day to sand them flush. 


Then back on the skirt went but this time in the correct orientation. The fit was much better! Closing the gap in the backend quite a bit. So one problem is now solved and onto the next aft end. The shape was terrible and I just couldn’t get all edges to fit at the same time. So what to do? Glenn says start cutting off a little at a time to you do get a good fit and rebuild what you cut off. So you can see I had to chop a good amount off which scared me since I have very little experience with fiberglass.so to rebuild I needed a bridge to give shape to the initial lay up in this area. I used a file folder cut into the shape to fit into the space and covered it with packing tape so that fiberglass would not stick.I made a tunnel/cover for the slider rail you can see out of sheet aluminum shaped and sized to fit just over the rail. This will allow for the skirt to slide over the rail when closed. I covered all the rest of the surfaces with packing tap and started the layup. I placed one layer of heavy cloth underneath both edges of the pink skirt and three layers in between the two edges of the pink skirt for my first lay up. When I came back the next day I found that the layup wasn’t perfect and had a large gap at the top where it met the canopy. Probably due to the black tape not holding down the skirt as tight as it should have. So I removed the entire skirt and cut it in half on the new layup. I removed a little bit from each side so that I could lay it down tight against the canopy and the gap would close. Now that I had it in a tight position against the canopy I did another new layup to close this gap.At the same time I started using some micro to build up the transition between the pink and the new on the edges for a start.


Boy does this look rough! And it’s gonna take a lot of work I think. When I came back the next day I sanded down the edges to get a close shape and cut off the extra then covered the entire surface with micro so that I could start the shaping process. 


More to come on this project. This process takes a lot of time in between work so you can let each step dry before continuing. 

Site Back Up

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I had my blog suspended due to it using up so much of the shared servers CPU and memory with all my photos. I have worked over the last week trying to optimize my photos as well as how the website caches them for you viewing pleasure. Hopefully we are in the right path and no more interruptions.