Moving Day & Final Assembly

Hangar Move

After over 3 years of N10JW living in my garage it was time to do the big move. I had completed a majority of my Hangar Move punch list with only the Air Conditioning items outstanding.  I didn't want that to hold up progression so I made the call to go forward with the move.

The same friends that loaned me a truck last year and helped hang the engine also happen to own a Roll-Back which is a perfect method for moving the chassis. In preparation I pulled her out to my drive way for a couple photos.

Once Andy got here we talked a bit about it and figured out the best way to pull the plane onto the truck. The plane has an incredibly wide wheel base compared to your average car and we determined there was about 3/4" clearance available on each side.  We also decided it would be best to go ahead and remove the wheel pant mounts from the wheel nut to avoid any damage.  Once that was done I lined her up and actually laid under the fuselage with a tow bar attached to stear her while she was SLOWLY winched onto the truck.

Now Andy has some plane part moving experience.  He also helped me about a year ago when I moved the wings and the horizontal stabilizer to the hangar.  After looking things through decided it was best to do an additional strap on the nose gear, one on each main that would cross and another around the steps to hold it all down.

Moment of truth came and we pushed on the 20 mile or so journey to the airport.  It's a pretty funny sight and being the chase car I enjoyed watching people's reactions to what they were seeing.  We also drove no faster than 50 MPH on the highway.

Unloading was a lot easier than loading.  We had her off the truck and in the hangar in about 5 minutes.  It was a HUGE relief to have that safely done and quite a project milestone. 

Final Assembly

I would imagine its hard for any builder to do that move and then just lock up and go home.  I had come a bit prepared and brought a number of things from my garage with me so I could get a bit acclimated to everything. From a work prospective, still working off punch lists I now have it divided into 'Final Assembly' and 'Home Work'.  Some things like say the wing tips, I can finish up in my garage, while other things like the obvious wing attachment have to occur in the hangar.  My plan moving forward is before every work session I'll write out the things I want to get done, review those planned elements and ensure I have the tools and parts needed to do them and then head out to the airport.  Make notes, lists, ect. prior to coming home.  Rinse & Repeat and I'm expecting to make fast progress.

Not wanting to wait on progress I decided to started on the first task of removing tape and other protective coatings that I had left on.  After that started with reviewing each page of the plans, one by one and ensure the all steps had been done as I'm now able to go through the plans and complete things that I skipped previously.  Didn't take me too long to realize for whatever reason I left out two rows of AD470 rivets on the Vertical Stabilizer for whatever reason.  I assume I might have thought that it got rivets to the tail-cone skin seeing two rows pre-punched holes on the aft part, which I now know were used for other rivets.  So I had circled this step, put my VS up in my garage and forgot about it the next 3 years.  Given that I didn't bring my #30 bit I was quickly at a hard stop. Not to be beaten I used the time to remove the wingtips so I could bring those home and organize my hangar a bit better.

I did however take a picture of N10JW prettied up a bit!

Ram Air Servo

Sometimes it's fun to overly complicate things just to have cool buttons to press!  This was the case with the actuating function of the Ram Air.  The kit comes with a bowden cable you can run to your panel.  I'm sure that works great but I felt I really needed more buttons to push in flight so I pushed forward looking for a solution.

The switch requirements are the same as my cowl flaps as it requires just swapping of polarity to extend and retract the actuator. The actuator itself is a L12 Linear Actuator 30mm 50:1 12v. 30mm is the throw and the lowest it can be.  I did some measuring and it seemed to me that would work fine. 50:1 is the gear ratio that is essentially the force to open and close.  I'm going with this one first and if in flight I find it needs more force for whatever reason I can replace with a 100:1 or more.  wiring that swaps polarity between the two switch positions.  Since I resolved that with the cowl flaps that was the easiest component to this.

My dilemma was trying to figure out how to work the actuator arm on the canister in a somewhat cramped space, which running the arm the full throw of the servo. I tried various things such as replacement arms, changed brackets and even remotely mounting the servo somewhere else.  The only other person I talked to who had done this mounted his servo in the tunnel and ran the bowden cable there.  If I end up with heat issues I may have to go back and do that.  But for now I tried to do a self contained unit.  I won't bore you with my trail and tribulations so here's what I ended up with.

Canister prep was basically attaching a small piece of bowden cable and adel clip.  I expieremented on different holes and in different orientations.  What I found worked the best and didn't interfere with anything was to position the arm for a downward movement, run the bowden cable down and to the side to allow me to mount the servo on the bottom of the unit.  Far from the engine, exhaust and other heat elements.

Then I made a bracket to mount onto the canister that would allow the actuator enough space to move a very small piece of bowden cable.  It's about 3 inches wide and hand formed to the curve of the radius of the canister.  I then drilled 2 holes down the center, with the mounted point to match an existing canister hole.  Then I spaced to additional holes an equal amount apart.  Lastly I put some foil tape on the back to help as much as I could with heat.

 I did a test run and found the actuator pushed up vs pushing the cable.  The actuator came with two little clamps, having no idea what they were used for I just ignored.  Then it occurred to me that these are to mount the actuator so it wouldn't move. Fortunately me I happened to space the two hole out in just the right spot that these could be attached to the bracket screws.

I re-purposed some connecting hardware meant for the carb heat (Which I don't have) as well as safety wired everything up.  I mounted the unit fairly painlessly and used a molex connector for the wiring.  Checked the cowl spacing and gave it a quick test. As you can see in the video it works well.  It doesn't close as much as I would like, however I'm not overly concerned with anything getting through that space.  If it poses a problem I can upgrade the servo to a 100:1 or more to get something with a bit more pull/push strength.  I'm going to wait though to see if heat becomes an issue as well before I do anything like that.

  

Flaps Position Sensor

Lots of options when it comes to how you want to work your flaps.  The current 10 I'm flying just has a momentary switch on the panel for flap actuation.  My method in landing is I hold it down for 3-4 on each part of the pattern.  I am not a huge fan of this because that means during downwind, base and final I have my hand off the throttle and I'm counting in my head and looking out the window to verify.  I haven't crashed so it works, just not the most optimal.

To alleviate this I put the switch on my sticks which to me is a bit of a no brainier. However I also wanted the flaps to work similar to planes that have 'notches' that work like a Showtime Rotisserie and you can "Set it and forget it!".  Okay maybe not forget it, still need to make a visual check that the flaps are down but in reality you should feel it in the attitude of the plane. To accomplish this I choose to use a combination of a Ray Allen Position Sensor and the VPX.

I will note that PHAviation has taken an off the shelf actuator with a built in sensor which is a great idea.  I'm sure it works great but the stock system I had already installed and the tunnel is a bit cramped with AC lines and the like. I didn't know how the larger actuator would affect that so the path of least resistance was a stand alone sensor.

Even mounting the sensor you have various options.  My buddy Mike was able to install his in the tunnel similar to how the RV-14 is attached.  That's probably a better way but again I had the tunnel all close up and didn't want to try and manage in that area with drills and what not.  Others have mounted it on the tube itself using Adel clamps but to me that doesn't seem as solid of hard points.  It's probably not likely but in theory a clamp could slip over time.

What I ultimately ended up doing was mounting it outside of the fuselage, directly connected to the flap horn itself.  This is extremely easy to get to and solid enough that it's not going to slip around.  There seems to be a concern of water getting in there but I mitigated that a bit with the bracket I made and the way it's positioned.

The bracket I made used a scrap piece of carbon fiber from some of my interior pieces.  I had tried a few things with bending some metal into various shapes. I wasn't happy with any of those options then remember some of this scrap I had.  It's light, strong and had the clearance where I was able to mount the sensor outboard enough to attach on the outside of the flap horn.  I did want to strengthen it a bit so I used some adhesive and attached some skin aluminium to the mounting points.

  

Attaching everything together took a bit more work.  Using RC Plane parts (Thanks Mike and Julie!) I worked a bit to determine the best location to place this thing.  I found that if I mounted it off center on the horn then at the beginning of the horn movement it didn't register.  The connecting rod would just rotate down.  I also wasn't comfortable going between the root and first lighting hole.  It may be fine, but as I'm not an engineer I don't know the kind of load this thing takes.  Following another builders lead I decided to make a aluminium bracket and secure it onto the horn.  I chose to put it inside the horn and stagger the rivets where there was more material.  Took some time to shape it but then it was a matter of putting some adhesive onto the rivets and popping them in.  I added some adhesive just to ensure these don't move over time.

The rest is just drilling holes, and attaching things together.  I tried to get as close to a full 1.2 stroke of the position sensor as possible.  I probably could of moved the rod up just a bit, but figured the middle of my aluminium piece had the most strength so that's where it went.  Here is everything clecod for testing.

Placement of the bracket is fairly important.  In short it perpendicular to the arm being at it's halfway point.  The horn position in these pictures is with the flaps retracted or in the up position.  Therefore I wanted the sensor to be all the way in.  Then I rotated the bracket to that perpendicular angle did some testing with duct tape and the VPX and was happy with the movement and sensing which I'll talk about in a second.  When I was happy with the position it was just match drilling and riveting.

Back to water protection.  The only entry points into the sensor are on the bottom and where the actuator arm goes in and out.  Placing it upside down protects the bottom from any moisture and having it slanted a bit should protect the arm.  I suppose if you leave it on the ramp, with the flaps down in a heavy rain storm then water could get on the arm and then retracted into the unit.... I guess that's the chance I'm willing to take.  Back up plan is manual extension of the flaps through the EFIS.

Talking about the EFIS and flap position I found the setup within the VPX extremely easy.  You seem to be able to chose about 4 positions.  Full up, and full down take up two of those positions.  There's also a reflex option but I'm not sure what that does and haven't messed with it.  The range of sensor movement for mine seems to be 0 - 227.  So 0 is all the way up, so right now I have it stop at 1, then all the way down I have it stop at 226.  I then just made the middle two increments of 75 for now.  The way it works is I push down on the stick switch it goes one 'notch', down again the 2nd 'notch', 3rd time it's all the way down.  Hit it once up and the flaps will fully retract.  That's one thing I'm not a huge fan of, but there may be some way to change it.  For now I selected the 'slow retract' option so if I'm on final and I inadvertently hit retract hopefully it gives me enough time to correct. Because I don't have the wings on as of yet I can't finalize any of these settings.  My goal will most likely be 0, 10, 20, 30 degrees of flaps at each setting.