Flight testing finished!

It took a little while due to some silly little things like my having dropped the bundy bushes out of one of the flaps in the test & trim again phase (which meant that it was really hard to land as the flaps are like flying brakes).  And wouldn't you know it that the only bolts I didn't tighten, because I thought they'd be coming out again, were the only bolts that weren't taken out 4 times in the course of testing, grrrr.

Anyway it's all finished now and flying well - apparently our fuselage is very straight (which I would like to take credit for, but can't honestly do so).  Gary who did the flight testing took me out as an observer for one of the flights, & we flew over the Welney bird hide, around Ely cathedral which somehow looks quite different from the air, and up to the Denver lock.  The system of canals around Norfolk is quite amazing, dug out around 1760 by a Dutchman, as before that the land was swampy.  I met a lovely couple on a sourdough bread making course at the Denver Windmill, Dov and Rebecca, who spend 4-5 months each year touring England on their narrowboat and who explained all about the canal system.

I have a couple of lovely photos of the windmill as seen past a barley field with poppies poking out amongst the grain, which I will add at some point I hope.  Apologies if I've gone all Denglish today, I've been working on places to go in Germany.

Plane finished, paperwork finished

Today we finished off our paperwork for the LAA, tomorrow morning Gary, our supervisor will check through everything with us for one last time before we drive it over to Turweston.  The paperwork shows that we have completed all the necessary steps of the build and carried out any modifications required by the LAA, and once the LAA have asssured themselves that they are happy with what we have done we will get a permit to test fly.  With any luck that will only take 1-2 days, then we just have to send off more paperwork to the LAA or CAA (I'm not the pilot or the lead builder, so forgive me some vagueness on this point) and wait for them to come back with the permit to fly.  Fingers crossed it all goes through quickly!

I've decided to add random photos to all my older photoless posts, so here's me on short final at the farm strip where the plane is currently based!

Bolting the last pieces together...

We've been pretty busy putting things back into the plane now that it is upholstered.  I didn't quite understand that if you follow the manual you apply the upholstery at 3 or 4 different times, so there's been a bit of work with the carpet knife cutting holes through the lovely grey furry headlining fabric that lines our plane.   You would not believe how difficult it is to drill a hole through that material - it manages to wrap itself around the drill tip then nothing happens.  Anyway the first thing I did was bolt in the brake master cylinder, put in all the brake lines and then with Gary's help prime the brakes with brake fluid, which was fun!  Then I bolted in the cable mounts that Julian had already drilled: the position of the cable mount affects the smoothness of the flight controls, and as a non-pilot I don't think I can get it right.  I also had heaps of fun bolting cables onto the moving bits (that is the technical description).  Whilst Julian got all the good work: 4 days with his head in the footwell, fiddling around trying to get the rudder pedals to move smoothly and as far as they need to go (the rudder pedals are like the steering wheel and we had a lot of time at which we could steer as far as we wanted to the left, but only go straight ahead to the right....)

In terms of minor disasters: I managed to drop a socket into the console (the hole I was working from was 1.5 fingers wide and 3 deep, but the bottom of the console a whole hand deep...) and then a bolt as well.  As it turned out the socket was easy to get out using a special magnet on a pointer tool, but the bolt had disappeared completely: I think it slid down some cables, luckily Julian managed to grab it with the magnet on the fibreglass bottom of the plane and work it out to a little 1 inch diameter hole right below where I dropped it & out through there.

Ok here's another add in photo, Julian doing some engine wiring:

Stunning weather: still on the ground....

Back in Norfolk and the weather is stunning.  Julian went to pick up the plane from the trimmers this morning, whilst I built up the bicycle trailer, put the hitch on Julian's bike.  Added these neat magnetic lights to my bike (a magnet cycles past the light which is attached to the frame), and by a process of induction (?) current is produced causing leds in the light to blink, i.e. completely battery free, so a great backup.  I also attached the pump to my frame, changed my cleats to my travel shoes (no mean feat when the cleats and their bolts are no longer new) and did quite a bit of test riding.  The trailer is really quite fun, it makes the bike ride more solidly, the challenge is remembering that you are now a 3 wheeler and not bumping the kerb....  In the afternooon we went to look at the plane at the farm strip where the last works will be carried out.  It looks really fantastic.  The purple leather seats look exactly as I wanted them to: the trimmers did a really fabulous job of the interior, we are so pleased.  The paint looks pretty smart too.  So we're pretty close to completion now – just a little bit of bolting together to go :-)

Onwards and upwards....

I can't believe how long it is since I last posted.  We've been up and back from London a couple of times, organising things for a friend + family to stay at our flat, and then going down to London to spend some time with them.

As regards the aeroplane I've mainly been working on the doors.  They may not look like much but there's a lot of trimming to fit the door frames (as done by Julian to my wavery blue line), attachment of door hinges, retrimming, adding in the rain gutters, trimming again, then putting in the door seals.  Funny thing is that a seal isn't the really useful bits of rubber that seal, but a less useful more hard piece of rubber onto which the useful bits are stuck.

Julian's been busy working on the wings - cutting holes (tricky as the distance from the outside of the wing and the embedded fuel tank is 5mm, so you want to go easy with those power tools!), putting tubes through and sticking the upwards curving wing tips on etc.  (I shan't get too technical here as frankly it didn't mean much to me until recently!)

Today was a bit of an easy day in a way, a lot of driving around to pick up parts (and drop a few off) and some aimless meandering as we tried to find the really good local butcher.  When we finally did find it Julian almost drove into the middle of what appeared to be their abbatoir - a smallish piece of concrete with a good scattering of what looks like salt and a few remaining tufts of hair.  We got some fantastic skirt steak for a stir fry. This is a really nice cut, that is highly prized in France for making the official 'steak frites', but can be a bit hard to come by  elsewhere.  I also picked up along with bacon a small piece of black pudding to try out for breakfast tomorrow.

We're finally testing our camping gear: after a lot of research I've gone with the Optimus Terra cookset - two pots that fit neatly into a neoprene bag, plus a frypan on top which is also a lid.  The neat thing with this set is that the bag means that you can bring your rice or pasta to the boil, then keep them hot (and cooking) in the neoprene bag whilst you cook the accompaniment in another pot on the stove.  I went the whole hog and got the kettle to match as well, on the theory that it will be a huge luxury to have a non garlic tasting cup of something with breakfast, and since the kettle fits inside the cook set it won't take up any extra space.

Swimming pool blues

I seem to be going through a tough couple of days here in Norfolk.  I arrived at the fitness centre today minus card (I think I left it behind last time I was there) & once the lady at the desk had looked for it & then found me in their system via my name, she said 'oh, you're not wanting to go to the swimming pool!  They've drained it...'  Just my luck.  I hadn't showered since Friday (waaay too long).  So no idea why.  She assured me there was no crack (for non UK people - there was a swimming pool that collapsed on various users in London a couple of years ago), so I figure someone must have died there.  Also not good.

So we went to our next next most local pool, which was hideously awful.  The water tasted funny.  And was cloudy.  There were two lap lanes with only one marker.  (It turns out that the locals need that little bit more room for their laps so use two lanes as one).  Dodgey lighting.  The very worst of English radio music.  The times I feel the desire to listen to dance music are limited, in the pool is not one of them.  And no private showers.  And surrounded by English people who shower in their bathers.  I think it could have been one of Dante's circles.

BTW did I mention that the swimming pool was in March, but it was the 28th of Feb???

Microwave blues

I have a microwave that I love dearly.  It's a Panasonic combination microwave that does the best baked potatoes on its special pre-programmed program in under 13 mins.  Unfortunately yesterday appears to have been its last curry.  I wondered why my dish didn't boil over in 30 mins of microwaving and felt it to be somewhat suspicious.  But today I microwaved our soups (2x = 585mL) & in 9 minutes total no warmth was felt.  RIP wonderful microwave.  You've spared me the cost of taking you to Oz.  And with the number of months it's been my only cooking source I can't really complain.

While Julian's away....

Today Julian went to Gary's to tune something on the engine, so i got half a day to myself to do.... What do I normally do if I've got time to myself?????  So I ended up reading through the instruction booklets to come to the conculsion that there was nothing I could do that didn't involve a) cutting holes Julian had already told me not to do without help or b) filing stuff down (bad for my fibreglass allergy).  So I made a mud cake....

By the end of the day the plane looked like this...

Spiders???

One morning a few weeks back I got up to find little pieces of spider silk over everything, which really freaked me out.  So I checked inside the sleeves, legs and pockets of my overalls before putting them on, shuddered a little while walking through the kitchen area and tried to stay zen about it.  These days I'm really not zen, because I've realised that they're actually short pieces of glass fibre, that are presumably floating around the entire warehouse all the time & generally getting in everything.  Yuck.

Anyway today we did some good work after a slow start.  I started on the wings, Julian did a large amount of putting the rudder hinges on, and tomorrow he and Gary are going to somehow tune the engine before putting it on the plane.  All good.  I had fun screwing little brass fittings into little steel fittings and off again.  The usual.

Backdating and other little tricks

as you will have probably suspected, I've been liberally back-dating my posts in order to have the date match up with the events described.  So this is my first real time post!  (Well now I've corrected the date and time to be English and not Australian I suppose it isn't real time anymore!)  I didn't do much at all today: I was feeling pretty ill. So the boys did a sterling job of fibreglassing the tail of the plane (which took all day) and I managed to drag myself out in time to film Julian doing the last little bits of smoothing the cloth down and then putting the bubble wrap 'tent' over the tail of the plane.  About half an hour later we had a moment of intense concern as the smell of burning epoxy spread out in the warehouse, but luckily this appears to have just been ground off particles that have fallen on the coils of the radiator.  We're slowly accumulating a nasty silt of white dust over just about everything in the warehouse.  I got really worried a couple of weeks ago that we had a spider plague, as there were fine pieces of spider silk over everything, but no it was just fiberglass strands.  If I were to work much more with fiberglass I would get myself something looking a bit like a bee keepers suit to keep the stuff away from me.

Can't believe we're here again already!

After a hectic weekend of catching up with friends, post and work, we're back in Norfolk again.  This time we brought Chris with us.  But forgot to bring Julian's laptop, hence no photos to prove his having been here.  (The software for the time-lapse photography is only on his computer and my web connection is too slow to do anything like download it here).  So after a lot of fussing around, we took the wings out of their crate and rearranged the warehouse a bit, we finally got the tail fin on straight.  Gary came around to check taht we were doing it right.  A big help since we hadn't noticed that the bolts were loose on the jig that we use as a reference to make sure that the tail fin is perperdicular to the roof of the plane so it wasn't measuring correctly.  At all.  Then Chris and Julian spent a lot of the evening flocking both tail parts into place and then screwing them in place.

In the interim I made a duck wing red curry, as I could see that we weren't going to be finished in time to go out to a pub.  I partnered it with a Kuenstler 2003 Spaetlese riesling from the Rheingau in Germany, which was really quite delicious - 8% alcohol and so fruit laden with good acid, very intense.  2003 was a very hot year in Europe, which made for good wines in cooler areas like Germany, but was less favourable for hotter places like Sicily.

Friday morning

A hectic clean and vacuum of the factory unit, placing the last few items needed in London in the car, then a trip to the gym to go for a swim in public hours (7-9am), then home to London via the market so that we could pick up a few pheasants and duck wings.  Ah the joys of rural life!

1 sleep to go!

Tomorrow it's back to London, so was important to get the tail fin and horizontal stabiliser (tail too)  ready so that they can be fibreglassed into place on Monday.  This meant heaps of complex negotiations of placing to make sure the tail is perpendicular to the body, then a whole heap of drilling holes for self tapping screws so that we actually put the tail in the designated angle and position.  And of course the endless fun of pulling mousing lines through the tail with the radio cable (amongst others) attached, with of course the obilgatory putting the wrong size tube through, routing the cables the wrong way, tugging too hard on the cable and pulling it back into the body of the plane so that we have to completely remove it from the plane's body and pull it back through.  The joy.  Amazing how time flies though!

Exxxxpandafoam

is truly amazing stuff.  Quite incredible.  Julian spend a lot of time installing the rear seat just right, treating it with the heat gun to mould the fibreglass to the right shape to fit the plane, drilling dozens of holes so that it could be held securely in place while the epoxy dries, removing them, fibreglassing the join etc., and then along came the new tin of expanda foam.  It smells funny.  It looks funny.  You put a bit in, watch it expand, put a bit more in, watch it expand, and finally you've used up the entire tin 'oh no it's not enough I'll have to go buy some more!' then you check on it an hour later to see the foam mushrooming out of the holes in the seat that had been drilled to put the foam in.  So you remove the mushrooms and keep doing so for the next 2 h.  The next morning the seat is all bulged up, so that anyone sitting on the rear seat feels like they're on a pop ball.  Oh oh.  So drilling of more holes to let more of the still wet foam bubble out.  Apparently the foam can stay wet for a good 10 years.  We just hope that our seat stays level.

And here is Julian taking out the self tapping screws that held the seat back in place whilst the epoxy was setting.

Other people's planes...

always look different to your own.  Today we went down to Denver airfield to have a look at Gary's to get a better understanding of what the trimmer would do and to nut out the thorny issues such as 'did they really want me to mount the seat belt attachments there?'  Anyway the latter question was meant to apply to the rear seat belt attachments, but I discovered that the front seat belt mounts go behind the seat, ahhhh.  Oh well it was a quick repair.  I have a real aversion to redoing any job, but I'm discovering that although it takes 20 mins to do a job the first time, it really only takes 2 minutes to redo it.

Epoxy resin...

will only go hard if you put hardener in it.  Our fuel tank didn't have hardener mixed in the epoxy affixing its fittings, which meant that they loosened very easily.  Luckily we noticed it now & not in the air, as all the fuel could have leaked out!  Anyway that has put the installation of the fuel line a bit behind schedule, as we wait for a new one to be shipped from Oz.

I don't know where the days have gone...

It's Julian's birthday already.  The plane is looking more plane like, but I'm not sure where the last few days have gone.  Progress has been made, slowly, and we hope it's only another 4 weeks until it's ready to paint.

And back again in Norfolk

and being very careful to stay well away from any fibreglass cutting / sanding / epoxy fumes.  The plan is to see if I can be in the factory without getting an allergic reaction again.  This means that my tasks are a little more boring at the moment - I read through the manual, make cross marks where holes need to be drilled, find all the parts needed for each task and line them up on the bench.....  At least I can still cook.  So far triumphs of factory cooking have been oxtail stew in the rice cooker, which was hard work as you have to keep flicking the switch between cook & warm in order to keep the temperature at a simmer.  And mustard eggs (senf Eier), again a rice cooker effort - because the rice cooker gets very hot very quickly it's a good thing for making sauces like this mustard sauce.

Aargh everything is getting so itchy!

I woke up Thursday morning with a big rash on my right hand, which was annoying.  So we decided it was time to head back to London for a weekend that night.  Anyway I didn't sleep very well Thursday night as my face was itchy, and now it's one big raised face-mask shaped red blob.  Which wouldn't be half as bad if it weren't extremely, incredibly ITCHY!

Anyway since we've got a nice fast web connection in London I did a little bit of research into my rash & it's sorta fascinating - I think of glass fibre threads as being a bit like nettle prickles, in that they're tiny silicon needles that in this case inject formaldehyde under your skin.  So maybe this big face rash is just a sign that I'm pickling well and I will retain my current youthful(-ish) looks for the rest of my life!

Firewall prepped but still no engine installed!

We've spent the last few days installing the firewall (the steel sheet that separates the cabin from all the hot combustion taking place at the front of the plane) and the bits and pieces that bolt onto it.  This has meant spray painting some fibreglass parts so that they don't look too awful when oil starts dripping on them, spending what seems like hours trying to drill holes through the steel plate and blunting several drill bits, and figuring out exactly from where they make those precise measurements, listed in the instruction manual.... and yet still getting the holes in the wrong places.  Oh well Gary hasn't said anything about one of my 2 inch wide holes being a handspan closer to the middle of the plane than it appears to be in the manual.  Progress seems a bit frustratingly slow at times.

Now we're going to do a whole heap of jobs inside the cabin from later in the manual, as Gary is pretty busy and we need his help to put the engine on.