Tornado and Transponder

Last Saturday a Tornado hit the southeast side of Wichita. It maxed out at an EF3 and the damage trail was about a mile wide in places.  The Cherokees were tucked in the garage safe and sound here at home and the storm missed us entirely except for some wind and rain.  However, Leah and I's workplace took a direct hit and as a result of that we have this week off work.  We went flying in the 2-33 on Monday and between 3 students (Leah, Matt, Bob) I flew 4 instructional flights each lasting ~1 hr.  It was a good day! 

Matt has been working on the Standard Austria with his days off.  I've been doing some work around the house but also getting a lot of work done on YYY.  I bought a Microair transponder a few weeks ago and took this time to start getting it installed. When I first moved to Wichita I got a Garmin 320 transponder but never actually got it installed.  I did have a wiring harness and encoder for it which I planned to use for the Microair.  I spent most of yesterday working with the wiring diagrams of the Garmin and the Microair to get all the right wires moved to the right pins.  I managed to accomplish that without too much trouble.  Today I went out to the avionics shop and got a circuit breaker and a length of RG-58 coax with BNC connectors for the antenna cable. 

Most of the day was spent removing the instrument panel and running errands.  I got a new battery as the old one had drained down so far that it wouldn't take a charge. Then I was able to hook up the transponder and encoder on the bench and make sure everything was working.  All seemed well and the reported pressure altitude from the encoder seemed accurate.  Then I started wiring everything into the glider and installed the antenna.  By the end of the night I had the wiring harness and antenna cable in place and all the instrument panel put back together.  The only thing left is to make a mounting bracket to mount the actual transponder under the instrument panel.  Here I've taken a picture of me sitting in the glider and holding the transponder in approximately its ultimate location.  Hopefully this weekend we'll be able to do some more soaring!

Cherokee project for sale and update

The Wings of History museum in California is selling their Cherokee II, N1861, on ebay. 
Check it out here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HALL-CHEROKEE-II-GLIDER-AIRFRAME-SKELETON-FULL-SIZE-WOOD-FRAME-FOR-DISPLAY-/280862061069?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4164aef20d

No progress on TTT lately but I have finished the aileron gap seals and leading edge smoothing on YYY.  Everything is painted with filler at the moment. At some point it will get painted.  I have also continued to work on the fit of the aileron bellcrank fairings and thought about how they will be installed.  I might try to make a drag rake to test if they actually help.  I also should make a set for the bottom of the wing too. 

A Microair transponder should be arriving soon so perhaps this weekend I will start working on installing it and also try to make some progress on sealing up the wheel well and the wing roots on the fuselage.  The good news though is that the glider is currently flyable so if good weather presents itself I can go fly!

Right Wing

Made good progress today on the right wing and the entire leading edge is now ironed down smooth. Next for it will be to paint on EkoFill.  I also put a bead of silicone sealant around the airbrake as I did on the left wing so that it will be nicely sealed.  Once that cures I'll have to trim it to size.  I also pulled the first layups off the Aileron bellcrank fairing molds.  I used way to light of fabric as I am a rookie at this fiberglass stuff but the pieces i got are good for a test fit and seeing how well this will work.  I am pleased and next will use some heavier fabric and maybe two layers thick.  Hopefully that will provide the stiffness that I want and also give me some material to sand away so I can get a nice tight fit.

Matt has been over a lot recently working on his new-to-him Standard Austria. It's a sweet glider and I can't wait for him to get it flying.  It mostly needs the tail feathers covered and painted and some paint work done on the right wing (which you can see in the picture). 

YYY Work

I have been selfishly working primarly on YYY the last few weeks to get it ready for the season.  I decided last season that I was getting unhappy with my roll rate.  Perhaps it was just my imagination but it seemed like it was starting to get sluggish.   When we recovered I used two pieces of weather stripping, one on the wing and one on the aileron, to seal the gap.  It worked well at first but my theory is that as it deteriorated with time it lost effectiveness.  So, i decided to put a fabric seal back in , which is what the glider had before I recovered it.  I also decided to go all out and add mylars to the top of the wing as well.  Unfortunately the gap on the bottom is a little larger than the top and would required going to a ridiculously large mylar.  The price goes from expensive to stupid expensive so for now we'll just do the tops.Last night I finished painting the last of the EkoFill on the seals and I think the left wing is now ready for touch up painting.  Other work I did to it was putting a silicone seal around the airbrakes and ironing down the bubbles on the leading edge.  Hopefully this evening we can get the right wing in the garage and start on it.

I've also started doing some work on making fairings to cover up those aileron bellcranks.  It's been an interesting process.  First of course there have to be two fairings, one on the wing and one on the aileron. The aileron one needs to be slightly under sized so it will slide in and out of the wing fairing when the aileron moves.  They need to be sized so that when they are they are the furthest apart they still are together.  I started out by using some thin plywood to make a rough outline of what the combined shape would look like when the aileron was fully deflected.  Then I cut what was needed for the wing side from that and used the router to cut that profile onto a double thick piece of 3/4" plywood.  I added a thin piece of plywood to the top of the original template to make the future mold a little taller than the aileron mold.  I then glued some thin plywood to the sides of the wing-side mold to that it would be a little wider.  I used a 1/2" radius and with some filler it is looking pretty good.  For the aileron side mold I realized I had a 4x8 sheet of 1" foam in the garage and I used that to make its mold which was about 200 times faster.  I did have to make a guide with the 3/4" plywood to be able to sand the foam down to the proper thickness. That worked really well actually.  The router also put a nice 1/2" radus on the foam and with some filler it is looking great too.  Soon I will be ready to actually lay up some fiberglass over the molds and then it will be interesting to see how much tweaking is needed to get thing to fit together nicely.  Then it will be time to do the bottom, and perhaps the rudder.

YYY in the Garage

YYY's fuselage has been in the garage for about a week although I haven't really done anything to it.  Leah and I moved in the left wing tonight.  I measured the aileron gaps for future sealing and started taking some MEK to the leading edge in an attempt to fix the leading edge bubbles that have been driving me crazy since we recovered it.  I got about 4 feet of the leading edge de-painted before it was time to fly the nightly race on Condor.  Spring work planned for YYY includes better aileron seals, fixing the leading edges, and doing some sealing work on the fuselage, particularly around the canopy which has some massive gaps and I was thinking about making a cover over the wheel since it is just a big hole in the belly.  Odds are all of this will make no difference in the gliders performance but I guess it will make me feel better.  I'm hoping to do some glide test flights this spring and maybe some oil flow tests.

The wood for TTT's right wing shipped out today so hopefully it will be here for the weekend.  We're looking at a long term forecast with a lot of rain here in Wichita so perhaps that will allow some opportunities to get a lot of work done in the garage.

Ribs

The last few nights with some help from Leah and Matt G we've started to put ribs back in the right wing.  I ordered some more wood from Aircraft Spruce to re-do the trailing edge and to rebuild the area around the airbrake as well as add all the necessary stiffeners to the ribs.  I need to work on the profiles of the ribs now and will need to get the last two false ribs built up to the right shape so they can be removed and used as templates.  Previously they were way undersized which lead to the leading edge skin separating from them, especially on the lower surface.

We moved the fuselage for YYY into the garage today and I did some sanding work on Leah's cedar rowing shell.  We had a really nice day here today with light winds and t-shirt weather in the afternoon.

Here is the current state of the right wing. The two false ribs on the right side are the ones that still need to be replaced.  The rib on the right where the plywood ends is the one that I broke the bottom off aft of the aft spar.  Will scarf in a new piece to replace that rather than completely replacing the rib.

Sawdust

Not a lot to report lately so there haven't been many updates.  Matt G and I did cut out a few ribs after making templates from a set of ribs that I found online.  Used the router I got over thanksgiving and learned that I really needed a router table to do a semi-quality job.  So I very slowly gathered the wood I needed to make a router table and ended up with a pretty nice 4 foot long by 1 foot wide table that the router mounts to.  Tonight I finally got it all finished up and put it to work.  I had two full size ribs that I needed to re-do so I nailed the first one to the new plywood and started cutting. It went great until almost the end when the template became detached and the new piece was ruined. Drats!  I had almost exactly enough plywood to just do the two pieces and no more so I had to make sure to do it right.  Thankfully with some luck (or my incredible skill) I managed to not screw up the pieces and I now have two very nice new ribs to install on the glider.

Plan is to work the next few days on getting the new ribs in place and then I'll finish tweaking the profile of the two false ribs that need replaced.  I have enough scraps large enough to make those I think.  Then I will have all the ribs replaced and can start working on putting the airbrake box back together and then eventually new skin.  I am starting to see the light at the end of this repair!