Tuesday, February 28, 2017

CNC assembly begins and yes...another flight.

This week Jeff, Martin and I flew down to Tillamook to visit the blimp hangars.  We were aware that there used to be a museum there and were surprised to find that it is still there.

Work on the CNC is progressing and I'm enjoying working in the warm house.  I've basically completed the structure and now I'm researching the electronics.  The kit doesn't have much for instructions when it comes to the electronics.


A pile of CNC parts.

The pile gets smaller but structure starts to form.  In this picture I found that they had sent me the wrong size support beams (the cross member in the middle of the picture)

Squaring things up a bit.


Gantry installed.  At this point things are moving very smoothly.  You can see where I have the Y axis stepper motors installed but no belt yet.

And here we see all four stepper motors are installed as are the belts that they use to move.  One of the two spindle mounts that I printed up is installed and the support crossmembers are installed (after a trip to the table saw).  At this point the main structure is complete except for the spoiler board that acts as the base upon which my project sit.  Now its on the the electronics.

Jeff sitting in his airplane in front of the guppy.

Not a good perspective to see how big the guppy is but still a pretty cool picture.  That building in the background is a blimp hangar from 70 years ago!  It was huge, and it houses a small aviation museum that we didn't know would be open until we walked in an open door.

Martin as he was pulling up to the guppy.

The inside of the guppy.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

More plastic parts and some flying

Seems like it's been so long between flights lately due to the weather but Jeff and I still managed to get a flight to the San Juans in this past week.  Friday after work looked like a nice day for flying so we saddled up and flew to Lopez Island.  There was  a beautiful sunset on the way home and it was just a gorgeous evening for flying.  The camera just doesn't do it justice.

I also spent a considerable amount of time working with the new 3D printer making some parts and prototypes of parts.  Below you will see a series of pictures of  the new intake that I designed with Solidworks.  So far its looking like it will work but I won't know until I try it.






Oh, I got the new CNC parts today.  Looks like I have a project for the next week or so!

Ok, here is the first part of the new induction.  This part will get bolted to the front of the fuel servo.  It has holes in the sides that I will eventually put some sort of door on that allows me to get alternate air if the intake gets blocked.

Next on the list is a plate that gets bolted to the first part.  The purpose of this piece is to act as a base for the air filter that you can see in a picture further down.  The small lip you see on the top is what the K&N filter will clamp on to.  The ring around the outer edge is for the cone to bolt to.  This part is designed very similar to the James intake I had on the airplane originally.

Attached to the plate is this big cone.  Actually this is only half of the cone.

Here is the bottom half of the cone with the air filter inside.

Another picture of the air filter.  I took this one to explain how the ram air will work.  I need to cut a hole in the top of the filter and then using the top of the cone (see next picture) I can have a butterfly valve to either allow air directly into the servo or to pass down the side of the cone and through the filter before entering the fuel servo.

This is a top down view of the top part of the cone.  Here you can see both the bypasses on the side of the ring, and the ram air inlet in the middle of the ring.

This is a view from the outside of what the entire assembly will look like.  The small hole you see in the middle is for the butterfly valve that I will use to control the ram air flow.

Another top down view.  Here you can see the area of the intake filter that I need to remove to allow bypass air.

Finally here is another part that printed that will be a phone holder Ram mount for the airplane.  I use my phone to take pictures a lot as you all know and I've always wanted a safe place to put my phone that is easy to reach.  This has edges to prevent the phone from slipping but it also has a powerful magnet in the middle that will hold the phone in the cradle without clips.  This works very similar to the magnetic phone holder I use in both the car and the truck.  This still needs some sort of cloth or rubber backing to act as a bit of a cushion.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

3d printer

I mentioned last week that I had purchased a 3D printer.  Well this week I got a chance to try it out.  In fact since I purchased it its been printing day and night!  I'm pretty impressed with it but it did come with two broken plastic clips that hold the bed down.  I emailed their support and they replied within an hour with a promise to send me new parts and also included a file that I could use to print my own parts!  So the first picture below is the first of two parts that I printed.

On Sunday Jeff and Martin and I got a chance to fly down to Newport Oregon.  Its a nice little town and a beautiful flight.  I tried to use my new 360 cameras that I purchased for some VR stuff but I'm not 100% of the quality of the images.



Printing the parts needed to fix the printer.

My first self designed part in the printer.

Here is the finished part...12 hours later...

Nice sunrise again for our flight on Sunday.

Martin in his RV-4 off the left wingtip as we fly up the Oregon coast

Jeff over the Puget Sound as we approached Tacoma.  You can see the Tacoma bridge in the background just in front of Jeff.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Oil cooler mods

As most of my long time readers (both of you) will recall I mounted my oil cooler on the firewall behind the #4 cylinder.  Well I also suffer with some less than optimal oil temperatures during extended high power operations.  Well I have tried many different approaches to bringing down the oil temperature some with a little success and some with little to none.  Well this week I am posting the next chapter in this never ending saga.  I decided to replace my existing oil cooler with a larger oil cooler.  The cooler I have in place now is an 8 row oil cooler so I decided to replace it with a 10 row oil cooler.  They are both about the same size but the 10 row has more oil passages giving it a higher capacity.  In doing so I decided to replace the inlet air duct as well as fabricate the outlet air ducting.  That took me a couple of weeks but I finally have something I can show.  It turns out that I built the inlet duct a little too tall so I have to go back to the drawing board on that one.

I also decided that I have been without a CNC and a 3D printer long enough!  I ordered both this past weekend and the 3D printer should arrive today.  Expect lots of new posts in the coming months with new things I am trying.  Starting out with the oil cooler inlet duct, a new alternate air inlet for my fuel servo, some headset hangers for my flight headsets, and possibly a headset control model mount for said headsets.  :-)

By the way, if you are a member of EAA you can download a free copy of Solidworks for designing different items.  It has a pretty good learning curve but WOW there is so much you can do with that software!

The inlet duct I fabricated from fiberglass is on the left and the outlet duct is on the right.  Note that the outlet duct is designed to allow me to hook up my 2" cabin heat air hose so that I can take advantage of all that hot oil heat!

Kinda hard to tell from this picture but the new oil cooler is installed and the inlet duct is sitting on top.  You can see from the picture that it sits too high and will interfere with the cowling on the right side of the picture

This is the outlet duct with the cabin heat air hose sitting just off to the left of it.  The duct is not bolted on in this picture, just set into position as a trial fit.

Oh yea, we also got a foot of snow on Superbowl Sunday.  Made for a nice snow day on Monday.  :-)