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.

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.  :-)

A little more flying...

This weekend I got a chance to take a good friend flying.  Dave is a great photographer so most of the pictures below are from his camera.  We had planned on flying down to Sun River but the runway had some pretty big snow chunks so we planned to fly to Madras.  When we got down there the town was covered in freezing fog so we opted to go a little further and land at Redmond Oregon.  After borrowing the local courtesy car, and eating some lunch, we launched for Aurora Oregon to pick up a part for another friend Ben who drives an RV-12.  A brief stop in Aurora and maybe a cookie or two later we were on our way back home.  This time we stayed low and flew over Portland, up the river, and then crossed near Chehalis on our way home.  All in all we had just over 4 hours of flying and a LOT of fun.

The start of the day

My passenger, photographer, and good friend Dave

Jeff snuggling up for a picture.

Not sure what happened here....Dave must have had his camera upside down or something....

On final to Redmond.  Look at all the snow!

Snowy backdrop.

Jeff and Chad as we taxied out for departure from Redmond

I think this is Smith rock.  Taken on our departure from Redmond.

downtown Portland from 1000' agl

The end of the day after cleaning up the hangar a little

Long hiatus

Wow, it has been a while since I posted any updates but unfortunately for the 10 there haven't been any.  I've been working pretty much solely on the 9A, oh and doing a bit of flying.  :-)

So what have I been doing on the 9A?  Well I recently purchased a new oil cooler that has more cooling capacity than the one I currently have installed.  As the warm flying approaches I want to do everything I can to keep that oil cool so I moved from an 8 row cooler to a 10 row cooler.  As most of you will remember I have my oil cooler mounted on the firewall and that means I have to duct cooling air to the cooler.  So, I've been fashioning new inlet and exit ductwork.  I decided that since I have the cooler off of the airplane that I might as well finish the exit cooler design plans that I had.  I will have more pictures of this process in the future.

Because of the cold air I decided to do something about the temperature in the airplane as well.  Part of the problem is that cold air can enter the cockpit from the tailcone via some corrugated stiffener bends in my baggage compartment covers.  I pulled those covers and molded some soft rubber plugs for these corrugations and then I glued them in place.  So far it seems to have cut the air flow down considerably.

Oh, I'm also trying out a new audio panel that allows me to use a connection bluetooth to my phone for playing music during flight.  No more cables running across or under the panel.  :-)

Below are some pictures I've taken, or my passenger took, while flying the past few weeks.

Mariah and I after our Christmas flight.

This is a picture of the existing oil cooler and inlet ducting.

Jeff and I on an afternoon flight around the sound.

See Seattle in the background?  We are headed North while flying over the puget sound to the West of Seattle.

Oh this could have been such a great picture....I think it was so cold I couldn't hold the camera still...

Andy Karmy in is RV-8 moving in during a flight around the sound yesterday.

Another picture of Andy with Josh in the back seat.  Josh got his first RV ride today.

Ok, this is a selfie that Josh took during an aileron roll in Andy's 8.  So cool!  If you look closely you can see the ground above his head.

Trim Tabs and cold weather

This week was trim tab time.  I figured I could knock them out in a few hours....right...  Anyway they are getting close to being ready to "glue" up and then rivet.  I skipped a few steps on the elevators because the next step for them is to glue (proseal) some foam spacers in place and I wanted to do the prosealing all at one time.

I did get to do a little flying the weekend.  Jeff and I went out Friday afternoon and just looped the Puget Sound.  Then on Saturday we met up with Martin and went to Jefferson County airport for a little breakfast.

Elevators ready for the trailing edge sequence.

Jeff against Mt Si as we pass over my house.

Another shot of Jeff near Mt Si.

Sunset Friday evening.  It was so cold my oil temperature wasn't getting hot enough to boil the moisture out so I did an aggressive climb up to about 7500' to warm up the oil.  While I was up there I caught this picture but it really doesn't do the colors justice.

Jeff and I do our run-up checks.  The sun was just starting to break out over Mt Rainier.  Temperature was about 21 degrees when we took off.

We ran into a little light snow at Jeffco.  This is Martins RV-4 parked next to me and the snow is drifting around.  Not much wind so it was cool to see the snow blow around the prop and plane as we landed.

More Elevator time

Yep, this week I spent most of my free time on the 10.  The elevators seem to be taking forever but slowly they are coming together.  I find that when I reach a point where I stress about a particular step I tend to delay it more than I should.  Such is the case here.  I have been thinking about how to best rivet the trailing edge where Van's wants a special bucking bar.  Well I figured it out and think I found a better solution.  I like to use my tungsten bucking bar whenever I can as it seems to make much better shop heads.  I used a little gorilla tape and my old metal bolt gauge to come up with an interesting solution that worked very well.

Here is the solution...Notice the bend in the metal plate..that's there to help angle the tungsten bar properly while allowing me to put some leverage on it and not ding the lower skin.  One other note of interest, I did elevate the aft spar just about a quarter of an inch so that the angle was better and the flex on the top skin was less.

And the top rivets are the ones I used the special bucking bar on.  I think they came out better than the ones on the bottom that I had to do free hand.

And here they sit at the end of the day on Sunday.  Still not done but very close.  Just a little more riveting and I can start on the trim tabs.

OH, we got a little snow this week so I had to take a pic.

Last year the starter in the 9A broke just before I was to take one of my IFR lessons.  I replaced this starter with a new one and put this one on the shelf thinking I might find another one and between the two make one working starter.  I found out that Sky-Tec will rebuild any starter for less than half the price of a new one.  I took this picture as I was boxing it up to send back.  This will make a nice starter for the 10.  

The cold weather also prompted me to get my Switchbox hooked up again.  I took this picture so I would remember my account info.  This neat little device allows me to start the pre-heat heater on my airplane from anywhere with a text message.  Pretty cool!

Intro to Induction

This week I spent pretty much the entire week working on the Induction system for the 9.  As I've mentioned before I seem to have a problem with my engine running too rich at takeoff.  I sent the fuel servo back to Airflow Performance and there is nothing wrong.  I did buy one of their new induction systems because the next most obvious cause would be turbulent air flow at the inlet to the fuel servo.  Since the new induction parts didn't fit with my cowling I have been modifying them to work.  As you can see in the pictures below I came up with what I hope is a good solution.

I did get a chance to fly it this weekend and I found both good and bad.  The good is that the airplane is actually a couple of knots faster!  The bad, but controllable, is that on takeoff with the induction wide open I actually indicate up to 18 gph now.  Not the direction I was hoping to go with that number.  I say its controllable because I can adjust mixture manually to keep the fuel flow down where I want it.  Not sure what to do next.  Originally I thought it might be an indication issue but given the amount of power that I can add by pulling the mixture out to about 13.5 gph I don't know that it would be just indication.  

So the first thing I did was to cut the majority of the alternate air inlet off.  Then I JB welded some screen to the new inlet.  I then fabricated a cover piece of the same screen material and sandwiched a piece of filter material between the two screens.  This will allow air to flow in but no chunks.

The top screen is screwed to both sides and the edges are bent to capture the filter material.  This picture has the inlet upside down such that the alternate inlet will pull from the bottom of the cowling.

 

Here it is after Harry and I installed the new inlet.

This is the other side of the inlet showing the alternate air flapper valve controller.

Test flight with Harry and Jeff.  In this flight we buzzed Martins house, Jeff's mom and boss, and Harry's neighbors.  Then we went to Bremerton for some lunch.

And this is the next shot in the sequence.  Pretty cool photo even though we were not in tight formation.

Martin took this picture as we were making our second pass over his house.  Notice the jet behind the clouds on the right?