Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

Drilled and deburred the right seat. All of the seat parts are now ready for paint prep.

While waiting for Julie’s help, I did a little more on the seat backs. I drilled and deburred all of the parts for the left seat back. It’s turning out pretty good.

Sandwiching the seat back between two pieces of plywood and stacking stuff on top didn’t really do anything to help lengthen it. I ended up getting the whole family on top of the plywood. That did the trick. I got it right to 26-3/8″ exactly.

Julie helped me with some riveting today. We got about 1/3 of it done. We did the rivets along the F-704, the arm rests, the F-705, the baggage ribs, and the seam between the center and aft sections along the sides of the fuselage. Not too shabby. I’ll need to take a closer look at a couple of the shop heads as they might need to be re-done.

Earlier in the day I went to the Washington Aviation Assocation show down in Puyallup. I talked with Dynon. They are expecting to have their engine monitor done in the next month or two. Their next project will be a larger 7″ screen that can display either the flight info or engine monitor.

I talked to rep from Superior. He went over the differences between their engine and the other ECI-based Lyco-likes. There’s lots of little things that probably extend the life of the engine. Is it worth the extra money to get 6500 hours out of a crank instead of 6300? And according to him, ECI buys some of the parts for their kit from Superior. There is a lot of inter-breeding between the companies making Lyco-like engines.

I talked with Tony from Aerocraft. They’re working on a center console for the RV-10 and are planning on adapting it to the RV-7. From pictures, it looks like it’s coming along pretty nicely. They also had a Chelton system on display that I was able to play with a bit. It’s a very responsive EFIS.

I talked with Approach Systems for a while about their PDA and Table PC based EFIS. I also looked at their wiring hub. It’s a nice concept, especially if you think you’ll be making avionics changes in the future.

The Garmin booth was swarmed, as usual. I don’t know why they don’t bring more displays and people. I guess when you’re the only show in town, you don’t have to do much work to sell your product.

I also chatted a while with a guy that is building condo hangars at Auburn and other airports. I have my eye on Auburn as the place to complete my kit and keep my plane at least for the short term. They have enclosed rental hangars available now, and more condo units will be available next summer. I’m not worried about hangar availability when I need it.

The last building-related company I talked to was Lindean Aircraft Interiors. They do custom interiors for all sorts of vehicles. It’s nice they’re located close by at Boeing Field, but I think they might be more expensive than the other companies that have pre-made RV seats and interior panels (Classic Aero Designs, Flightline).

Finally, I talked with Will, a fellow RV-builder and flight instructor. He’s been doing some instructing in an RV-6, and said he’d be very willing to do some instructing in my plane for an instrument ticket some day. He also has access to a Citabria and is working on being able to do aerobatic training. That would be very cool.

It was definitely worth-while to stop by the show. I just wish more vendors (Grand Rapids, Blue Mountain, Aerosance, Trutrak, Advanced Flight Systems) would show up there or at Arlington. I don’t really want to schlep to Florida or Wisconsin to see this stuff in person.

The Lancair pilot was sick, so I didn’t get a Chelton demo flight yet. Josh is still working on it.

Adele and I had a sleep over at the Pacific Science Center last night, so no progress on the plane.

The top angle on the seats nests inside the curve at the top of the seat back, so the outer corner of the angle needed to be rounded off. In the past I’ve used various power tools to do this, but I think the easiest method is just using a Vixen file. It took a while to get the radius looking good on both pieces.

I also cut the tabs from the middle of the bottom hinges.

Messed around with the seat backs some more. There’s no order specified in the directions or plans for building these things. I decided to start by drilling holes in the vertical angles. I carefully laid out the holes on one of the angles and drilled them on the drill press using a fence so the depths would all be the same. Be careful to note that one of the holes (the one for the hinge) has a different depth than the others. After drilling one angle, I used that to transfer the hole locations onto the other 3 angles.

The next step was to back-drill the angles to the seat backs. The plans say the seat backs should be 26 3/8″ long, and to trim if necessary. Well, mine are 1/4″ short. I guess the flutes are a little too aggressive. I figured out that flattening the seat backs makes them slightly longer. I put one seat back between two pieces of plywood and stacked a bunch of heavy stuff on top. After leaving it overnight, hopefully it will stretch out a bit.

I moved on to working on the seat back braces. I laid out the holes on the hinges and drilled them. I then carefully located the hinges on the braces and back-drilled them.

That was it for tonight. These seat backs are definitely taking longer than I thought they would. I thought I’d crank them out in one night, but nothing on these things is prepunched. Makes you realize how much time the pre-punching saves.

I talked with two companies today. First I called Mattituck to confirm that the engine mount I needed was a Dynafocal I. The salesperson was very help. He said the lead time on the TMX-360 engines is about 12 weeks. He also mentioned that Sun ‘n Fun might be a good time to order.

I next called Direct2Avionics, the distributor for the Chelton EFIS systems. I got all of my questions answered. The single screen system is not able to do a split-screen display. It’s either the primary flight display, the map, or the engine parameters. When using a FADEC-equipped engine, the Chelton still needs to interface to an engine monitor such as the Grand Rapids EIS-4000. The GPS is not WAAS certified for GPS approaches. Apparently, there are only 40 some GPS approaches right now. He suggested getting an SL-30, which can interface to the Chelton and provide VOR-based approach info. So far, D2A has been providing software updates for free. Navigation data updates need to be purchased from Jepp. One thing I didn’t know is that the Garmin GTX-330 can’t interface directly to the Chelton for traffic info. A $2k unit is needed to convert the ARINC info to RS-232. Ouch. He is also trying to set up a demo flight for me this weekend in a Lancair. That will be cool.

Mailed off the order form for the Finishing Kit!

Worked more on the seat backs. I cut the lightening holes and trimmed the ends of the braces. I also cut the hinges to length and deburred them. The hinge dimensions on the plans are a little misleading. It looks to me like the hinge at the bottom of the seat is 16″ and the one that connects the seat brace is 15.5″. That’s how I cut them anyway. We’ll see how it works out.

While waiting for some help on riveting the fuselage, I’m moving on to work on the seat backs. I want to be able to sit in this thing once I turn it over! I fabricated the 8 angles needed for the seat backs.

There were several chunks of angle to cut, and they wouldn’t fit in the band saw. I dragged out a special metal cutting wheel I bought a while back for the chop saw. I didn’t work very well on aluminum at all. It tends to melt the aluminum instead of cutting it. I tried a really fined toothed blade in my Skilsaw instead. That ended up working really well.