Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

My dad was in town, so of course I had to take him for a flight. We went up to Friday Harbor for a quick dinner. Before we took off, I decided to remove the nosewheel fairing. I thought it was causing the plane to yaw (it wasn’t–more on that later) and I wasn’t happy with how I had installed it. I didn’t bend the brackets to match the inside of the fairing, so it was puckering at the rivets. I figured they’d pull through in a short amount of time.

Here’s me doing the pre-flight. (Most of these pictures are taken by my dad.)

And here we are before take-off and in flight.

A picture of the San Juans in all their glory.

The plane at FHR and the Friday Harbor waterfront.

And finally Lake Washington and Mount Rainier on the return.

Awesome after work flight. Dad seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

So the fairing saga continues. I haven’t finished the intersection fairings yet. The leg fairings are held in place by a single hose clamp at the top that grabs a couple of tabs on the fairing. Well, those tabs broke off. The fairing was free to rotate and I figure that’s what caused the yaw condition. The top of the fairings are right in the prop blast, so it figures they broke off pretty quickly. They’re really meant to be protected by the intersection fairings.

It didn’t go down to the hangar at all over the weekend. I was too tired and/or the weather was lousy.

I went down tonight, removed the leg fairings and went for a short flight around the patch for fun. I’m definitely making negative headway on the fairings. I just need to buckle down and get them all finished instead of messing around here and there with them.

Doesn’t look much like a plane, huh? Don’t worry. I haven’t traded in the RV-7A. I was just helping my friend Steve with his home project. I really only spent a few hours at it, while he was working on it all weekend.

Went up for a flight on Sunday and cruised by his boat yard. It certainly is a remote spot.

The flight was the first with the nosewheel fairing in place. I’d have to say I was disappointed. The ball is now way off to the left, especially at cruise. I’m hoping I just had the nosewheel somehow canted to one side at lift off. I can’t see how the fairing can be that mis-aligned.

Julie asked me to take a summer intern from her work on a flight. It was Maggie’s first flight in a small plane. She seemed a bit nervous, but ready for some excitement.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t terrific. I was going to try going around Ranier or out to the ocean, but both were pretty cloudy. We ended up just flying around Seattle a bit. She took a few pictures along the way of the Microsoft campus, Seattle, and Bellevue (with Seattle in the background).

Here she is flying the plane.

Right before we landed, she noticed the passenger warning placard and had to have a picture of it. Guess I should have pointed that out in the passenger briefing. Oops.

Back at the hangar, I decided to remove the cowl and check everything out. It’s been a while since I’ve had it off, and I’ve still got a few hours until the next oil change. I checked every fuel line, oil line, electrical wire, control cable, and engine nut I could get my hands on. Everything looks just like it was before first flight with one exception: I’m still getting some wear between an oil cooler line and the prop governor cable. I put some more spiral wrap around the cable, but really need to cover the abrasive stainless braid of the oil line. I found what I thought were some oil leaks, but were actually spilled oil from the oil filter during my prior oil change and/or minor drips from adding oil at the filler tube.

I promised a fellow builder some pictures of the side baffles where they meet the cowl. It’s not a great seal, but I think adequate.

After that, I spent 4-5 hours on the nosewheel fairing. Cutting fiberglass and crawling around on the dirty hangar floor are both unpleasant tasks, made doubly so by the warm, muggy weather. I’m happy it’s done. Can’t wait for the next flight to see if it’ll go faster. The leg fairing should be fairly easy and then I just have the intersection fairings left.

I volunteered for booth duty at the Arlington Fly-in in the Dynon booth. And of course what better way to get to work than fly?!?

I dragged my camera around all day and kept forgetting to take pictures. I did get one picture of the bird on the flight line, although I there was a steady stream of people checking her out.

The fly-in was very well organized. I had no trouble getting in, parked, and leaving.

Working in the booth was fun, but tiring. Lots of really positive comments about our products. It’s fun to hear straight from the customers what they like and what features they want added. Saw lots of friends from EAA and a few people I know from the Renton airport.

All in all, an extremely fun day.

Thursday night I sanded and painted the canopy targa strip. I just used the same Rustoleum that I’ve been using for the interior. I figured that would make it stand out less. Friday night I went down to the hangar and glued it into position after roughing up the plexiglass. I used epoxy, but should have thickened it up a little bit with some flox. The epoxy wanted to run everywhere. I taped it in place in a few spots and let it set up overnight.

I went down to check on it Saturday, and it turned out pretty good. I was having bad dreams overnight that I had epoxied the canopy shut, but luckily that wasn’t the case. The tape I used to mask off around the strip got caught up in the epoxy a bit, but I was able to get it out. And one spot right at the top is lacking in epoxy a bit, but the whole thing is still very solid.

Went out for a short test flight, and it worked great. No more whistle. So much more pleasant.

While flying around, I noticed a plane that looked like it was a long way off and headed right for me. Normally those little spots grow pretty quickly, but this one took a long time to get close. Turns out it wasn’t close at all, just really big. It was the Boeing DreamLifter. I’m glad it was far away as it has a mean wake turbulence.

Coming back in, I kept power and altitude up a little longer than usual to see how fast the plane can drop. The problem is getting it to slow down from cruise to Vfe (flap extension speed). It just doesn’t want to slow down. Once the flaps are extended, it slows down pretty good. I was over the numbers and still had a few hundred feet of altitude. With the 5000′ runway I could have still landed it on the last half of the runway, but decided to not risk it. I put in full power, told tower I was going around, retracted flaps and climbed like a rocket. Second attempt was perfect. That was my first go-around. Good to practice those anyway.

When I got back, I wasn’t motivated to start something new (e.g. the nose wheel fairing), so I headed home.

Sunday I went down sort of late and tinkered with things for a while.

I jacked up the nosewheel. Turning the wheel is still pretty stiff, but there’s no longer any black stuff coming out of the bearing. I checked the breakout force for the castering, and it’s still right on spec.

I tried out my new oil filter cutter on the filter from a few weeks ago. It works great, although next time I should poke a hole in the outside of the can to let the oil drain out first. Made sort of a mess. Tried cutting the paper filter element out, but need a bigger knife.

I tinkered and checked on a few more things, visited with a hangar neighbor who has a Vari Viggen, and eventually decided to go for a fun flight around the patch.

I took off to the south, which I haven’t done before. I usually head Southeast so I can get out from under the class B space and climb up a bit. This time I stayed around 2500′ down to Lake Tapps and Puyallup, climbed up and went over McChord, and then headed north by Port Orchard and Bainbridge Island. I crossed Puget Sound north of Seattle, over to Bellevue, and back in.

I loaded the latest firmware on my AFS screens the previous night, so I was interested to see what had changed. The lean of peak detection was better, but still not great. It’s showing the temperature delta as being much closer now. The span is now around 20 degrees. However, it’s saying my number 1 cylinder is rich of peak and the others are lean, which isn’t true. The screen rotation is now sorta configurable. I can remove screens from the rotation, which is nice. I don’t care for the analog gauge screen. Other than that, it looks the same.

Anybody order a 737 quickbuild fuselage? I was driving to work yesterday and saw these sitting on some tracks in a random spot in Woodinville. Couldn’t resist taking a picture.

Today was predicted to be a gorgeous day and it was. Adele and I launched early for a sortie around Mt. Rainier. This was the smoothest and clearest flight I’ve taken yet in the RV. Simply spectacular.

The destination was in our sites standing tall at 14,410 feet.

Once clear of the class B airspace, we climbed up to 9,000. Getting closer…

Off in the distance was Mt Adams. And in the second shot you can just barely make out Mt. St. Helens on the right. That will be another trip in the near future.

Adele does a great job of taking pictures, and I’ll just let them speak for themselves. This is a ton of pictures, but every side of the mountain is different and incredible in its own way.

I had Adele fly some on the way back practicing holding an altitude and doing some shallow turns. She’s a great pilot already.

We approached Renton from the north along Lake Washington. Tons of boats out today.

Base and final for 33 at Renton.

And a fresh batch of 737’s almost ready to go.

Really an awesome flight. If we hadn’t messed around on the way back, it would have been 45 minutes flat. As it was, we landed with another 0.99 on the clock.

I almost forgot that I tinkered with the canopy “targa” strip last night. It’s turning out really great so far. It just needs a little more sanding and some paint, and then I can affix it to the canopy with some epoxy.

Finally. Some decent weekend weather. Saturday morning I took my mother-in-law for her first flight in the plane. We did a simple loop around the Seattle/Everett area. She seemed to be enjoying it thoroughly.

After she left, I worked a bit on the wheel fairings. I used a drum sander in the Dremel to round out the corners of the openings and then I installed them on the plane again. I went for a short flight to confirm they were working OK. It was super bumpy, but it seems that the 5000′ 75% cruise speed is now around 154 knots true. Pretty sweet. About an 11 knot increase with both wheel and leg fairings in place. One more leg fairing, wheel fairings, and then the intersection fairings. Should see maybe another 5-10 knots?

Sunday was nice again, so I went for a short flight around the patch. I was hoping it would be smoother to get some better speed numbers, but it was still slightly choppy at 5000′. I just messed around a while and came back in.

Once back at the stable I decided it was time to make a fiberglass fairing for the canopy. I got some advice that the curve is compound and that a strip of aluminum wouldn’t work. So I laid up 3 layers of the Rutan bidi about 1.5″ wide with the intention of cutting it down to 1″. I don’t want a huge fairing and don’t see a need to cover the screws.

I closed the canopy tightly and stretched some saran wrap over the area. It was hot, so I was moving quickly to lay up everything before the epoxy set. I put some Dacron over the top to keep the filling and sanding later to a minimum. Next time I go down, I’ll pop the fiberglass off, trim it to size, fill and sand. I’ll then rough up the plexiglass and stick the fairing to it with some epoxy. It’ll be great to be rid of the whistle.

Here’s the bird in it’s current fairing state:

Went down to the hangar early to work on the wheel fairings and get them fixed up. It was something like the 6th cruddy weather weekend in a row, so I figured there wouldn’t be much flying to do. Summer has got to start soon.

I used the cut off wheel in the Dremel to increase the size of the openings for the tires by 1/8-1/4″ in the areas that were too tight. I’ll probably increase them even more in a couple spots. I’m shooting for about 1/2″ clearance, especially at the back of the tire where any contact would cause the fairing to catch and fold inward. I also made cuts through the spots where the fiberglass cracked.

I had just enough fiberglass material left (ordered more from Spruce) to lay up some patches on the inside of the fairings after thoroughly sanding and cleaning the areas. I used some tape and clamps/wood blocks to hold the broken areas in alignment. The whole process went very quickly.

While that was setting up, I worked on the leg fairings. I installed them loosely and jacked up the plane to a level attitude. I wrapped a line around the fairing and tied it to my step ladder toward the back of the plane. Using a water level (just water in some plastic tubing), I made sure the line was level front to back. I then dropped plumb bobs from the center of the plane, front and back, and made sure the line was parallel to the centerline of the plane. I wrapped a tiny bit of safety wire around the line to pull it closer together and centered the fairing based on that. Took longer to explain than to do it. It ended up being very simple compared to some elaborate schemes I’ve heard of.

The wind was again very swirly, but I wanted to test out the leg fairings. To get a real accurate measurement I should have flown the same day with the fairings off. Instead I just tried to duplicate the conditions of my test flights on Wednesday. Based on that, it seems the main leg fairings alone added about 6 knots of speed. Not bad.

The flying wasn’t so great with ominous clouds everywhere and light turbulence, so I kept the flight short. The controller was very helpful calling out the current winds. They varied minute by minute from dead calm, to straight down the runway, to 8 knot crosswind. I semi-unintentionally stayed high on the approach. I was at 1000′ right up to where the Cessnas normally turn base to final. I pulled power, waited for the white arc, dropped flaps, and she lost altitude very quickly. The flare was perfect. Everything was looking really good until right before touch down the winds changed. The plane popped up and then dropped in to a bigger thud than I would like, but I kept the nosewheel off this time.

By the time I got back, the epoxy on the wheel fairings had set up. I removed the clamps and peel ply and was very pleasantly surprised at the result. A little filler and they will be literally as good as new. I just need to clean up the tire openings a little bit with the drum sander in the Dremel.

The good news is that I got the wheel fairings finished and installed.

The weather was good and the evening was free for getting down to the hangar. I went for a short flight to get a reference speed before installing the fairings. Arbitrarily choosing 5,000′ and using a 75% power setting (24″/2400 RPM/leaned to 50° ROP=max power), I was seeing about 143 knots true airspeed. It was varying between 142 and 144. I also took note of the slip/skid ball, which was just a hair to the left. I landed (one of my best yet), grabbed some dinner, installed the nut plates on the fairings brackets, and installed the fairings.

Major problem. I made the cut outs for the tires while I had the plane jacked. With the tires supporting the plane and bulging a bit, the clearance was no good. I swore at them profusely, took them off, trimmed them some more, and re-installed. I made sure there was a finger thickness all the way around.

I took off again and found the winds to be swirling wildly. A cold front was moving in and bringing more bad weather with it. Still plent of time for a test flight before things turned ugly. I got up to 5,000′ again in a few minutes (it’s so nice having a fast climbing plane) and set up the same power setting. I forgot to record the temp on the first flight and it certainly dropped some, but not enough to affect things very much.

True airspeed was about 149 knots. A 6 knot increase. Very cool! And the slip/skid ball was perfectly centered. I guess I didn’t perfectly line up the fairings, but I ended up cancelling out the very slight out of trim condition I had before. On top of that, it was a very nice evening flight with the sun setting in the west. It was a little bumpy down low, but smooth and cool above 3,000′ with no traffic around.

Now for the bad news. The winds were varying and gusting even worse than when I took off. I made one of the worst landings yet. I kept a little more speed on final to help with controllability. I touched down a little too hard, bounced back up, and then landed on all 3 tires rather ubruptly. It wasn’t a dangerous landing, just hard on the landing gear. Not sure what I could have done better given the circumstances.

I feared the worst for the wheel fairings, and sure enough they cracked at the back of the opening due to the tires bulging out. I guess I didn’t have enough clearance after all. Maybe my fingers are too narrow to be used as a gauge. Luckily, fiberglass is easy to repair.

Went back down to the hangar in the afternoon. Weather wasn’t great for flying (again), so I worked on the wheel fairings some more. The layups from yesterday turned out great.

I re-rigged plumb bobs and lines to make sure the wheel fairings were straight and then drilled the inboard holes out to #19. I then went through several iterations on each to get the wheel opening just right. I made sure I had a finger’s width all the way around the tire. I also countersunk the fiberglass for rivets and screws and installed the outboard brackets to the fairings.

Last step is to drill and install nut plates on the inboard brackets and these things will finally be done. I’m hoping to fly once without and once with the fairings and get some accurate numbers on the speed increase. Then I’ll install the leg fairings and fly again. I can also keep an eye on the yaw trim and make sure I haven’t introduced any problems there.

Then I just have to work on the nose wheel fairings and the intersection fairings. There’s always more to do…