Dave’s RV-7A Building Log

There was some discussion on the forum about the Aircraft Finishing Systems primer. I prepped, primed, and installed this aluminum patch outside on my fence over 3 years ago. I cleaned it off with a rag, but it otherwise looks just like the day I put it there.

I was planning on flying down to the EAA 105 fly-in with Julie, but the weather didn’t look great. There was a slight chance of getting stuck down there due to a system moving in during the afternoon, plus it looked turbulent. Wasn’t sure Julie would enjoy the trip.

Instead I worked on the wheel fairings for a few hours in the afternoon. The left fairing is still too wide, so I added 3 more layers of fiberglass to each attachment point. Hopefully that will be enough. I also mixed up some filler to the consistency of frosting (actually started to look edible), and used it to fill the gap under the outboard bracket on the right side. I used some sticky Glad wrap (very handy stuff) to keep it from sticking to the fairing.

I almost have these wrapped up. One more session ought to do it.

I went down to the hangar Saturday and worked on the wheel fairings. The weather was miserable, so I didn’t even entertain the idea of flying.

First thing I did was take a look at the nosewheel. I’ve been noticing some black stuff oozing out of one side and the wheel is still pretty stiff. I removed the whole wheel and checked out the bearing, which looked fine. I re-greased the seals and re-installed. We’ll see if that fixes things.

I jacked up the plane to level the longerons, trimmed the fairings a bunch until they fit over the tires and gear legs, and spent a bunch of time aligning them to the centerline of the plane and making them level per the recommended orientation on the plans. After all of that, I finally drilled the fairings to the brackets. It would be nice if the two fairings were remotely similar to each other. The right side fits pretty good. The left side seems to be about 1/4″ too wide.

I went back down late on Sunday and laid up some fiberglass reinforcement patches where the inside brackets attach. I put a extra few layers on the left fairing in hopes of taking up some of that 1/4″ gap.

I even managed to fly a tiny bit. The weather looked decent, but a bit gusty. By the time I took off, the gusts were increasing. I flew around for about 20 minutes and decided it wasn’t fun flying weather. When I came back in the wind was worse, 20 to 70° across the runway gusting 10-18 knots. A bit over my personal comfort level, but the runway at Renton is long and wide. I had no problem keeping the plane aligned with the centerline, but the plane dropped in a bit harder than I like. I was trying to keep some extra speed on short final, but I think the slip stole some of that away. Next time I’ll keep even more speed on final. Still a fun flight. Even nasty weather is fun in a little rocket.

Almost forgot that I figured out the source of the whistle in my cockpit. It’s coming from the small gap between the canopy and rear window. I put some tape over the gap and the whistle was entirely gone. Much, much, much more pleasant in the cockpit. Time to order some aluminum for a “targa” style strip across the back of the canopy.

Got down to the hangar after lunch on Saturday, flew off the remaining 1/2 hour, made the official entry in the aircraft logbook, and test phase I officially ended. I spent an hour or so getting everything prepped for my first passenger, installed the passenger seat, cleaned the bugs on the prop and canopy, etc.

After putting up with this crazy project for almost 4 years and driving many of the rivets, there was no one else that I could consider for the honor. The plan was to take Julie up and if she was comfortable, attempt a flight up to Friday Harbor. We got into the air and she loved it. The take off surprised me a bit. Between the extra load and the high temps, the plane didn’t just leap into the air. Not a big deal. It just took an extra second to get up to speed and start climbing like crazy.

I let her have the plane as soon as I got it stabilized to help fend off any queasiness. I adjusted power as needed, navigated around our tricky airspace, and watched for traffic.

Julie snapped pictures along the way. She said I looked too serious. Ah, dah. I’m flying an airplane. Alright, I’ll smile.

Here’s part of the Microsoft campus.

Back toward Bellevue and Mercer Island.

Lake Sammamish and Sammamish proper.

Then we got into the more scenic area north of Seattle. Here’s Deception Pass and Mount Baker.

In my limited flying around here, there’s nothing as beautiful as flying up to the San Juans. The islands are clustered together sitting on the edge of the huge Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Looking back at Anacortes.

Island dead ahead, Mount Baker off to the right.

This is probably the best picture of the islands.

Lots of traffic around Friday Harbor, but an uneventful landing. Here’s the beautiful magic carpet.

For those unfamiliar with the area, Friday Harbor is on San Juan Island. It’s at least an hour ride by ferry on top of the ferry wait and 2 hour drive from Seattle. We did the short walk to town and had fish tacos on the deck at Downriggers overlooking the harbor. Very cool to watch the sea planes and ferry coming and going.

I let Julie fly most of the way back as well. We swung over North Seattle and by Snoqualmie Falls before heading into Renton. She had a great time.

Today I took Adele up for a short flight in the afternoon. We just cruised around the Duvall/Snoqualmie area a bit as I let her fly the plane. It was a really hot day, so we kept it fairly short. She’s been studying air and space flight in school the past few weeks, so I was very happy to let her put her knowledge of ailerons and elevators to use.

There was a funny exchange on the radio as we were taking off. Tower was talking to a Cessna that was entering the pattern, “Cessna XXX, enter the downwind behind the silver RV that is climbing steeply and turning crosswind.” Cessna: “I have the silver rocket in sight and will follow.”

Adele snapped a few pictures as well.

All in all, a great flying weekend. Makes all those hours of building (and even some of the frustrating ones) seem worthwhile.

Julie was kind enough to let me pop down to the airport after work. Looking at the right brake, the only problem was that the fitting was loose. I could have just tightened it. However, I wanted to make the line shorter and figured making a new flare would be a good idea since it had been fretting around for a while. It took about an hour to drain the line, cut it shorter, re-flare, re-attach, and re-fill. That brought me to 7:30pm. Plenty of time to fly before sunset.

I checked out the brake on the way over to the fuel pump. It was working great with no more squawking. Hurray!

Then I got to the fuel pump and found it closed for scheduled maintenance. Bummer. But the fuel truck guy was just finishing filling a helicopter. He swung over, filled up the tanks, and gave me the same price as the self serve pump. Hurray! I got a little back story on the fuel prices. There’s a bit of a price war going on at Renton. AirO is trying to encourage people to use the self serve pump, so they’ve been pricing it pretty low. It’s been the cheapest 100LL in the Seattle area for the last few months. That’s been especially nice for me since I’ve been burning a lot of it lately.

The flight was great. I just flew around my usual loop up to Monroe, east to Index, back south toward North Bend and on to Enumclaw. I did some stalls while I was out over the farmland. The AOA warning is working perfectly giving me about a 5 knot cushion before the buffet and then the eventual break.

I was heading back in, but still had 15 minutes before sunset. It was plenty light out still. I turned back east and just farted around a while. The sun was setting in the west just as a full moon was rising on the other side of the planet. Mount Rainier was bathed in the orange light. It was an incredible sight. Too bad for you that I forgot the camera.

Once the sun dropped behind the low clouds/haze, it started getting dark quickly. Time to head in. Renton tower was just shutting down for the night as I reached the class D airspace. It was strange to make radio calls like I was at a dinky uncontrolled airport. No one else was in the pattern, so I just made a straight-in approach to the runway.

I landed, shut down, and checked the Hobbs. 39.56 hours. So close. One more short flight will do it.

I got really close to finishing the test phase, but the weather on Sunday didn’t cooperate. Rain and low clouds kept me grounded.

Monday was a different story. Ceilings were around 4500′ when I took off in the morning. It was very bumpy and not much fun flying. After about 1.5 hours of that, I was ready for a break. I went back up after lunch and the clouds were starting to break up. I found a big hole to pop above and found an incredible sight. It’s like sticky your head out of a cave to find a beautiful sunny day. Above 6000′ there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and all the mountains were out in full glory, Rainer, Hood, St. Helens. I went up to 7000′ where it was very smooth and flew around for a while.

Here’s a pic of the panel in flight. It looks like I’m in the clouds, but it’s just super bright outside compared to inside.

There were a ton of boats out on the water near Olympia.

And here are the Olympics just barely peeking above the clouds.

Up north, the clouds completely disappeared. I did some climb testing at 90, 85, 80, and 75 knots. The climb rate kept increasing, but not by much once I hit 75 knots. Trying to climb at 70 knots would be a crazy steep angle and the engine would cook. Not worth it.

After that, I was down to about 15 gallons. I decided to land and get some fuel before finishing off the last few hours. Port Townsend was handy and I’d been in there before. Turns out the power was out. No fuel. The cafe had also closed, but they were still around and sold me a cookie. There were a few RVs there including a beautiful silver and polished RV-3 fastback.

I didn’t hang around long and consequently the engine was still warm. I have yet to find the optimum starting procedures. It would catch, but not keep running. It took several attempts before she roared to life.

When I got down to the run-up area, I found the right brake was a little weak. It’s been making a squawking noise ever since I re-bent the line to fit around the leg fairing. I’ve been tweaking it to try to eliminate the squawking, but haven’t been successful. I was able to do the run-up, but not at full power. I thought about jumping out and taking a look at the brake, but wasn’t sure what I’d do stuck out in Port Townsend. I never use the brakes to land at Renton as the runway is so long and wide, so I decided to just go for it.

Apparently the brake situation distracted me from doing the rest of the checklist. As I pushed in full power and started to lift off, I found I had forgotten to latch the canopy. I had heard of this happening to others and knew it wasn’t a huge problem. The canopy wanted to ride about 4-6″ open. I held it down a little with the handle while I flew the plane. Once off the ground, I attempted to close it without success. I climbed a bit steeper and was able to slow down enough where I was able to pull it closed. In retrospect I should have been more worried about flying the plane than closing the canopy, but it turned out fine.

I flew a fairly direct route back to Renton, landed without incident and still had over an hour of fuel left. Once I hopped out of the plane, I noticed brake fluid dripping out of the right brake. Apparently all my futzing with the brake line loosened the connection at the fitting.

Anybody who’s read accident reports will recognize the common themes above, a sequence of problems (no fuel available, hot start problems, brake problem, canopy not latched) combined with a case of get-there-itis. Luckily, it all turned out fine. So now I’ve learned not to ignore/delay maintenance issues and I’m going develop a mental checklist to augment the written one I have for pre-take-off. And if I ever end up taking off without the canopy unlatched again (which I won’t), it’s better to abort take off.

End result is that I got to 38.2 hours. I can easily work on the brakes and get that time knocked out next weekend.

The test phase is a strange thing. I want to explore all the capabilities of this plane. On the other hand, there are hundreds of RV-7A’s out there and they all fly pretty much the same. Plus many of the recommended tests aren’t relevant. For example, the fuel consumption test. I’ve already determined that the fuel flow reading on the EMS is accurate to within 3%. Magnetic calibration: already done by the EFIS. Aerobatics: can’t do them until I get sign off from the FSDO. Night flight: not supposed to do that until the test phase is over. On top of all that, 40 hours in a plane is a long time. At this point, I just want to get the test phase over with so I can carry passengers and leave my 50nm cage.

After work yesterday, I got in 2 hours. I just went out and putted around. I snapped a bunch of pictures, and I can’t really remember where they are now. Some are along highway 2, and some are from the Darrington area. Flying in and out of the canyons is very cool, and the views are spectacular.

A few more shots of Snoqualmie Falls.

Today I went up in the morning for 2 hours and joined up with Jim in his Boredom Fighter for a little bit. It’s tough getting an RV to slow down to 80ish. After he went in, I headed down south and just bombed around for a while.

Back at the hangar it was oil change time. My oil burn has stabilized at one quart every 6-7 hours. Not great, but I’m hoping it improves once I switch to real oil. I opened up the case of Exxon Elite that Mattituck sent me way back when and I discovered some handy little red pour spouts. Mattituck should have put them in the mineral oil box, so I would have found them sooner. These things rock! You can turn the oil flow on and off at will. And I can empty a quart into the engine in about 20 seconds. I got a system down where I collected all the residuals while I poured the next quart. Recovered an extra 1/4 quart that way.

What’s wrong with this picture?

While I had the cowl off, I decided to check everything out again. I’ve looked over the throttle cable a hundred times by now and never noticed that I forgot to safety the bolts for the bracket. Luckily, the bolts were still tight. I obviously immediately put some safety wire on there. I also discovered that when I was testing the fuel pressure sender, I didn’t get it put back on tight enough. There was a slow fuel leak there that I took care of.

I put the cowl back on and went back up for another 3 hours. I did a full loop around the perimeter of my 50nm radius test area, exploring a few areas along the way. I went by Enumclaw, Olympia, Port Townsend, Arlington, and North Bend. And that was only 2 hours. I ran into some turbulence along the way and used the opportunity to set the sensitivity of the autopilot. I cranked it up from the initial settings, but then it seemed to twitchy. I ended up with a number just slightly above the default settings (I think it was 10 for roll and 12 for pitch.)

I took a couple shots of Lake Cushman out near the Olympics. It’s a beautiful lake. Looks like it belongs in Norway.

Later on the air smoothed out quite a bit, I guess because it clouded up. I took advantage of that and did some of the climb tests down south by Olympia.

Total so far is 34 hours. I’m within spitting distance now.

I was beginning to suffer from withdrawals after not being able to fly last weekend. Decided to try a flight after work. The drive from the new job down to Renton is miserable (15 min of clear highway and 45 min of stop-and-go), but it otherwise worked out great. I quickly cleaned up from the wheel fairing work I was doing and re-installed the freshly primed cowl.

The weather was clear but very hazy. With the sun near the horizon, it was impossible to see anything heading toward the sun. There was still several miles of visibility, but no horizon and little view of the ground. I was glad to have the GPS. That’s the first time I’ve flown in that low of visibility.

I figure the engine is broken in at this point, so I didn’t fly at full power. I pulled her back to 2300rpm/23″ and leaned about 50 degrees lean of peak EGT. She was sipping around 7.5 gph and going 135 knots TAS (true airspeed). Not bad. I played around quite a bit with leaning the engine and getting a feel for the power difference lean vs. rich of peak. It’s pretty cool to be able to balance speed with fuel consumption.

I messed around with the sensitivity settings on the autopilot, but I really needed more turbulence. The air was so smooth that the autopilot wasn’t doing anything.

I initially headed out toward Duvall. I saw a Cessna doing steep turns at 3000′, so I tuned into 122.75. That’s the frequency at least one local school uses to announce use of the “Northeast Practice Area”. I announced I was in the area and got two replies back. It was interesting to hear how many planes use that area.

I went up to 6000′ to see if the haze would clear up, but it didn’t. I flew up north toward Arlington, back down south toward Olympia via North Bend and Enumclaw, and then back in. Rainier was spectacular popping above the haze and lit up by the setting sun. Really wish I would have remembered the camera. When I called up Renton Tower 5 miles out I was told to “slow down” to follow a Warrior on base. Jeez, I wasn’t even at full power. Gotta love it. Another 1.8 hours down.

What do you call 2 rainy days in a row in Seattle? A weekend.

The weather lately has been a real downer. It’s nice all week and then cruddy on the weekend. I didn’t get in any flying this weekend at all.

I did work on painting the cowl and fitting the wheel fairings. During the week I put a thick coat of Poly Fiber UV Smooth Prime onto the cowl. The stuff has a ton of gunk in it. It took longer to mix than to apply.

Halfway through sanding I was wishing I hadn’t put nearly so much of it on. After a few days of sanding, I finally got it to the point where I thought it was good enough.

I sprayed on some gray primer. It looks OK for now, but it could really use at least another coat of the fill primer. Or hopefully the paint shop I end up using will just take care of it.

Today I worked on the wheel fairings. I previously got the two halves fitting together fairly well. I polished that up a bit and then drilled the two halves for fasteners. Countersink, nut plates, etc. I enlarged the hole on the bottom to make it big enough to fit the wheel.

I jacked up the plane with my new wing jacks, put the 1″ block on top of the tires, and then realized it was getting fairly late. Time to wrap up. I can hopefully get the wheel fairings finished in one more long session.

It’s a good thing Vans doesn’t make fiberglass planes, cause their f/g parts blow chunks. The parts don’t fit together, are not symmetrical, are filled with pinholes, have voids, and just plain look ugly. Can you tell I’m tired of working with fiberglass?

I went down to the hangar and started working on the wheel fairings (after helping my daughter make her mother breakfast). After a few hours, the ceilings lifted to 4000′ or so. Time to fly. I didn’t have any particular agenda. I just flew around for fun for 1.5 hours. I played with the EGT leaning function on the EFIS a bit, and goofed around with the GPS a bit. I just kicked back and truly relaxed. And the big news is the heavy wing seemed to be fixed now. I did a bit more right aileron squeezing after the last flight, and that seems to have leveled things out with the magical 6 extra gallons in the right tank. I’ll probably end up tweaking it some more down the road, but it’s good enough for now.

Didn’t see any other planes the whole flight except for a possessed Cessna. I saw him a ways out, turned to avoid him, and then he made this insane sharp turn and bank like he was trying to hunt me down. I then had to evade the other direction. The only thing I can figure out is that he suddenly realized he was about to bust the SEA class B airspace and decided ramming me was a better idea. (Or more likely, he didn’t see me.) Definitely have to keep the eyes outside the cockpit.

Picked the worst week to start a new job. Five sunny days in a row is pretty unusual in Seattle. On top of that it’s only May. It was killing me to see the great weather pass by without flying. Luckily, the new job at Dynon is great. Way too tired to try flying after work, though.

Today the weather mostly cooperated. I went up for 1.4 hours in the morning. South of the Seatac class B, I was able to get up high enough to find some stable air. Before taking off, I squeezed the right aileron a little bit with the hand seamer. To this point, I’ve only squeezed it by hand. That certainly helped. With the left tank about 6 gallons lower, and the trim all the way to the right, I can now fly hands off at cruise. At slower speeds, it takes even less trim. Using the distance of my body and the fuel tank from the centerline of the plane, I figure it takes about 6 gallons of extra fuel on the right side to counteract my bulk flying solo.

So with the plane trimmed out and air stable, I was finally able to do the stability tests. I thought they were going to be difficult, but they’re actually very easy. The plane has positive static and dynamic longitudinal stability. The dynamic was pretty quick to settle when pushing the stick. Pull the stick took about 2-3 oscillations to settle. The plane also has lateral/directional control stability stability. The final test was for spiral stability. I’m not sure I’m doing the test quite right. You basically put the plane in a 15-20 degree bank and see if it recovers on its own. The problem is that a bank requires back pressure on the stick. When I let go, the plane immediately dives. I tried trimming the plane for slight back pressure before banking, and that helped. Still, it has neutral or maybe slightly positive spiral stability. From what I’ve heard, this is normal for RVs.

Second flight of the day was mostly just a fun flight. I did some slow flight, but mainly did a big loop around my test area. I went up to Arlington, over to Quilcene on Hood Canal, down past Bremerton National to Olympia, over to Enumclaw and back. In a car, that trip would take all day, mainly because of the ferries. In an RV-7A, it takes about an hour and a half. Very fun trip. Now up to about 23.5 on the hobbs. 40 hours is starting to feel like forever.

And just to prove I flew by Olympia, here’s a picture. The state capitol building is dead center and KOLM is at the top of the picture.