Doug and Linda's world

LED Nav lights

admin0 — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:04:44 +0000

I decided to use LED’s for nav lights. After looking around the web at some of the solutions, I landed on Jeff Bordelon’s design. Jeff built a 7A and in doing so developed the LED nav lights for his plane and good designs attract attention in the experimental world so Jeff started selling the nav lights. After trading emails with Jeff over a couple months, I decided this was the solution.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending upon your point of view, Jeff was moving into a new home and we all know where the priorities are when that happens :) . Jeff, was upfront about the extended lead time and offered to put together the parts for the kit and write out the directions for me. All I had to do was assemble :) Worked out great. Jeff’s directions were right on and only had to call Jeff once about the wiring configuration. Spent 10 minutes on the phone with Jeff and he cleared up my confusion and all was well.

(gotta figure out how to keep the pictures in order )

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Wing electrical

admin0 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:43:56 +0000

This past week (Feb 17-22) the weather has been miserably cold. So cold that it was no fun to work in the garage so I didn’t. I’ve been trying to finish up the wings and had set the goal of finishing the month of February. (No hard goal, just something to keep me motivated) Saturday, it warmed up a little so I worked on the electrical wiring in the wings.

Here’s some pictures of the “stuff” that I’ve been working on the last 2-3 weeks.

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And finally, some pictures of the AOA Kit A install

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Wing Tips and electric

admin0 — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 02:58:39 +0000

I’ll post some pictures in the next few days but I’ve been working a couple hours a night… brought the wing tips into the basement as it’s been pretty cold around here and the garage isn’t much fun.

I did the RYO Marker beacon by taking the shielding off of 40 inches of RG400 and attaching a female BNC connector. I then glassed it into the right wing tip.

I’ve also been working on the electrical in the wing. More details in the next posting.

Wing tips - nutplates

admin0 — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:37:56 +0000

Finished putting all the nutplates on the wing tips - including riveting in Archer nav antennas in each wing tip. ~4 hours

Gretz heated PITOT

admin0 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:24:03 +0000

Used the “old” version of the Gretz pitot on the -7A. The new version has a more elegant brain where it will manage the heat on the pitot instead. If I understand correctly, it’s supposed to cycle the heat on and off as needed instead of remaining on whenever the power is applied.

The picture shows the controller held in place with clecos… I decided it would be much easier to pop rivet the controller in place after getting the wiring done rather than struggle with getting the wiring correct with it already riveted in place.

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Trutrak roll servo

admin0 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:06:30 +0000

Not much to this but follow the picture. After installing, it does appear to me that the AP servo will limit the max travel of the ailerons….. not sure what to do about this… tried playing with the stop and the length of the push rod to no avail

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Cold today

admin0 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:38:07 +0000

2-10-08

Spent only an hour or so in the garage where I riveted the wing tip ribs into the wing tips. The outside temp is around zero and when it gets that cold my little heater can not keep the garage work area warm.

Wing Tips

admin0 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:29:06 +0000

Sat Feb 9th, 2008

First post on the RV10 site but I’ve been working on the -10 since Sept of 2007. I’ll go back and update the empennage section later…..

Spent the day working on the wing tips. It’s amazing how you can do both wing tips the same and get different results :)

First step is to trim the wing tips to fit. It’s about 1/2 inch clearance all around. I use a cut off disk and then a belt sander to cut the fiber glass pieces. Anyway, next step for me was to align the flap to full retract, align the ailerons to the flap and then align the wing tip to the aileron. No problem except the wing tip is big and dust makes it slick so it’s hard to hold. Use duct tape to hold in place while drilling the tips to the wings.

Next step for me was to install the wing tip rib to the wing tip. After all this the left tip didn’t align as well as I’d like for it too. On my 7A, the left aileron is a little below the wing tip and in level flight and it is quite annoying to the builder so I was determined to insure these lined up “exactly” on the 10. I took all the cleco’s out (except in the wing tip rib) of the wing tip and re-aligned everything. The bottom was off about 1/16th of a hole off. As I’d drilled these with #40 and the final will be a #28 drill, I re-drilled the wing/wing tip attach holes to #30 and re-clecoed. All looks great now.

I spent all day on these. Can’t believe it took all day. about 9 hours

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Empenage

admin0 — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:29:32 +0000

Just a few pics of the Horz Stablilizer…..

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and Rudder

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and Vertical Stabilizer

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and finally the tail cone

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Empennage

admin0 — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 02:28:23 +0000

This was done last October - Early December of 2007. You’ll find I’m not documenting the building as there are already plenty of great building sites. This is just for friends and family to be able to see a little of what the process is. Also writing this post in Feb of 2008 so it is out of order ….

So here we go again……

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