This week I started off by designing a little jig to hold the VA-140 training wing edge so that I could make sure that I was just working on a nice smooth flat surface. Once I got to the shop, I went straight to town on one of the VA-140s that I had to work on and got that all drilled out.I did pick up that I need to make some modifications to the design because the chips were getting in the way so I’m going to add some holes to this jig for when I do the flaps.After making sure the holes were the correct size and countersinking everything, I used some VAB tape to hold it to the inside of the aileron. This is definitely way easier than using pro-seal.Once I got everything cleco’d, I pretty much ran out of stuff to do because I’m just waiting on things. I decided that I was going to add an outlet near my drill press. That took quite a bit of time but I’m glad that it’s done.
On Monday the mailman quickly dropped off my delivery from Cleveland Tools with the trailing edge squeezer set so I went to town and got the trailing edges of the ailerons all squeezed in. This was a great purchase. I’m really glad I purchased this. I wish I had it when I was working on the elevators and the rudder. While working on the second aileron for some reason, and I don’t know why, the skin would just pop up on the last three rivets. It just wasn’t looking good so I decided to drill out all the rivets and I ended up having to replace this one particular piece of trailing edge. It looks a heck of a lot better than it was originally going to.
Once I had the ailerons done, I started mounting them into their final positions and using the hardware. I was hoping that it would force something away from another spot because I was having rivets that were hitting the inside of the ailerons. I just assumed that it was a washer issue. I ended up pulling up the service bolt for the aileron bracket and discovered I had used the wrong rivets. I ended up having to order some rivets and drill them out and just redo it.
Since I was back to not having anything else that I could do, I decided to extend our airline from the loop over to the drill press so that I can have an air hose over there. This is definitely a nice thing to have right next to the drill press.Later that day I ended up getting a nice box from UPS that said Dynon all over it. I opened that up and had my Dynon heated Pitot and my Autopilot servos had come in. That was nice. I ended up putting Deutsch DT connectors on the servos and the Pitot.
The next day I came back and pretty much didn’t really have much I could do other than trying to figure out the Pitot heater controller situation. Some of the ideas that I was able to come up with were:
- Installing some 6-32 rib nuts into the main spar but I’m going to have to call Vans to confirm that I can do it
- I also checked with one of the Facebook groups and some people had suggested using click bond fasteners.
- I’ve also had suggestions on mounting it to the wing ribs, but I haven’t seen any decent ways that I really liked that I thought would be easy to remove the controller if I ever had to.
- Some people mentioned mounting it to the access panel, which I’m not sure if I’m a fan of that either but we’ll see how that goes.
I had also developed some 3D printable conduit clips that I printed with PA12-CF. I took some time and installed all the clips and then ran my RF conduit. I ended up discovering after I ran the RF conduit that I put it too close to the top skin and that was going to interfere with some of the control linkage for the ailerons. I was able to move that one clip to the opposite side of the wing rib and it created enough room.