Hey Guys,

As the firewall re-populating continues I’m migrating to wiring up the engine components inside the GIB headrest and finishing up plumbing/wiring inside the hellhole. 

With the constant rain and wind, due to the Nor’easter currently hitting us, I have the wings inside the shop.  This doesn’t allow for any space right now to do any welding on the rollbar before final paint on that before it, and in turn the canopy, get installed.

As for painting, I am currently working on the black accent stripes on the winglets, with the white wing paint next up on the docket.  Also I’ll finalize the surface finish and get some paint on the lower cowling as well.

“Perfect is the enemy of good enough” is still my thinking regarding paint. 

In between the paint jobs, I will continue to work on getting components installed and wiring knocked out inside the bird.

Today was all about getting the winglets taped up for the black accent stripes that will border the blue accents on the leading edge and top of each winglet.

But before that, here are some shots of the winglets’ blue accent paint with the tape removed.

First the left side.

And the outboard side of the right winglet.

An inboard angled shot of the right winglet.  Again, accept for one run on the left winglet blue accent, these second rounds of paint came out good.

As you can see, to prep for the black accent stripes, the rudders had to be mounted back into place.  Here is the initial border taping of what will be the black accent stripe on the left winglet.

I wanted the accent stripe fairly thick as to be bold and stand out on the winglets.  I know some will give me grief regarding a bold black stripe on a flying surface, but remember that these winglets are vertical and will experience exponentially less heat because of that than if they were on a horizontal surface.

And here we have the black accent stripe and upper blue accent paint all taped up for painting.  After a bit of additional plastic taped in place to protect the remaining winglet and outboard wing, these will be ready to shoot once the weather is agreeable.

In the meantime I will continue working on finishing up the firewall install and getting firewall components mounted.

Today I got the ruined paint on both winglets sanded down and prepped for another round of paint.

Obviously I kept a constant eye on the weather forecast.

Here’s the left winglet in blue paint, and besides one run, both winglets look good.

My evening task was to get the slot for the RAM air scoop’s lever arm created in the firewall.

To do that I cut off the bottom portion of one of the paper firewall templates and attached it to the firewall.

With everything lined up as good I could get it, I then used the paper template slot holes to drill holes through the titanium firewall.

I the removed the paper template, taped up around the holes and used my Dremel tool with a cutoff wheel to create the RAM air can lever slot.

Voila… task complete.

Another task I completed tonight was wet sanding the carbon fiber glare shield on the aft nose/avionics cover before epoxy wiping it with 2 coats of West epoxy.

Still pushing forward . . .

Once again, this post covers the past few days.

First up, a slightly fuzzy pic of the firewall with all the clamps and wedges removed.  Still some fine cleanup work to do, as well as drilling and cutting the slot for the RAM air can’s open/close lever arm.

I then got to work on the winglets to get them prepped for the blue paint swoosh along the leading edge and top of each winglet.  After a final wet sand on each winglet, I then worked the final swoosh design and taped it up.

Both the design and getting all the left and right winglets’ outboard and inboard blue accent swooshes as symmetrical as possible took about 3 hours total.  Note the blue sky with a few clouds in the pic, and no rain forecasted until mid-evening.

Here’s the inboard winglets with the taped up accents.

I had an issue with the gun on my planned second and final coat, apparently the paint gummed up a little in the gun during my wait period between first and second coat.  The second coat shot out dry, and although I put on a good amount, it wasn’t wet at all.  I then had to mix up more paint for a 3rd coat.

My flash time is 30 minutes between coats on the color coats, and this little hitch cost me another 30 minutes before shooting the 3rd and final coat, which after I flushed the gun with lacquer thinner (another slight delay) came out nice and wet.  When I finished shooting the blue paint at a minute before 5 pm, I noticed some darker clouds rolling in, but nothing overly threatening.  I wanted to let the paint cure 20 minutes to get it to “dust dry” before moving one wing into the shop and the other under the carport —both areas prone to dust.

I went into the house to doublecheck the weather on the computer, which said rain was coming at 6pm.  And then went back outside at 5:15pm to get the wings under cover, but it was too late.  The sky had opened up and for over 20 minutes rain poured down.  In hope that the paint may have flashed enough to be ok, I still moved the wings under cover.  But unfortunately it didn’t help.

This is the following day, where as you can see, the rain ruined the paint surface.

Fairly disgusted with faulty weather intel, and apparently bad luck (it only rained for about 30 minutes total… just long enough at the exact time to ruin a good paint job), so I took the next day off from painting (and the ensuing required sanding down all that blue paint) and focused on some other issues… one being a call to EnerSys to discuss both my 12 year old PC680 battery (still acting brand new) and how to recover the PowerSafe SBS J16 battery (much more CCAs) that I bought off Marco a few years back.

EnerSys was very helpful and sent me instructions on how to recover the PowerSafe battery, which I did with the help of the Odyssey PC680.

Tomorrow I’ll get back onto the winglets to sand off the crap paint and reshoot it… WEATHER PERMITTING!

This post covers the last few days…

Starting off, I used the largest pieces of leftover Thermo-Tec heat shield to fill in the center depression on the firewall.

I then traced out the firewall onto my stock of Fiberfrax to create the layer that will cover the entire wood firewall structure, plus an oval to cover the Thermo-Tec in the center depression of the firewall.

I filled any gaps between the Thermo-Tec pieces with red hi-temp RTV before applying it across the entire face of the Thermo-Tec (pic 1).  I then set the Fiberfrax in place and let it cure overnight.

The following day I noted that I still had a significant depression even with the Thermo-Tec and Fiberfrax layers in place, so with a couple remaining large scraps of Fiberfrax, I went ahead and added a final filler layer for this depression… still not completely filling the depression, but good enough to provide an adequate transition.

I had a good bit of errands to run, life administrivia, etc. to knock out, as well as doing some research on other Long-EZ related components like my main battery configuration, brake pedal installation, etc.

Thus the only thing else I got done on the firewall was later in the evening, after the new Fiberfrax was securely in place, I test fitted the new titanium firewall cover.  I’ll admit I missed one hole: the AN3 bolt for the ‘Forrest-of-tabs’ grounding bus inside the hellhole… so I cut that out of the firewall Fiberfrax layer and made a note to buy a 3/16″ cobalt drill bit to make the hole in the firewall the following day….

Which I did.  With ALL the holes accounted for (and created), I then quickly slathered up the original wood/glass firewall with red hi-temp RTV, attached the Fiberfrax layer before then adding more red RTV and setting the titanium firewall in place (which took some fairly creative contortions to get into place).

I then spent nearly 2 hours first getting the titanium firewall set as securely in place as possible with bolts, screws, AN passthrough fittings, throttle/mixture cable securing hardware, etc. before then clamping a piece of wood across the lower engine mount extrusions and wedging the firewall into the underlying fiberfrax (I had meant to get a pic of the Fiberfrax in place, but I was scrambling to get everything mounted before the red RTV cured).

Next came almost an hour of simply cleaning up all the red RTV that was … well, everywhere.  It made a huge mess all over and took a good bit to clean it up.

And with that, another milestone has been met: the titanium firewall and underlying Fiberfrax layer is installed!

Today is a big milestone in this airplane build.

After inputting the few minor tweaks on template #7 I was ready to plasma cut the Titanium firewall overlay out of the 0.02″ thick Titanium sheet I have.

First, I grabbed a collective shot of all the firewall overlay templates that led up to the final configuration for plasma cutting.

Here I’ve got the laptop and plasma cutting table ready for cutting, with the Titanium sheet secured in position.

And here is the Titanium firewall after I plasma cut it.  Not as super clean on the holes as aluminum, but the dross is not much and very acceptable… although minor edge cleaning will be required.

Here’s a quick video I grabbed both during and after I plasma cut the Titanium firewall.  Enjoy!

Pressing forward!

This post covers the past few days, where my focus has been dialing in my Titanium firewall covering that will be overlaid onto Fiberfrax.

As I reported in my last post, I used an old paper template that I had made for not only the firewall size and shape, but the locations of components, pass-through holes, etc.

After cutting out a few points to allow me to pin the paper template to the current firewall, I then marked all the pass-through holes that would need to be made in it.  I then imported the firewall template into CAD.

After getting all the pass-through points and perimeter inputted into CAD, it was now time to start the iterative process of ensuring all those holes were in the correct spot.

Here I’m once again using my plasma cutting table as a plotter, with a Sharpie replacing the plasma torch, for my initial firewall template.

Here’s the initial and a couple of other templates immediately after being plotted out on the plasma cutting table.

I would then spend a good half hour cutting out all the holes to allow me to attach the template to the current wood firewall to check fit and hole locations.  I would then mark up the template as to which direction the holes needed moved, the perimeter lines and if any holes or alignments needed widened or narrowed.

As you can see, after the initial paper template, I did this 7 more times to get the firewall dialed in.  At over 2 hours work per template, that represents over 14 hours of work on these templates.

With lucky #7 needing just a few minor tweaks, my plan is to plasma cut the titanium firewall covering tomorrow.

Inching forward!

As I’ve transitioned into working on the firewall, I wanted to grab a couple of shots to show my efforts in painting the canopy and the inside cockpit.

Here is the canopy with all the inside and exterior tape, paper and plastic removed, except for the protective saran wrap I leave on there until it gets to the hangar.

Although the inside of the cockpit is not visible, clearly all the protective plastic and tape have been removed.  After the firewall is in place I will then work a bit on rollbar to get it finalized for install (some welding for camera attach points then final paint).

I am gearing up to start all the electrical component and instrument panel install as well.

After mucho preppo and a day’s delay in having to reshoot the black edge stripes, I was finally ready to paint the canopy… at night vs mid-morning to mid-afternoon which I prefer to do.

Since I had a fair bit of boat paint on the canopy frame, I needed to seal it before shooting the blue Nason paint.

When sanding the boat paint to get it smooth and contoured for the spray-on paint, I was cautious not to have any break-throughs in the paint down into raw micro.  That being said, there was a significant amount of micro showing through (epoxy wiped vs raw), but I definitely did not strip off as much boat paint as I would have wanted (for weight reduction) in being cautious NOT to have such a break-through.

After shooting the sealer above I had 2 large hairs (not human) on the aft frame near the D-deck intersection.  I scooped them out with my finger and tried to shoot another couple of coats to fill in the 2 areas, but the sealer is so thin it has no real build to it, so no leveling out of imperfections.  Thus I had to wait a good 45 minutes and carefully sand down the spots with 400 grit paper.  This, and one more light coat, did the trick and I was back in business (this is just ONE example of the myriad of on-the-fly repairs, remediations and mitigations that I have to perform on nearly every paint shoot).

I didn’t like the pic I got of the painted canopy, so I grabbed another one the next morning.  The yellow vinyl is to ensure no paint getting through the multiple layers of Saran wrap.

With the canopy finally painted, I carefully pushed it over into the far corner of the shop next to the milling machine.  Since the dew was up to its dirty tricks, I had covered the taped, covered and degreased fuselage/strakes/nose and pushed the bird outside.

With the canopy out of the way, I pushed the fuselage into the shop just far enough to be out of the “dew zone.”

I then uncovered the cockpit areas and shot the aft longerons and the aft corners where the longerons meet the base of the Turtledeck.  Also, although hard to tell here, I also shot a 1/2″ strip on the inboard side of the left longeron with the gray rock paint.  This is because the white longeron peaks out under the canopy on the inside, so I made a stylistic decision to remedy that… easy enough since I was shooting other internal cabin stuff.

I shot a little on the front right longeron as well as inside the right strake where the burn mark was from my heat lamp mishap.  I also did a couple quick bursts on the right edge of pilot’s seatback (bottom right corner of pic) since it was looking dull and not “rocky” enough.

On all the longerons, but especially the left side, the white paint seeped down about 1/4″ inch and literally melted some of the gray rock paint.  Thus the reshoot on all the longerons.  I also had bare longerons peaking out from my roll bar side attach frames, so I shot those edges as well.

Finally, I shot the top of the pilot seat back since apparently during the strake build/tops install I had ham-fisted this area each side with nasty brown EZ-Poxy on my hands… that all had to go.  Oh, and let’s not forget the left armrest storage bin hinge, which was looking pretty gnarly… that got some love in the form of primer + rock paint + clear coat as well.

During my induction period and wait times on the degreaser, etc. I worked for another good hour-plus on my paper firewall cutout, finishing up the bottom half so that’s it now ready to start the iterative process of drawing it up in CAD… coming soon!

Still pushing forward to get this bird in the air ASAP!

I took a couple of hours starting off today to uncover the fuselage/nose/strakes and pull all the tape and protective paper off the painted parts from last night.

On the strake hatch doors I carefully scored the paint around each latch button with a razor blade as to not have any big unsightly chunks of paint breaking off when I popped them into the open position for the first time.

For the right side (pic 1) I merely had to clean up around the edges a little bit and pull the inside tape off.  I’ll note that on my foam hinge spacer I had drilled some holes through and filled those with micro to ensure the spacer didn’t squish on me.  Well, apparently I only did that on the outboard sides because when I finished ratcheting on the middle nut by feel as compared to the outboard nuts, it felt the same when I stopped… but it had squished the foam down a good bit.  Oh well, it’s still mechanically sound and operational.  Plus I have a good “Boy, was I dumb!” build story to tell.

On the left side (pic 2), after cleaning up the latch buttons I then installed the hatch door with 2 nylock nuts.

Here we have the outside of the strake hatch doors showing, both in the open position.

And the real test: How do they looked closed??  Not too bad at all (IMO).  Done and pressing forward!

Here we have the top cowling outboard strips painted white as well as the lower sidewall “wings” (or “flaps”) on the aft nose/avionics cover.  I have to say I’m really pleased with how my color scheme is turning out on this bird (smile!).

So I didn’t grab a pic yesterday of my shooting the black stripes along each outboard edge of the canopy… which was probably a good thing.  The dew/humidity/(rain?) was so bad last night, and got to my black paint before it cured well enough that when I checked the stripes this morning they were all mottled and cloudy.  A big NO-GO.

Thus, I sanded the stripes with 400 grit sandpaper, hit them with degreaser and shot the stripes again.  Before early evening I moved the canopy back into the shop to avoid any dew issues again . . . live and learn, eh?

Last night I spent a good 30 minutes getting some initial measurements annotated for my titanium firewall.  I had also removed the CS124 aileron pivot bracket from the firewall.

Well, tonight I spent a good hour-plus utilizing an old paper cutout I had made of the firewall to fit in place on the existing firewall to map out all the components and thru-holes.  Here is the initial fitting, with the top area aligned.

I then worked downward, finding and marking all the the holes and using blue tape to mark the edges (width) of the firewall.  Tomorrow I’ll continue working my way downward and then soon put all this into CAD and start the trial and error iterations of plotting out thick paper templates until it’s spot on… then plasma cut the titanium sheet.

Inching closer!