Travels with FatCatAir

Wings!

So this weekend was one of those builder's moments as far as building my Velocity. I bolted the wings (such as they are) onto the center section spar.

---------------------------------------------- Here I am sitting in the fuselage making airplane noises and wishing I was a lot further along on this project. I've had to do a lot of moving of things around to get the plane to fit. At  this point the wings don't have the winglets installed. They won't actually fit in the space I have. My plan is to cut a hole in the roof and have the winglets stick out thru the roof. I'm going to make some sort of temporary structure on the roof to keep the rain outand when the project is complete I'll repair the roof. The first question people ask is how will you get the plane down? The answer is that the wings will be unbolted and brought down separately.

 Here is another view looking up from the first floor. It gives a much better view of how big this thing is.

One of the recent projects was to hang plastic strips to help enclose the second floor so I don't have to heat/cool the entire hangar. This has made a substantial improvement in my heating costs. Looks like the plastic will pay itself off the first winter. You can see the nose of the fuselage protruding thru the plastic strips. Hopefully when I get things a little more rearranged and the wings get trimmed to the actual length I'll be able to rotate the plane slightly and keep it within the plastic. For the exceptionally curious the white thing on the first floor just in front of the Tiger is a mirror grinding/polishing machine. I've have plans to grind/polish a 24 inch telescope mirror at some point. To this stage I've just been trying to learn the machine on an 8 inch mirror. On the Velocity the gap you see on each side where the wings are is where the strakes go. This area becomes the fuel tanks for the airplane. I think most builders would agree that building and sealing them is the most stressful part of the building process. It's not a good thing if they leak.

Jan 14 2008, 05:22:50 PM EST Permalink

FatCatAir site now live.

I've owned the domain fatcatair.com for several years but have never actually had a web site there. The intention was to have this site document the building of my Velocity among other things. Well I recently got a new laptop and that gave me the incentive to finally work on putting the website together. It is pretty crude at this point but it now has all of my construction photos with commentary. So at this point I'll probably not blog about the airplane builder here any more. For keeping up with the construction process you'll have to follow the work over there.
Mar 13 2007, 01:16:45 PM EDT Permalink

Building continues

I've been working pretty steadily on the new airplane. I've got about 175 hours on it, only about 3325 to go. At this rate I'll be done in, ... well maybe I shouldn't really think about that.  So yesterday I glued the center section spar in place. This spar is what the wings will eventually be bolted to.

 

Here you can see the spar after it was glued. On each side you can see legs that go down to the floor. These were use to help shim the spar to get it level from left to right. The spar is also supposed to be plumb although since it isn't uncommom for the spar to have a little bit of twist in it you just split the difference on each side. Finally you need to  make the sweep identical. In other words you measure from a point at the nose to the corresponding spot on each side of the spar (one of the outer bolt holes) and it must be identical. Because it is hard to do that measurement with a tape and be very precise I made a telescoping jig that rotated in a bolt at the nose.

 You can see the end of it resting on the spar on the right side of the photo. In the belly of the plane you can also see the main gear hydraulic cylinder (the long black thing) along with a lot of my mess.

 

 

Here you can see me using that jig to measure to the center of the bold in the upper spar hard point. Behind the spar you can (barely) see that metal ruler is bolted to the back of the spar. There is an identical one bolted on the other side of the sparc. This is so we can check the level of spar from side to side. Just behind that is a web cam. I have one on each side of the loft that is capturing photos once every 5 seconds. Then I have software running on my (Solaris) server in the house that once every 5 minutes analyzes the photos and decides if there is any motion. If there is it keeps the photo with the most motion. When the plane is all done on X years

I'll be able to assemble a movie of me building the airplane in about a 1/2 an hour. That should be pretty funny. This also has the benefit of keeping better track of my work hours than I tend to do by hand. Also my wife can use one of the computers in the house to check and see if I've fallen off the edge of the loft yet.

 

In this photo you can see my neighbor Pat using the optical level to verify that the spar is level from side to side. As far as we could tell it was level to 1/16 of an inch in 12 feet. Unless I walked on the floor nearby :-) For grins we put my digital level on the top of the spar to see what it read. Since the spar is by no means precision manufactured you can't really get the level right that way. However the reading was 0.0! I think it was mostly luck.

 

 

The final picture in the show is not so good. It's a picture of the nose gear doors open with the nose strut just jigged in place to see what it looks like.

I wasn't too happy with this because the door didn't open quite right. It's actually wide enough for the gear to rais and lower properly but you can see that the door on the left side of the photo is touching the fuselage. That's not good. So I ripped it all apart and re-did it all. This is one of the advantage off a fiberglass airplane. If you do something wrong you can pretty much repair it and no one can tell after the fact. In a metal airplane you prety much either have to buy new metal or live with the mistakes. I used a heat gun to soften the epoxy up and pulled everything all apart. On the next try I used hot glue to partially assemble it. I moved where the swing arm are glued into the doors and now the doors open farther and don't hit the fuselage. Much better. Too bad I didn't do it right the first time.

Feb 05 2007, 04:07:25 PM EST Permalink

Neon!

So I had this plan to get my wife a neon sign for Christmas. We'd talked about getting some neon sign/artwork in the past but never got around to figuring out what we wanted or who would do it. Well I decided to do the FatCatAir logo in neon. So back in early November I got in touch with several sign makers trying to get an estimate on what it would cost. After weeks of pestering I finally got an estimate. It was at the high end of my limit so I told my wife that the present I was getting was for both of us so don't get me anything. She was only too happy to oblige. 

Well after it taking so long to get an estimate it was pretty clear that I wouldn't get the sign for Christmas anyway. The estimate was it would be ready the first week of January. Well you know how estimates go. It didn't make it. In fact it didn't even make January unless last Friday was really January 33rd. So Friday afternoon I got a call that it was finally ready. So I quick drove over to the sign maker. The sign is 3 feet by 3 feet. I was pretty sure it would fit in the back of my Civic, at least until I got there. As it turned out it fit by about 1 inch. I was driving pretty carefully on Friday.

So Friday evening was the great unveiling. I had my wife go into the 1st floor bedroom and I turned off the lights except for the sign. Then my niece (who already knew what was coming) guided my wife out from the bedroom with her eyes covered and then the sign was revealed. She was pretty impressed. She was also sorry she never thought to do it herself. So without further ado here's a photo of the sign.

 

The cat isn't holding an airplane like in the real logo for two reasons. First the airplane would be so crude in neon (at this size) that it would mostly look like a blob. Second the current logo shows a plane that resembles my Tiger but once the Velocity is complete and FatCatAir switches its "fleet" to the new airplane, the logo will have to be updated. So my plan was to have my wife make a smal airplane in stained glass that we could attach to the sign. When the Velocity is done she'll just make a new version.

Feb 05 2007, 11:01:29 AM EST Permalink

Some progress

Over the holiday break I got some work done on the Velocity. Nowhere near as much as I hoped to get done but that is always the case. I've decided to work on the fuselage for a while instead of the wings/canard. It's a lot more assembly and much smaller fiberglass layups.

The very first thing you do is level the fuselage side to side and front to back. I have a cradle I built that has adjustable feet so it is pretty simple to adjust for level. The side to side level is pretty easy just use a long (6 foot) level and check (and mark) a few places on the flange. Front to back it a little more complicate since you have to use a water level (or an optical level /transit). The front point is a hole in the flange marked by the factory. The rear point requires some measuring. In any case I was happy in an hour or so.

The you have to mark the airplane centerline and well as the locations of the canard bulkhead, instrument panel and firewall. The instrument panel isn't particularly critical. The firewall and canard bulkhead are pretty critical. You want them plumb and also perpendicular to the centerline. You want to really sure that they are parallel to each other since the firewall has the spar for the wings mounted against and and the canard bulkhead positions the canard. You'd really like the wings and the canard to be parallel to each other.

I fussed with the placement of these parts for about 3 days before I was happy. I think they are as good as I can get them. Once you are happy you use structural adhesive to mount them in place (along with the gear bulkhead and gear pockets). That part went pretty smoothly.

Then I started working on fitting controls into the keel. The first thing to do is mount the upper aileron torque tube. This control stick gets mounted to the torque tube. Here you can see me sitting in the fuselage pretending I'm flying and making airplane noises.

 

This picture is sort of a tribute to Andy Millin who has a similar picture on his web site where he is building a Velocity too.

 

Jan 09 2007, 11:03:31 AM EST Permalink

First glass

I've actually completed the initial fiberglassing of a few parts of my airplane. The elevators are glassed as well as both winglets.

Here you can see the first layup on one surface of one of the  elevators. The weights are there to convince the foam to remain flat with the surface of the table. In the background you can see the second elevator being glued down temporarily with 5 minute epoxy to the table surface. Once the top surfaces are complete the elevators are popped off the table and flipped over and the second layup is done. Because they are glued to the table when you pop them off the foam on that side is damaged. Normally with dings and voids you'd fill them with a dry mixture of epoxy and micro-balloons. Weight is critical on the elevators so instead the damage is filled by "pour foam" (like "GreatStuff" only you mix it yourself). The cloth used in this layup is called UNI. It has major fibers running in only one directions. It has a cross fiber running only enough to keep the cloth somewhat stable. In these layup you cut 8.5 inch strips on a 45 degree bias. So from the 40 inch roll you end up with pieces about 28 inches long. So it takes about 2.5 pieces to cover a 72 inch elevator. The layup is two layers of glass with the fibers perpendicular to each other. Because the cloth is UNI and narrow if you look at it wrong the 8.5x28 strip becomes a 4x40 strip in a moment. It's really a pain to control.

 It took me more than an hour to do one layer of glass. At first I was pretty frustrated trying to get it to lay right. The second layer went faster but still the first layup took about 2.5 hours. In the construction videos it took about a half an hour to do both elevators. When I did the first surface of the second elevator it took about 1.5 hours. For the second surfaces I did both elevators at once and it took about 2 hours. Still pretty slow but improving.

 

After that I started on the winglets. The first thing you do on the winglets is install the comm antenna(s). One of the advantages of a fiberglass airplane is that fiberglass is transparent to radio so the antennas can be inside the airplane and not out in the airstream producing drag. (One of the disadvantages is that a lightning strike in a composite airplane is a much bigger deal than in a metal airplane).

Here you can see the antenna preparations. The antenna is a simple dipole using copper foil (like used in stained glass) for the elements. They are just stuck to the surface of the foam. The coax is embedded in the foam and then covered. The manual say to cut the foam track by burning it with a soldering iron and to cover the coax with dry micro. I cut the slot with a router and covered the caox with pour foam. Pour foam is a lot easier to sand into shape and less bother than making up the micro. The winglet is laying on the piece of foam it was originally cut from. There is a curve on the surface of the trailing edge and in order to preserve that gentle curve instead of glassing the winglet on a table you let it sit on the other foam piece until the initial layup is complete.

Here you can see the winglet covered with the fiberglass cloth. This layup was also done with UNI cloth, two layers. The first layer had the fibers parallel to the trailing edge and the second layer the fibers are parallel to the leading edge. The larger cloth was much easier to deal with than  the cloth for the elevators. The foam beneath the trailing edge is covered with aviation grade release tape (duct tape) so that the winglet can be popped of the lower foam form.

To the right is just another view of the winglet while it cures. The cloth you see at the  bottom edge (and actually is on the trailing edge too) is a strip of dacron that is called peel ply. It doesn't stick to the epoxy  and you can peel it off after the cure and you get a surface that doesn't need sanding  if you are doing a  later layup. It also tends to remove excess epoxy resin and excess resin only contributes weight, no strength. It is also good to use to get a smooth transition from one are to another. Peel ply can reduce the amount of sanding you have to do and anything you can do to reduce sanding in a composite airplane is a very good thing.

Nov 08 2006, 03:19:48 PM EST Permalink

Flying a Velocity

I got to fly a Velocity yesterday. A local owner that knows me from the builders email list had promised to give a ride some time when he was going flying. His plane is based at TTA in Sanford which is real close to where I live and close to my drive home.Last evening he gave me a call at work and said he was on his way to the airport if I wanted to go. I was out of here. It's a very nice airplane, an Oshkosh '97 award winner. This is a photo that I stole from Gary's website. He's actually looking to sell the airplane and get an RV-7. It was a really nice evening, very smooth. This airplane is a 173 which is smaller than the one I'm building. It has an IO360 in it so it has 200HP. It has a fixed pitch prop. I'm not sure if it is climb prop or a cruise prop but it isn't really lacking in either category. When we took off we didn't have much trouble getting close to 2000fpm climb. Makes my tiger look like the climb challenged airplane it is.

We flew around for an hour or so. I got to fly it for most of the time. It's a very nice flying airplane I'm really looking forward to flying my own in the distant future.

Oct 12 2006, 10:04:47 AM EDT Permalink

Wings - foam attached

After being away last weekend in NYC I got to do some airplane building this weekend. I've finished attaching the foam cores to each of the wing spars. I had done the leading edges two weekends ago. They turned out to be easier than the trailing edges. Mostly because they fit better which is because they are smaller and thicker. The trailing edges needed a lot more help lining up. In addition since you want the trailing edges straight, real straight you need to clamp these long straight edges to them. Here is the left leading edge while it is clamped and curing.

I didn't have much problem with the left side. The right side I ended up messing up the foam on the trailing edge. As you can see on the photo from the left side the aluminum channels are being held in place by clamps and bungee (and duct tape that you cant see). The duct tape is what mostly holds the channels together. On the left wing I didn't use duct tape on the whole length and I had the bungees pretty tight. While it was curing I was working the right wing and some of the duct tape popped loose. I caught it before the bungees tried to gouge the foam.

On the right wing I used duct tape on the whole length of the aluminum. I also didn't tighten the bungees as tight. Of course when I checked it the next day the duct tape had given way and the bungees had gouged the foam. You can barely see it in the picture below since most of the damage is at the outboard section of the wing. At least it is an easy thing to fix.

 

One thing I realize is how much room this is all going to take. I can't see how people build these things in their garage. I've got a 20x40 foot area here and I'm really starting to feel cramped. I'm already working on a design where I'll be able to hang the wings in storage out in the open section of the hangar to get them out of the way when I'm not working on them.

Oct 03 2006, 01:15:05 PM EDT Permalink

Building, sort of

Well after months of preparation I'm finally starting actual work on building my Velocity. It's not much but it is something. I've started sanding the wing spars in preparation for epoxying the foam to them. I've done about 3 hours of sanding so far.

I'm not really happy yet with the state of the sanding but I just had to get the leading edge  foam blocks out of their billets and place them on the spar just to see what they looked like. You can sort of imagine wings starting to appear. Well at least I can. Hopefully this weekend I'll actually fit the blocks to the spar and actually start mixing epoxy. My neighbor Duane claims I haven't really started building until I mix up some chemicals and cut some fiberglass cloth. He has higher standards than I do, I'm happy to finally be working on the parts I got almost 3 months ago!

 

Sep 08 2006, 10:05:43 AM EDT Permalink

It's Here!

Well Travis showed up yesterday morning with my Velocity kit. Pretty exciting! I've been wanting to build an airplane since probably '87 when I got my pilots license. The plane I wanted to build changed a few times over the years (though it's always been fiberglass) but now I'm commited. The trailer was smaller than I expected though the total of the parts was larger than I expected based on the picture on their website. Here's the parts unloaded in my hangar:



Since that doesn't give much perspective to those who haven't been to my hanger here's one with my sitting in the fuselage bottom (aka "the canoe") looking silly.



Jun 16 2006, 11:16:21 AM EDT Permalink

So close

So I took a break from building the second floor in my hangar on Sunday to do a little flying. Very litte. All I really did was fly to Siler City (19 miles away) to get fuel and back. As I was approaching Siler and doing my radio calls I was aware that another plane was following me in from the east. I could never make out the aircraft type but they were far enough behind me that there was no worry about competing traffic.

Anyway I landed and when I called that I was clear of the active they came back and said they were crossing mid-field and would do a touch and go. As I'm fueling the plane they finally came into view on final. It was a Velocity! Dang it. They did a touch and go and were gone. If only I had been able to understand them on the radio I would have had them land so I could take a look at it.

So when I got home I put a message out on the Velocity builder's list asking if anyone on the list was at Siler. Sure enough I got an answer back from Gary. Turns out he's based a Sanford (TTA) which is only 8 miles (by air) from my house. I've arranged to meet him the next time he goes out flying so I can get a little Velocity fix.
Apr 11 2006, 08:39:19 AM EDT Permalink

Mezzanine

So my kit airplane will be arriving in June and I need a place to build it. I could actually build it in the back of my hangar but since it is going to take me years (seven is the projection) I'd like it somewhat out of the way . Since we have our big annual party at the hanger each year that would be a problem.

So since the end of January I've been working on putting a second level in the hangar. The intention is to put a lot more insulation in the walls since I intend to heat & A/C the hangar. Also I want to sheetrock the walls since it will make it easier to put storage on the walls. Well 2 weekends ago I got the floor joists pretty much done. So I can finally see what it is going to look like. Here's some views, first looking from
the front of the hangar (what a mess!):


and now from the mezzanine looking to the front:


To give you some perspective. The hangar is 40'x60' and the mezzanine covers the back 1/3 of the room so it is a 20'x40' area. This past weekend I actually put some plywood flooring down. So I can finally walk from side to side. More importantly I can measure the height to the roof at the middle of the space. It is 7'6". The bad news is that a Velocity is 7'8". Good thing I can retract the gear! Actually when you build it the wings are only attached for a short period before you get to final assembly so it isn't really much of a problem. When I get to final assembly I'll be selling the Tiger and the Velocity will be moving to ground level.
Mar 29 2006, 09:48:56 AM EST Permalink

Oh so much safer!

So about a month ago I flew my plane to Houston to have some work done on it. I got the fuel tank leak fixed and some other stuff I put off. I also got the annual inspection done. Two weeks ago I went and picked it up and flew it back home. It was pretty expensive [ > $6.5k ] but it was nice to finally be able to have full tanks again and my flaps rigging is actually correct for the first time since I owned the plane. The only really annoying thing (and the reason for this entry) is my seatbelts.

When the did the annual inspection one of the things that was "wrong" was that my shoulder harnesses were missing the TSO tags. I didn't even know they ever had the tags. Could you just sew a new copy of the tag on? Oh no only the manufacturer can. So I had to replace the shoulder harnesses with new (old really) harnesses at a cost of $260. I feel sooo much safer now. I'm glad the FAA is protecting me so well. It'll be so much better when I build my Velocity.

So here's a picture of one of those really expensive tags...

   Mar 24 2006, 09:48:29 AM EST Permalink

9NC8 - KHOU

I just got back from flying my plane to Houston. I've had a small fuel leak that I needed to get repaired in addition to some other squawks and the folks at FletchAir are pretty much experts at fixing the fuel leaks in planes like mine. So even though it was pretty far I didn't have much choice.

The airport in Houston that I was going to isn't the "big" airport there but it is still quite busy and the entire area is in class B airspace. It was going to be the biggest airport I'd ever landed at.

With ordinary wind conditions it would take about 7.5 hours to fly from NC which I could normally do with a single stop. Because of my left wing tank leak I was being cautious about how much fuel I put in it so I was planning two stops, one in Georgia and one in Mississippi.

I'd been watching the weather all week and it looked like no matter what at least part of the flight was likely to be IFR. My original intention  was to fly to Mississippi the first day (Fri.) and finish the trip on Sat. and then fly home commercial on Sun. By late Thurs. it looked like the weather in La. and Texas was going to not be very good on Sat. so it would be better to try and do it all on Friday if it was possible.

Friday morning the weather here was great. Checking the forecast the high had moved into a very favorable position and it looked like I would even get a tail wind most of the way. Usually going west you just hope the wind isn't right in your face, a bit of a tail would be great.

I took off and had no trouble getting my clearance to the first stop. I was making good time, almost 140 knots across the ground. I got to Thomaston in no time. This is just south of Atlanta and I expected going in that the controller would be real busy so I expected to try and get my clearance on the ground for simplicities sake. As it turned out the controller wasn't really that busy.

I refueled, filed the next plan and took off. I contacted Atlanta and got a transponder code but no clearance. Then when the controller called back  when I answered he didn't hear me. Ah crap. I tried the other radio, still no good. I tried both radios back and forth still nothing. Finally another pilot on frequency told Atlanta what was happening and the controller told them to try and relay a new frequency to me (I could hear Atlanta fine). I switched frequency and immediately got thru. Whew I was not looking forward to trying to figure out what frequency to try.
Now I'm off to Mississippi and the wind is even better I'm doing a little over 150 knots this time. In two hours I'm landing again.

Now I have to make the decision do I go the rest of the way now or not. Checking the radar it looks good. A call to flight service and it is as expected it'll be actual IFR most of the way but nothing convective and the ceilings are quite high in Houston. I'll probably have to do a real approach (only my 4th "real" approach since being IFR rated) but it should be a piece of cake. I cancel my hotel room in Mississippi and take off. In about a 1/2 an hour I'm in the clouds. It's real smooth, 58 degrees, and raining. As flying in the clouds go it was quite easy. The first 45 minutes or so I'm having no trouble. Then I got near some airspace ATC didn't want me in so they vector me straight west for 15 minutes or so. It's out of my way but no big deal. I'm told that I'll soon be back on my course. Well when they put me back on the course I'm told "join victor 212 and then as filed". Now I filed direct so this was a bit of a strange clearance but whatever.

Unfortunately I've got to find victor 212 first. Which requires reading the map. Here's where it gets fun. Flying IFR single pilot can be a pain if you don't have an autopilot and now you have to divert your attention from the instruments to read a map. It's especially painful today. Because of my fuel leak my fuel strategy is to burn my left wing mostly empty and then switch to the right. This causes the plane to be right wing heavy so it really wants to turn right bad. In some planes from the cockpit you can trim this out, but not in my plane. Usually I burn one wing for 1/2 hours at a time to try and keep it with reaonable trim.

So everytime I look at the map trying to find V-212 and the VOR and the radial the plane tries to give me an "unusual attitudes" lesson. It was not much fun. I finally find it and figure out what to tune my radio to and things are fine again.

In 20 minutes or so the controller asks if I'm going to be doing the ROKIT-7 STAR (standard terminal arrival). I say I haven't been assigned it but I'll do what they want. So they assign ROKIT-7. So I have an IFR certified GPS and it has the STARs builtin, I've never done on but I know how to call it up. I call it up and now it want to know which transition I'm going to do. Crap now I have to go look in the approach procedures book to figure out which one I have to do. Once again it's unusual attitudes time". I figure out the transition and now the GPS is happy and I'm back to it being easy again. I don't actually end up doing the whole STAR bacuase after the 3rd waypoint they switch over to just vectoring me around. They ask if I want to do the ILS or if I want to try and just get vectored for straight in. After all this I want a real approach so I ask for the ILS. They didn't really want that answer because the ILS is for 12 right (a big runway) and they want me on 12 left so I'm out of the way of the heavy traffic. So they tell me that once I break ought and see the runway they want me to sidestep to 12-L. So as it was I only got to fly the ILS for a short time but at least I got the chance.The landing was uneventful and it ended up taking just over 6 1/2 hours of flying time. Not bad I definitely lucked out on the wind.

I got my plane ticket switch to Saturday from Sunday and got home a day earlier than expected. Based on the weather on Saturday I definitely made the right choice pushing thru on Friday. The weather was bad enough I might very well have been stuck in Mississippi until Sunday.

Now all I have left to worry about is how much all the work on my plane is going to cost...
Feb 27 2006, 11:37:54 AM EST Permalink

Composite class

I haven't had much to say lately, I need to work on that. Last weekend I flew down to LakeLand Fl (X05 to be exact) for an EAA class on building with composites. Since the airplane I order is all composite I figured it'd be good to try it out on something that wasn't so critical or expensive!

Here's the result of one of the projects we did, a mini canard



We hotwired the blue foam and then did the various layups over the two days. The blue foam is very similar to the stuff you'd see at Home Depot or Lowes except the the cell size is larger in the "aircraft" foam. You can maybe see it in the photo. It came out pretty well.

We also did a layup of a molded fairing and also constructed a bulkhead. There was also a demonstation of vacuum bagging. In the construction I have to do there'll be no vacuum bagging.

There were 12 of us in the composite class. Only two of us were actually committed to building an airplane. Three people couldn't follow directions on the canard that were repeated at least 3 times and ruined theirs. They should probably avoid building an airplane!

Now I'm all excited about starting to work on the plane but the parts won't be here until June. Putting in the mezzanine in my hangar should keep me busy.

Feb 17 2006, 03:42:03 PM EST Permalink