Travels with FatCatAir

Monday February 05, 2007

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.

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.