This morning I realized it has been ages since I’ve put pen to paper, as it were, to share with you all that’s been happening with the build. Let me start by saying that we are ridiculously happy with our new place, and it is such a wonderful luxury to have a complete hangar space a few steps from the house in which to work on the airplane. One of our challenges has been finding everything we need. While we have all the parts well organized, labeled/marked, and on shelves in the hangar, various tools and tubes of goo are still often difficult to locate. Invariably, the tool we need is in the garage or basement – up at the house – instead of in the hangar. Likewise, when we need something in the house it’s out in the hangar. We’ve made innumerable trips back and forth between hangar and house to fetch tools and such, but as we move along we’re getting things to where they need to be – mostly.
With the comfort of having all our major componentry – fuselage, wings, tail cone, empennage – mostly complete, and now being able to see them all next to each other in the hangar space, we’ve starting putting some big things together. In addition, we are making forays back in time, and backward in the instruction book, to pick up where we’d left off on certain sections. The instruction book looks like a rainbow now, with many multicolored tabs poking out the top, denoting where we have steps or sections yet to be completed. Over the past few months, we’ve been starting to chip away at those smaller, unfinished tasks to help us complete pages and sections of the book. It’s very satisfying for my OCD to check those pages off and remove the colored tabs marking the pages.
Ken started the summer’s airplane work by mounting the exhaust system on the engine. We had waited for a while for a part from Vans, which arrived a couple months back and proved to be the impetus for selecting that as the first thing to work on. Once installed, we were able to do the initial fitting of the lower engine cowl. In the weeks prior, I had that cowl up at the house where I worked on installing the aluminum heat shield on the interior of the piece. That was a tad fiddly. The piece of what basically amounts to a thick piece of adhesive-backed aluminum foil was not large enough in its initial in tact dimensions to simply cut out the shape we needed as one piece. Because of this, I first made a template of the area to be covered with the shielding using some of the free brown paper that everything comes wrapped in within the Vans kits (very handy stuff – we also used it to wrap things for our move – I’d recommend not throwing it out if you can spare the space to store it). Next, I laid the rectangle of aluminum shielding material on the template and traced it, being careful to conserve as much space on the foil as I could. From there, I trimmed the template as needed for any areas that were overhanging the foil piece, and fit those template pieces as best as I could on the remaining foil. There was very little material left after cutting it all out, but it turns out I needed to use almost all I had.
Next, to install the shielding, I started with the biggest piece and worked slowly, peeling away the backing from the adhesive side as I went. I used an old plastic squeegee from installing decals on something in the past to flatten the material as I went and press out any wrinkles – it’s impossible in my view not to get some wrinkles, no matter how careful you are. But the squeegee (or an old credit card) does the trick in flattening them out. After the big piece was in, I placed the smaller sections and flattened them as well. The trickiest part was going around the protruding heater intake port. Its more three-dimensional shape is challenging to wrap with a relatively flat piece of material. To ensure full coverage, I cut some smaller pieces from the scraps of foil left from my initial cuts and worked at the gaps. It was also tougher to smooth this area, but with persistence and after some small foil cuts on my fingers (that stuff is sharp), it was done and looked like the photo in the instruction book – one can’t ask for more than that.
To fit the lower cowl, we placed it on the fuselage, securing it with its hinge pins. We then checked for any interference, particularly from the exhaust system parts. Thankfully, there is some wiggle-room on the exhaust mounting, so we were able to shift it slightly (about 1/4 inch) to make it almost perfect. Following the guidance of the instruction book, I then used my Dremel to shave away some of the aft side of the opening in the cowl for the exhaust tube so that it met their recommended clearances. Satisfied with the fit, we set it aside and moved on.
Next on the list was attaching the flaperons. We had built them what seems like ages ago, and had them stored up in our bonus room at the old house while we worked on the rest of the kits. Now – thankfully – we were able to attach them to the wings. Ken had some help from his brother to get each wing up on a horizontal surface to enable the work. One was on a padded workbench, the other laid across a big old sofa that we have out in the hangar (you have to have a place for visitors to sit and gawk at your build, after all!). Once the flaperons were in place, he attached the appropriate hardware per the instruction book. It was while attempting to properly tighten these bolts that we discovered our torque wrench had somehow failed and was no longer functional. After waiting a couple of days for shipping, the job was done and the flaperons attached. He was able to connect a small battery to the flaperon motor to test it out, and…they work! So cool.
With the wings looking like…well…wings, it was time to fit them to the airplane. As I may have mentioned previously, the RV-12iS has removable wings so that you can trailer the airplane and tow it to where you need it. Before you say, ”holy [cow], how do you keep the wings on?”, note that there are enormous spars that run through the fuselage from each wing, and each of those spars is connected to the fuselage with big beefy metal pins. Each pin is connected to a microswitch that basically won’t let you “turn the airplane on” if the pins aren’t in place. “Pin” might be a bit deceiving as to the true size of these things. For comparison, for those who spend any time in the kitchen, they are about the diameter of an English cucumber. Hopefully that gives you a better idea of the heft of these safety devices. Once the wings are fitted and the pins in place, those wings aren’t going anywhere. The mechanism is set up such that the two pins – one on each side behind each of the pilots’ seats – must pass through both wing spars. It is an extremely solid assembly when everything in place. But, getting the wings in place was a wee bit of a project.
Keep in mind, the wings are meant to be removable – to fairly easily go off and on the airplane as needed. So, it’s important when fitting the wings that you can actually take them in and out without a huge struggle. Ken worked at this for a while, over several days, and was not getting to the ”easily go off and on” point. He decided to get some help, and asked our new friend Brent Connelly to come by to have a look at the airplane and provide some advice.
If you are not familiar with Brent, he has a great little YouTube channel (https://youtube.com/user/brento41) where he shares videos about his flying adventures in his RV-12. You should visit and subscribe (shameless plug). We had visited Brent in the early stages of our build to look at his beautiful airplane and ask questions. Now we were living fairly close-by to him, and actually now belong to the same EAA chapter out of neighboring Sky Manor airport (N40, EAA chapter 643; check them out at https://www.eaa643.org). Brent came by the hangar one sunny Friday afternoon and spent several hours with Ken, going over things and giving tips. Best of all, with his help, the wings are fitted. It really really looks like an airplane now.
There has been a lot happening in the last few months outside of our build, so we’ve not gotten full-swing on it yet. It’s tough with a new house and million projects to tackle there, large and small; from painting rooms to installing ceiling fans and a wood stove to planning for a kitchen reno, there’s a lot happening. We have had many visitors to our new home these past few months, which has been so wonderful. We’ve relished spending lazy sunny days in the pool, my band has played a bunch of really fun shows, and Ken and I had a couple of very nice long trips on our sailboat. We also managed to do a road trip in New England in September, and I did a boar hunt with my Uncle Bob in Pennsylvania a few weeks back (yes, I got one, and so did he!). While we may not have done as much as we’d hoped on the airplane this summer, we have made progress and – most importantly – we’ve been able to enjoy our lives, our new home, our friends and family, and all that we are lucky enough to have. With the pool closed for the season, the boat winterized, and the house getting in shipshape, we’ll undoubtedly have more time to spend in the hangar.
We’ve been attending the local EAA chapter meetings and are making new flying friends there. It’s great to have folks to talk to about what we’re doing, who don’t look at us like we’re from outer space when we say we’re building an airplane – they’ve all done it, too! It’s a community of kindred spirits, and something we were so hoping to find in this new place. Ken’s had a friend fly into our little airport a couple of times; last time to pick him up for a boys’ weekend up at Lake George. After dinner some nights, we stroll over to the airport and listen to the Unicom, watching the airplanes come and go or the skydivers land. We are so fortunate, and life is good.
We Should Build An Airplane 