Author: farmerDan

Day four saw us start with a renewed vigor. There was no longer time to start new projects. And some of the items we’d started were not going to be able to be finished in the time we had left.

The first thing I wanted to do was to get the airplane onto my stands. It was really easy to do and nothing went wrong, but I was concerned that we might try to mount them last minute only to find something was amiss and there was no time to fix it before we left. That would be a serious problem since the plane had to ride home on these stands. As I said, it ended up being no problem and everything fit up perfectly.

It is hard to see in this pic, so I’ve drawn in some arrows. Normally this side of the airplane is enclosed in fabric and inaccessible. However Robby had been putting baggage doors in because it saved you from having to crawl over the seats to access the rear baggage area. Despite the planes small size, the baggage area is pretty generous. Reaching the back of it from the cockpit would be a challenge. With this baggage door, it is simply.

This door however is the first piece of custom work I was doing to the plane. Luckily Robby had a mockup of a door he’d done previously so between his mockup and my existing frame, I was able to make up a frame fairly easily. Well, after I designed it wrong and Robby stopped me so I did it correctly.

The door frame was made by welding up 90 degree unions from 4130 steel from our door kit. I’d done those over the weekend. Then I cut aluminum tubing into sections and mocked it up. Once it looked like a good fit, I mixed up some Hysol and went to work.

I was unfamiliar with Hysol prior to starting this build. I’d used plenty of 5 minute epoxy, JB weld, and Acraglas before. Mainly Acraglas because I use it when I’m gunsmithing. Hysol is another epoxy and it looks and works similar to JB Weld, but is has the work time of Acraglas. And it is an interesting work time too. At first it is a thick paste, pretty gooey. But as it starts to set over the first 30 minutes, it becomes more like clay or fondant. Once that starts happening, you can wet your fingers with alcohol and start working it with your hands, shaping it and smoothing it. Once you get a feel for it, it makes for pretty easy and good looking work.

The door is Hysoled in place, aligning with the existing frame.

Here you can see the inside view. The gray goopy stuff is the Hysol holding the door frame in place. Once it sets up, it is like concrete.

Once we finished up for the day, Spork and I once again headed out for dinner. But this time Jenny and Robby were meeting us at their favorite place in New Bern, Persimmons Waterfront Restaurant. Spork and I got there early as Jenny was flying back from Manteo and Robby was driving to New Bern to pick her up at the airport.

There was some concern because Jenny was bucking major headwinds and turbulence that was “the worst she’d ever seen.” Considering she is an aerobatic instructor pilot, when she said she was scared my heart rate went right up. Fortunately she made it safely and we worked to have a drink waiting on her.

No not this one. Spork and I sat at the bar where we ran into a waiter from 247 Craven we’d met he night before. Now I really was starting to feel like a local. There was a very nice young bartender behind the bar and again nobody in the place. The bartender was using her time to concoct new drinks. What you see above is version 3.2 of a poison apple. I don’t remember what was in it and I didn’t try it (it has caramel on the rim, no sugar for me). But Spork and I had a large time being part of the creative process. We talked to the other staff, compared notes and flavor profiles, talked about what this drink we pair well with, and worked on specific gravities of the different ingredients trying to get the correct look.

There was a lot of science ongoing at the bar, and Spork and I were able to bring a lot of school topics into the discussion. All while not actually drinking a drop.

Jenny and Robby eventually arrived and we had a stellar meal and a great time with Jenny and Robby at Persimmons. It may be my new favorite place and definitely somewhere I’ll take SWMBO if she comes down with me.

Day three was a busy day. Spork and Robby worked hard to get the flaps finished while I worked on seat belts, the lockable tail wheel and its cable, and finishing the dorsal stringer.

They had to redo one of the flaps because a part was installed upside down. This meant they actually built three flaps instead of just two. When Spork and I took our EAA workshop to try all four build methods, wood, fabric, composite, and metal, his least favorite method of construction was metal. Oops. I kept reminding him that at least here he was only building a couple of flaps vs the entire airplane.

Needless to say, he was glad the flaps were finished.

I asked him later if he still didn’t like metal building as much. His answer was interesting. When we were in Oshkosh at the workshop, he really didn’t like the cleco pliers. They were hard to manipulate in his smaller hands and that was the main driver of him not liking metal work. He didn’t share that detail before, so all I knew was he didn’t like metal.

But he’s literally grown a foot since Oshkosh. He has a man’s hands now, and the grip strength to go along with it. After working on the flaps, he said that he didn’t love metal, but it was surprisingly easy for him now. So note to self, if you kid or wife isn’t in love with helping on the airplane, it could simply be that the pliers are too big for him/her.

One of the things I changed on my build was I substituted the standard tail wheel for this beefy one that was lockable. The machining on it was a thing a beauty and now I can lock the tail wheel for cross wind landings. According to Robby, I’ll use it a couple of time and then never use it again. He’s probably right (he usually is) but as a low time tail wheel pilot I just felt better knowing I could lock the tail wheel. It should help with cross wind parking and taxing too and it didn’t add much weight. Plus it looks sexy, so there is that.

After getting the tail wheel mocked up, I mounted the lock handle in the cockpit. This took more time than it should because the factory sent me the tail wheel kit for the SuperSTOL XL, not my regular SuperSTOL. This meant I has several extra feet of cable. That would mean I could move the handle pretty much anywhere I wanted to, necessitating a lot of fit up, discussion, pondering, etc. After all that, I ended up putting it exactly where the factory said to anyway.

The black writing on below the red tail wheel handle is a mockup of where the fuel shutoff will be.

We were Robby’s seventh Just Aircraft build. However his first build was performed with the help of an aviation legend, John Stanley. John was kind enough to come by several times while we were in Grantsboro and even went to lunch with us and bought us pizza one day. He was a humble and generous soul and a prince of a man.

John soloed his first airplane in September of 1966 and graduated the Air Force flight academy in May of 67. He served in Vietnam, and then later left the military to become a contractor. He flew with Aero Services based out of JNX, who was my neighbor at JNX for 20 years. John spent a considerable amount of time overseas flying on missions he still cannot talk about. He flew these dangerous and secret missions until he was 72 years old! He then decided to retire and while a bit lost from all the sudden free time, he decided to help a young guy build a kit plane. That was Robby and his first airplane build.

On this day, John stopped by and asked me if he could give Spork something. He pulled out his wings from his military flight suit. I was shocked and honored. John wanted to pass his wings along to another aviator, which Spork intends to be. I assured John that when Spork earned his private pilot certificate, that I’d pin the wings on myself. What an honor!

We gave our thanks to John and said goodbye, then it was back to work. I needed to cut and remake the cable for the tail wheel, which basically involved taking the entire cable apart, measuring it, marking it, measuring it again, and then cutting it hopefully not too short! I managed to get it together with barely enough length. With that, the tail wheel was installed! At least for now.

I needed Banner occupied while I was on my back. And Spork needed a break. Both puppy and boy were glad to play with each other for a while so it was a win-win.

With the tail wheel done, I moved onto the seat belt attach points. There are cables that are made up from provided hardware and wrapped around a cross member in the cockpit. Robby offered that I could do a single attach point and basically just use the cross member itself but I thought I’d go with the factory recommendation since seat belts are about safety and all.

It took a while to make up all the cables, assemble the hardware, etc. It also took a bit of trimming of the floor pan, removing the seats, etc. Between the seat belts and the tailwheel, I pretty much used up my day.

When running the cable for the tail wheel, Robby showed me a trick using tie wraps to make standoffs for the cable. It was simple, efficient, light, and cheap. It was also safe because it keeps the cable from rubbing and maybe wearing through.

These tie wraps come from Lowes and have steel reinforcement making them very strong and safe.

At some point I need to build a hanger door for when we finish the airplane. I wasn’t sure if I liked Robby’s design or not. I mean, I like it. I’m not sure if it’s what I want for my door though. I think I may build a bifold door instead. Regardless, I needed pics of the design.

Robby recommended this book to me. It is a condensed version of the FAA’s rules on how to do pretty much everything to an airplane. How much overlap does the leading edge of a fabric panel need to have? There is a rule for that and a requirement. Safety wire required? Find out here. How to cut a hole in the panel? Yep, all the things you need to know, and the proper and improper way to do it are contained. I have a copy on order.

We called it a day, cleaned up, and Spork and I headed out to dinner.

I made a point to take Spork out to dinner each night that I could. We used to travel to New Bern quite a bit because my buddy had a boat there. Spork and I have  few favorite hangouts we wanted to hit again and we were making our rounds hitting them all over the course of our two weeks in town.

On night three or four out on the town our bartender said hello to us, again. Turns out she’d worked at the previous night’s stop, MJ’s Raw Bar. This night she was at 247 Craven, another one of our favorite places. At this point, I was starting to feel like a local. We were half way through week two and now we were starting to know people and be a tiny part of the community.

This night at 247 Craven was uncharacteristically slow so we had a good opportunity to talk to both Kristen our new favorite bar tender, and Dillon pictured above.

Kristen, besides being a fantastic bartender, it turns out is related to a famous aviator. Dillon was on standby for OCS school with the Navy. He was waiting on a pilots slot and was waiting tables to make ends meet. Dillon also cannot swim, something that I was incredulous about since he was talking about joining the Navy!

So between Kristen and Dillon, we had lots of aviation talk and some awesome food. Spending time with these fine folks was an perfect cap to our great day.

 

Day 3 dawned cold and snowy. I traded snow pics back and forth with The Princess at home. She was highly disappointed there was no snow for sledding. I was glad we had sleeping bags, and LP heat in the cabin.

Day three was flap day. There was a big effort to put the flaps together and get all that riveting done. This was done by Robby and Spork, with me only taking pictures. In fact, looking back now I’m not sure what I did on day three. Thank goodness I took notes!

Day three saw me installing the tail wheel and it’s locking cable. I’d originally ordered the non-locking standard tail wheel but when I was at the factory I saw the upgraded tailwheel and decided I had to have one. It is a beefy, shiny, awesome looking tailwheel and it was totally worth the upgrade price. Unfortunately the cable they sent was for the SuperSTOL XL instead of the regular SuperSTOL. Oh well, I guess I can add cable splicing to my list of things I know how to do.

Not to be outdone with my sailing injury I brought home from the Bahamas, Spork managed to cut himself while working on the flaps. I gave him all the sympathy you’d expect out of a bunch of guys, which is less than none. There was some mockery or his life threatening injury, of which he was the instigator. Then work resumed.

Apparently I also worked on the stingers more on day three. Specifically the one that is on the bottom of the airplane. The ventral stringer, maybe? This one was a piece of cake. It only attached at the front end. The back end was basically free and terminated behind the baggage compartment. No crazy shaping. No need to match top to bottom. All I needed to do was to do exactly what I’d done on the other stringers, drilling, shaping, etc. But in addition I had to put a small bend at the free end of the stringer. Easy.

“So Robby, how do you bend this tube?”

“I just bent it on the bench by hand.”

Sounds easy enough. I’d rather use a vise so I can put the bend just where it needs to be and have some control but Robby did it, I can too. That should have been a clue I was doomed.

I got everything ready, holes drilled, spacing correct, etc. Even as easy as it was, we are talking about several hours of work at this point. Then I took the stringer over to the bench and carefully put a bend in it, at exactly the wrong angle!! I didn’t realize it had rolled on me slightly while I was holding it. Of course, in the vise I wouldn’t have done that but I was trying to be one of the cool kids and do it by hand.

Maybe I can bend it back and get the angle correct? After a bit of futzing around, I broke the piece. Argh!!

Robby calmed me down and showed me how to splice the pieces back together. That involved making a splice from some scrap tube, then using Hysol and rivets to put the pieces together, which meant leaving the whole thing to dry overnight.

With the flaps basically done (except Robby’s was upside down. Oops! Score one for Spork), and my spliced stringer glued up and drying, it was time to call it a night.

We thought we’d leave Sunday afternoon to return to Grantsboro, but in the end, with all that we had to do before we could leave, we ended up leaving early Monday morning. Driving straight through, we arrived just before 8am, and within 20 seconds of Robby. Pretty good timing.

I didn’t mention that the previous week we had a bit of excitement. I had to run to the hardware store to grab some supplies. When I went to leave, I met a volunteer fireman who had the road blocked. He told me that I had to turn around and go the other way. Complying, I turned around and headed back down the two lane road, past the hanger, and then into another road block. I asked if I left, would I be allowed to come back through the road block to get back home. There was much confusion over this question, but eventually, after much debate I received the official verdict.

“Um, maybe.”

I went to the hardware store but told Robby via text that I may not make it back. Driving through the back country to circle around, I found every road blocked and volunteer fireman and even younger kids blocking roads. Whatever it was, they were serious. Eventually I made my way back in through the road block and work resumed.

We really didn’t know what happened till the next day when a neighbor stopped by and told us there had been a murder. This was maybe 1/4 mile from where the hanger was. When we had lunch this week, I saw this in the local paper.

Apparently she’d had enough of the old guy. Word was she was a bit different anyway, but who knows. It is not like we haven’t dealt with dead bodies before. Anyway, mystery solved, we went to work.

One of my first tasks was to bend the elevator push rod. That is the black rod you see in the above picture. It is what controls the up and down  of the airplane, as in pull back = houses get smaller. Push forward = houses get bigger. It is a major control. Bending a control rod may seem like a bad idea, but all we are doing is introducing a few degrees of custom bend into the push rod so it doesn’t rub and runs true. It is actually difficult to see the bend in the pictures.

If these bends aren’t put in there, the push rod still works just fine. The problem is it rubs ever so slightly on the baggage floor. No sense rubbing the paint off or introducing extra friction into what you hope is a smooth control surface run.

With the controls running free, and some clean up of tools, rivets, trash, etc completed, it was time to start learning how to cover.

All the fabric for the entire airplane comes in one roll. It really isn’t that heavy, but once all the glue is applied, then the primer, paint, another coat of paint, decals, etc, this ends up being a significant portion of the overall weight of the airplane. It is also a large part of the structure, very similar to how the skin is our largest and most important organ. The fabric is very important to the airplane.

The glue that is used is pretty amazing. You mix it with acetone to thin it to the desired consistency. Then you brush it on in relatively thin coats. Above you see a grey part and on the tube closest to the camera you see it barely tinted green. This is after a couple of coats.

Now you see the glue applied at a correct consistency. It is technical, tedious, and demanding. It is also color coded and basically arts and crafts. Glue till it is green enough, then move on. And the materials, while important, are not individually that expensive. If you mess up, get some more and do it again.

But as I was saying, the glue. You paint on a bit of this glue and work around the part in a circle. When you get back to where you started, the glue has already dried so you can keep right on going. Once it is thick enough, you trim some fabric material as you see here. This part is exacting not because you’ll crash if it is wrong, but because you want it to look good. Straight lines, clean cuts, etc. You put a bit of glue on the fabric, then start folding it over the glued up parts. Now remember, the glue has already dried, it actually dries in seconds. So how does it stick?

When you fold over the fabric, you apply a bit more thinned glue that soaks through the fabric. This is where the magic happens. The glue is thinned so much it is basically just acetone. Acetone reactivates the glue, through the fabric. It immediately becomes sticky again and then you adhere the fabric to the now sticky glue. Give it 15 seconds, and it is dry again. Don’t like it? Peel it off, reapply and do it again.

What is your work time for this glue? How long will the glue reactivate with acetone? Robby was at the stage in the picture above one time, stopped working on the plane and went to Alaska for the summer, came home, and went straight back to work. The glue sat patiently waiting and only needed a bit of acetone to reactivate.

So you use the cool glue to basically wrap your part like a Christmas present. Trim the corners, make the folds, get the lines straight, etc. With everything wrapped, and glued you end up with a part that looks sorta decent, but has floppy fabric sorta hanging loose. That is when you introduce the best part, the iron.

You see, the fabric material shrinks with heat. You have three settings on your iron for three different passes you make shrinking the material, but no pass is as fun as the first one. At this point, you’ve been working for half of a day on one part, like what is pictured above. When you pass that iron over the big sections, the fabric draws drumhead tight almost instantly, and you can finally see what all the work was for. You also iron out wrinkles, bubbles, etc so there is some fussiness at this point too. The amazing glue also reactivates with heat so if you have an area giving you trouble, you give it a bit of extra heat and work it out to look perfect.

It takes about one full day to cover a part like one of the ones you see us working on. That is one person, one day, after you know what you are doing. At the stage above, we are only about 1/2 done with covering. We still need to put on the tapes that protect wear areas, the edges, etc. Then later we’ll have to cut access holes for inspections, but mostly they are in the wing and the fuselage. You start with the tail feathers, the pieces that we were working on. Eventually you move to the fuselage, the main body of the airplane. I’m told the tail feathers take longer than the fuselage. If that is the case, we’ll go from naked metal frame to covered airplane in a day. That will be an epic day. But we’ll hold off on that for some time because once the fabric is applied, it gets much harder to get access to all the parts we are working on.

The pieces we are covering here are the blue surfaces on the back of this airplane.

And here you can see the fabric and how it covers the fuselage. The airplane is basically a big steel 4130 box frame, wrapped in a tight covering and painted. It is fragile to being poked, but very strong in the air.

In case you are wondering if this flimsy construction style is strong enough, or safe enough. The control surfaces of World War II aircraft were built the same way. They seemed to be strong enough to do the job.

The way our two week event worked was we worked from 7:30am on Monday till 5ish pm on Friday. Then we rushed home, got in after dark, showered and went to bed, and then tried to get a weeks worth of stuff done during the time between Saturday morning when we awoke till we were scheduled to leave Sunday afternoon. This included our farm chores, Spork’s school work, my taxes, and homework Robby sent home with me. I didn’t have time to take pics of most of what I did, but the one thing I remembered to do was take pics of our new airplane holders.

During the week, Jenny had gone to Greenville and picked up two engine stands for us from Harbor Freight. Robby was using the exact same ones so copying the design and changes was easy enough.

Of course, I didn’t actually measure anything. That would be too easy. This is the tail stand off. It is 92% of a Dan Hand long, a critical dimension.

The engine stands have to be modified to work with the airplane. Nothing dramatic, just cut off the riser and add in some steel to make the nose stand higher. This allows the plane to sit level.

There was no intention of ever using these stands to hold heavy weights again so no enginerding was needed. Just grab some scrap pieces and weld them in well enough to hold a couple hundred pounds. No problem.

Except I hadn’t welded up the standoffs at this point. The brackets you see attached to the face plate are the ones that came with the stand. I cut 26″ lengths of 1″ box tube and attached them to the existing standoffs with a good bit of welding.

The tail stand was much easier to weld up. Just cut 99% of the steel so that the box section is bendable to stand plumb instead of leaning backwards as it does out of the box. Then weld up the cut to the new plumb position. This one just took a few minutes, which was awesome because I still had a ton to do and not enough time to do it.

Besides packing, taxes, etc, I also had to weld 90 degree brackets for the door I would be making for the cargo area on the airplane. The four brackets were made of 4130 steel like the rest of the fuselage. I had about 15 minutes for the entire project, including cutting the steel, jigging it up, and figuring out how to weld thin wall 4130. The welds were pretty ugly but they worked for the application. Thank God they were buried under epoxy when the door frame was assembled. I couldn’t have lived with those welds showing on the finished airplane. They would hold fine, but they were ugly.

With entire seconds to spare, we got everything loaded and were ready to leave. Ready to start week number 2.

Day five started with a bit of a different energy. Today we were wrapping up and going home for the weekend. We needed to work the farm, and also there were a number of things we’d be getting from home while we were there. Things like some tools I now knew we’d need, a sleeping bag for Spork, a tooth brush for Spork (yes he forgot a tooth brush. It was one of 7 things he didn’t think to pack, or decided he didn’t need. Teenagers!)

I also needed to modify some engine stands that Jenny had very kindly gone and picked up for me at Harbor Freight.

Robbie uses engine stands to hold the airplane fuselage. They allow him to spin the plane this way and that so working on it is easier. Of course, you have to modify the engine stands to hold an airplane. I took some pics of the mods so I’d know what to do when I got home. I neglected to take any actual measurements because of course I hadn’t brought a tape measure and I never could seem to locate Robbie’s.

I wasn’t sure if these stands would be required for us when we first started work but after about 10 minutes of using them, I couldn’t imagine any other way of doing it.

It was hard to get good pics in the hanger. Robbie has the entire door made of the clear material you see, meaning that awesome light was there for working, but terrible light was there for pics. There is a 1/4″ x 5.5″ bolt threaded through the modified engine stand hold offs, then an aluminum spacer, then some nuts and washers. It holds very well and allows the entire fuselage to be spun 360 degrees.

Spork and Robbie spent their day working on the flying wires, tweaking cables, installing shim washers, etc. There was a lot of time and experience involved in rigging the tail of this airplane.

I spent my day drilling and adjusting the stringers. Those are the curved, shiny metal tubes going from front to back of the airplane.

Here you can see the stringer viewed from the front of the airplane. Each one of the little grey standoffs had to be cut to the right length to match the inside of the stringer, then a matching hole had to be drilled in the stringer. Getting the first one done was kind fun. Cut, drill, bow the stringer, look for the right amount of curve. Kinda artsy getting it to bend just right, and have the right amount of standoff.

Then you move to the other side. The lines had to be matched perfectly so that from the tail, the plane looks symmetrical. Nothing about it was hard, but it took three times as long to do the second side as it did the first. The curve had to match overall, and be curved at the same place. It isn’t just one big long curve, it changes over the length. There was a lot of look, remove, file, reinstall, look, remove, wash, rinse, repeat. Still fun though.

About this time, we heard a plane come over head. We had talked to Marco’s dad the day before. He has a live fish delivery company, the largest in the country. He hauls all kinds of live sea critters all over the country. It was a really interesting niche and he was a great guy. He mentioned he’d send Marco over the next day if he could. We dropped our tools and went outside to see Marco.

Robbie immediately was worried. Normally you approach from the cleared side of the field and land towards the trees. But it was really windy and blowing the wrong way. That meant approaching over the trees which made it much tougher. Plus Marco wasn’t in a SuperSTOL, he was in its brother, the Highlander. A very capable airplane but not one with the short field craziness of the SuperSTOL. However, it all worked out ok and you can see the approach from Marco’s perspective as he has a video he uploaded to youtube.

We chatted with Marco for a few minutes but I asked if I could get pictures of his bird. When you are building, nothing helps more than seeing someone else’s airplane to see how they did it.

Marco spent a good bit of time talking with Spork about finding jobs, a career in aviation, how to get started flying, etc. Marco is a corporate pilot for a company in Kinston and flies jets for a living. Spork listened attentively.

With pics done, and chatting over, Marco fired up and took back off. I captured that side of things from the ground.

With the excitement of having an actual airplane here over (it really was awesome), we went back to work.

No really. I don’t remember what I was working on here. Gary, our EAA technical advisor had one bit of advice for me above all else. He said I needed to be in some of the pictures to prove that I actually was present for the build. Seems funny, but when the FAA looks at your records, if they don’t see you in the picture they aren’t comfortable that you are the one that was behind the camera. Apparently it has come up more than once.

Every once in a while after we got that piece of advice, Spork would grab my camera and snap some shots. So consider this one proof of life, but not proof of memory because I just don’t recall what I was working on at this moment.

As the day came to and end, we scurried out of there about 5pm which felt early. We left Hobbes to keep an eye on things while we drove the 2.5 hours back to Raleigh. We had a super busy weekend ahead and we were planning on being back in town Sunday night to get started again first thing Monday morning.

Robbie has an Alaska style cabin that he built at the end of his runway. It has no electricity, but it has LP, battery powered lights, a stove, a rudimentary sink, etc. There is a futon downstairs and a bed upstairs.

On day one, we made it out to the cabin to find that there was a bird that had taken up residence. After some shooing and hilarity, we finally got the bird out. I’d discovered that Carter had forgotten his sleeping bag on the way down, but there was heat in the cabin, along with blankets and whatnot. We’d be fine. After saying our goodnights, we built a fire in the little fireplace because the heat apparently didn’t work in our LP heater. Not to worry, we’ll fix that tomorrow.

You see, part of picking early March was I knew the weather would be cool but not cold. Robbie had heat in the cabin, but of course no A/C. If we waited till later in the year, we’d be sweating in this little Alaska cabin, but with North Carolina heat. Better to enjoy being snug in the cabin with the heat going in early March.

Except as I said, the LP heat didn’t work. But no worries, we had a fireplace. In fact we arrived to find a fire already going, and the lights on. The cabin was warm and cozy, and it was a very nice welcome.

Except the fireplace made the bottom floor warmish, and the loft where I was, a sauna. I was laying on the bed in shorts and a t-shirt sweating while Spork snuggled in on the futon. Since he’d forgotten his sleeping bag, I gave him mine with the thought that it was warmer where I was. And it was. Till the fire went out. You see, in the dark, we’d walked right by the stack of wood available for rebuilding the fire. During the night, in the cold, I didn’t feel like venturing out to find more firewood.

So the fire went out, and then it was the same temperature above as below,  which was about 30 degrees. There isn’t any insulation in the cabin so without constant heat going it quickly cools to ambient. I lay there, in the dark, wrapped in every blanket that was available, freezing and picturing Spork snug in my sleeping bag. It is a really nice sleeping bag, more like two huge heavy quilts sewn together. It must weigh 15 pounds. The next morning, when I finally braved the cold enough to get into my frozen clothes I found Spork asleep under what I can only describe as a thick sheet. It certainly wouldn’t have qualified as a blanket to me. My sleeping bag was laying beside him, still unpacked. At least I had real blankets, he’d slept all night basically bare. I fussed at him for not unpacking the sleeping bag and using it. But at 13, he’d simply crashed and went to sleep after an 11 hour work day. I felt like a bad dad but he just thought it was funny.

Day 2 Robbie replaced the heater in the cabin with a new one, so this time we had LP heat. We also knew more about where the wood was for the fireplace so we could keep the fire going longer. We built a nice fire, chased the birds again, several times, and turned the LP heat on low. Spork snuggled into my sleeping bag and I used the blankets again. Again early in the morning I woke to a cabin that was cold. Not frozen, but certainly not snuggly and warm. I’d say it was 40 degrees in the cabin, perfect if you are in my sleeping bag (I made sure he was in the sleeping bag this time). Not so much under the blankets I was using.

Day 3, I had this thing figured out. I had the fireplace ready to go when we walked in. I struck a match and had a fire going in just a few minutes. I turned the LP heat to high, the fireplace fully stuffed, and went to bed. It had to be 95 degrees in the loft this night, and it never stopped. I was dying of heat exhaustion. Finally I opened a window, just a crack, to let some air in. Our tweety bird immediately flew in and again we spent the night chasing birds around the house. Spork had been asleep just long enough to Zombify so he was stumbling drunkingly around trying to help while I cursed this bird. This took about 30 minutes. Finally we got him out and I went back to bed, to sweat, and sweat, and sweat. Turns out instead of a low of 30 degrees like we’d been having, it was only going down to 47. We’d finally gotten the heat figured out just in time to not need it. I roasted and barely slept.

By day 4 we had things figured out much better. The birds had apparently moved on to another house and we were able to match heat and cold pretty well. There was some angst as we wondered if our LP would run out during the night but it all worked in the end.

Day 5 we tidied up the cabin and locked it up. We would be back again the following week for another five days. This time with more sleeping bags and kindling to start a fire.

I accidentally included some of the pics from day 4 on day 3’s post. At this point, with all the posting that is still needing to be done, I’m not going to back and fix it. As long as the work is recorded that is good enough for record keeping.

Day 4 was seat day. I started first thing on the seats and worked nearly all day on them. Fitting, bending, drilling, reaming. They were way harder than I thought they would be. Even the seat backs were a pain as the bushing was hardened from welding and wouldn’t take the bolt. I broke off drill bits trying to drill them out. I jammed bolts in the fittings and had to drive them out with a punch and a rivet gun. Again, I longed for tools I knew were sitting patiently in my shop. A press. A mill. Robbie had everything we needed, but not the things I had. Of course, now that I am home, he has things I don’t have and I’m wishing I was at his shop with his tools. Such is the way of building I suppose.

Once all the drilling, reaming, broken bits, cursing, etc were over, I got the seats installed. The seat backs are mega tight. Like the airplane rolls around on the stands when you try to fold them flat and the hinges groan in complaint as metal rubs on metal. This is an area where I don’t see why it is so tight. Maybe the powder coating took up too much room? Maybe there is a bit of warpage? However these are the seats, and the seat backs at that, not a control surface or piece of avionics. I’m going to let them wear in and see if they loosen up before I remove any metal. If six months in I think they are still too tight, it would take about 5 minutes to remove the seats and fix them then. No need to stress over it now when there is so much more to do.

Spork spent the entire morning organizing hardware. Like 6 hours. This is the mountain of hardware that spilled from the boxes when we first opened the kit. Robbie knows where everything is, and more importantly, what everything is. I however don’t know (I do now) the difference between an AN3-12A and an AN4-11. I need labels. Spork put in the hours and became the master organizer. Then he worked with either Robbie or me to help either put the seats in or work on the tail feathers.

Robbie pretty much worked on cables or the tail feathers all day. There was a lot of adjusting, measuring, testing, and twisting to get them aligned correctly. We had to pick between the tail flying a bit negative which is the factory suggestion or flying neutral as the Highlander does. Neutral helps with heavy loads, negative is better with lighter loads. We don’t plan to fly moose quarters in Alaska, instead opting for kids on joy rides from the farm. We went with 1.5 degrees negative. The factory recommends 1.6 degrees and the Highlander would have been 0 degrees.

This was day four of building. Each day started about 7:30 am in the hanger after sleeping sorta ok in the cabin. We pretty much worked till a late lunch, stopped for a bit to eat right there where we were, then went back to it till around 6pm or so. It wasn’t hard work, not like farm work or working cattle. But by about 4pm I was starting to drag a little bit. I made sure Spork took breaks to play with Banner when he could.

He’s only 13 and he still put in over 8 hour days. I’m supposed to be used to long days but I found myself starting to flag a bit by about 4-5pm.

On day four, I remembered I had a bottle of really good whiskey in the truck. I stopped about 5pm, grabbed a couple of glasses, and poured about 1 fingers worth of whiskey, neat, and slowly sipped as I worked. The last hour or two suddenly went much better. Despite all warnings to the contrary, whiskey is apparently a required component of airplane building. (Don’t worry Grandma, at the end of the day we’ve already done the important stuff).

Day 3 for me consisted of rudder pedals, rudder pedals, and more rudder pedals. Robbie had already done the initial assembly. He told me that fitting the rudder pedals was one of the harder jobs of the build. Really? They are already built? How hard could it be.

Turns out, not that hard. But it took time. I must have installed and removed the rudder pedals 10 times. Maybe more. Plus I had to buff, polish, file, shim, etc. nearly every mating surface to get the pedals to run right. On a tail dragger, the rudder pedals are arguably the most important flight control. They are also a welded assembly, which means they are heated and cooled during the process, causing warpage.

They apparently never run straight out of the box. That means putting everything in place, tightening all the bolts (8 bolts, nuts, washers, and stand offs/shims), then finding out where the bind is. Remove everything, and then file, sand, buff until you think maybe that is enough. Be careful it’s not too much! That would make them sloppy and sloppy is bad. Reinstall everything and… still tight. Wash, rinse, repeat until 9 hours are gone. That is installing the rudder pedals. Hard? No. Tedious? Yes. I REALLY wished I had access to my big belt sander though. That would have made things progress much faster.

One thing that made the job harder was the instructions. They were, um, incomplete. Here is page one, step one.

Oh, ok. Use some certain hardware. Expect to do some massaging. Insert tab A into slot B. Sounds good. I can do that. So, how do I go about shimming, adjusting, etc? Lets look at step 2.

Um, where is step 2?

Up to this point, I’d just been doing what Robbie said to do. I hadn’t really been reading the manual. This was my first attempt at reading the manual. It read sorta like this in my mind.

How to build a house.

Step 1. Build house.
Step 2. Move in.
Step 3. Cook dinner.

Having read step 1 of installing the rudder pedals, and then envisioning doing it green, by myself, I considered going over and hugging Robbie and telling him how much I appreciated him. I refrained, but only just.

Once the rudder pedals were fitted correctly, I took them out and prepped them for paint. Once again I missed my shop because at home, I have a nice sand blasting cabinet. Not nice because it is high end. It is decidedly low tech. But nice because it is the single best Craigslist buy I ever made. Best $100 dollars I ever spent.

However instead of sand blasting the pedals in about 7 minutes, I spent about an hour hand sanding every little nook and cranny I could reach. I then drove to the hardware store where I bought a drill operated Scotch Brite pad and polished up the weldments and other areas I could not reach with sand paper. Call it 3 hours total from done fitting to ready to paint. It would have been 5 hours and seven minutes to drive home to Raleigh, sand blast the part, and drive back to Grantsboro. Believe me, I thought about it.

While I was working on the rudder pedals, Spork was working on the seat backs. He had to trace, cut out, file, and sand the metal backings of the seats. Unlike his father, he did the job with no whining and no rework. He just traced, cut, and finished like it was an every day thing. It is a little unnerving and rather annoying how he picks things up so well. On day one he couldn’t operate the drill to change drill bits. On day three he’s doing metal fabrication.

With the rudder pedals drying, and the seats installed, I went underneath the plane to drill out for the cargo bay floor pans. I’m wearing my sunglasses because I’m too lazy to go get safety glasses. I wear Oakley sunglasses (thanks Ron!) and they are rated as safety glasses so I was good using them instead. I had a bit of a Stevie Wonder thing going on, but luckily I was able to drill all the right places without any screwups.

While I was working on the bottom of the airplane, Robbie and Spork were installing the tail feathers. This is harder than it sounds because there are some very critical adjustments that need to be made during install. Once they are made, they are permanent. One decision is how much angle the horizontal stabilizer needs. Zero degrees would be perfectly in trail. No down force, no lifting. That is what the Highlander has. However in testing the factory determined that a negative 1.6 degree set to the stabilizer was better. Robbie and I talked about it for a bit and we decided to go with the factory recommendation. Robbie spent a good hour just measuring and tweaking the adjustments and got it to 1.5 degrees. I called that close enough and he and Spork drilled the holes and permanently locked everything in place.

While the boys were tweaking to the tenth of a degree, I kept drilling and riveting, disturbing their work. Thankfully they were good at what they did and didn’t mind my working.

These were just mockups of the seats but it looked really cool to see something that looked like an airplane.

Day 2 started early. Unlike day 1, we already had some idea of what we were doing. Plus, we were frozen from the lack of heat and blankets the night before so may as well go to the hanger and start building a fire in the fireplace.

We got things going in the fireplace, then went back to work on the floor pans. We made really good progress and it felt great to be able to work without needing stop and ask questions every few minutes.

Once Robbie arrived, he showed me some lexan pulley covers that he’d made for his airplane. They are to cover the control surface pulleys that are located just behind the seats, in the baggage compartment.

There is nothing in the design of the airplane to protect the cables, and the cables are what keep the airplane under control. One errant strap from a bag getting caught in the cables would lock the controls in whatever position they jammed in. This could be fatal. Robbie had designed and created some simple lexan covers that protected the pulleys. He set me to making my own set. A couple of hours later, I had a set of covers that were exactly, perfectly, wrong. I’m not very experienced on a brake, and I didn’t have a bandsaw to do the cutouts. As I worked, I thought that this was silly, Miguel has forgotten more about running a brake than I’ve ever known. After finishing the covers, I decided that it would be time better spent having Miguel make the covers on our brake once the plane was home and we were making them to fit the actual airplane and not just a pattern.

Frustrated with the lack of success with the covers, I moved onto something simple, the cockpit floor pan. Robbie showed me some additional work that needed to be done to it besides the normal cut, fit, drill. There were some extra relief slots that needed to be made to accommodate the rudder pedal attach points. The easy way to create the slots was to drill the holes the same as where clecos normally go. Then take a step drill and drill them out to the size of the cutout. Then it was a simple process of cutting with shears to the circle and we had perfect slots. Unfortunately someone was visiting about this time and I really wasn’t paying attention when I was drilling out the holes. I unfortunately drilled out one of the cleco holes into a large hole instead. With this now oversized hole in place, I then needed to create a patch for the hole (after some cursing), which then took a couple of tries to get correct because aluminum has a grain and the patch needed to match the direction of the floor pan. Something I learned after making the first patch incorrectly.

At this point, I was thoroughly frustrated. I expected to make some mistakes along the way, and none of these was really that big of a deal. But two back to back mistakes, on day two, had me pretty frustrated.

Fortunately at this point, I began working on installing the fuel sump point. This was a good opportunity to get back on the horse and do something right. I spent an hour doing something that should have taken 15 minutes, but it came out perfect.

Carter had spent his time installing the pulleys for the control system. He and Robbie also built the flap handle.

It is surprisingly complicated and took a good bit of time, but once it was done they got it installed and it worked perfectly the first time!

With those successes behind us, we installed the control sticks and mixers. This went well and finally we moved onto the rudder pedal assemblies.

They were just getting started when we called it a day. Fortunately we had Robbie because the instructions for the rudder pedals were pretty much missing from the manual. Step 1 was there, and a small picture. That was it. No step 2, 3, 4, etc.

With our day in the shop ended, Spork and I headed out to dinner in downtown New Bern. We went to MJs Bar and Grill. We’d been there before when Spork was much younger, and he had tried alligator tail for the first time. It was a big event for him, trying something so new and strange.

Now years later, we came back to the scene of the crime and he had second helping.

We started about 7am and finished about 6 pm. After dinner we returned to the cabin and I made a fire and turned the LP heat onto full. We weren’t going to be cold tonight! Except it was almost 20 degrees warmer this night instead of last night. With all the heat going, we absolutely roasted in the cabin. The birds came back when I opened the window to get some air and we spent a good 30 minutes getting them out of the cabin. After the birds were gone, I had a bug crawling on me, on my face. I knew it flew there, and I’d seen a wasp previously. Nothing like a wasp on your face, in the dark, while you’re sweating. Finally I used an iPad light to see what it was and it turned out to be a ladybug. Crisis averted, we finally got a few hours of sleep before starting day 3. Our adventure continued.