Schmetterling CEO Visit

As a major milestone approaches with the imminent completion of a major aerodynamic surface and flight control, it seemed that it might be a good time for the CEO of our parent company to come for a visit to the production facility. VIP treatment is standard for situations such as these so I took the company plane out to pick him up.

Or, put another way, the weather was gorgeous today and was almost irresistibly beckoning me, but the RV-12 rudder is on the cusp of completion and I really wanted to spend some time doing that. But… there’s just no denying the call of a sky that appears as if it may have once or twice heard whispered rumors of these new fangled things called ‘clouds’ but was believing none of that wild gossip, thank you very much. And calm winds in the forecast as well! Astounding! What better way to kill two birds with one stone (hmm, this seems like a wildly inappropriate time to use that expression) than to fly out to KVES and pick up my Dad and fly him back to Columbus for a shop visit. Sure, it would mean flying him back as well, but seriously, isn’t that just a cherry on the sundae?

It was a relaxed morning what with the DST ‘found’ hour to buffer the time between having a hot cup or two of Vitamin P infused coffee and having to head to the airport for departure. There’s no lav in an RV-6, remember? Timing is critical.

The extra hour came from Daylight Savings Time ending later in the year than ever before because our Congress, always eager to flaunt their dominance over us, legislated a seemingly random change in when we shift time. They meddle in so many things anymore that I think a House bill to coerce water into flowing up hill is expected to get voted out of committee next week.

In any event, no one bothered to tell my Garmin 396 of the change of schedule. Try as it might, it just could not find any satellites, my theory being that it was looking at points in space that wouldn’t be inhabited by GPS satellites for another hour. Or spots from which satellites had already departed an hour earlier. It could be either – I’m not very good at temporal calculations. If I had to bet, I’d say it was the latter case.

Whatever the cause, buggered if I was going to sit around waiting three months for the clocks to get set back ahead. I’d go without it – I have a nice spare built right into the panel. Although I rarely use it, I do dial in Direct To now and then just to remind myself how. That came in handy today since it was super simple to just dial in KVES and get things going. It’s a little less pleasant than the Garmin to use, though:

Always the forgive and forget type, I gave the Garmin another chance. And another, and another, and another. I diddled around with menu pages trying to find a place where I could set the time and, for that matter, the date. It was convinced that it was October 28th. Brilliant little box, but sometimes easily confused. I couldn’t find anything that would let me give the unit a temporal foothold on reality, but I did find a way to turn off Daylight Savings Time. I was optimistic about that, but the Garmin stubbornly continued to play the fool:

Finally I stumbled upon a ‘Set Location’ menu item. Just what I was looking for! You just pick a spot on the map or type in an airport identifier and Bob’s your uncle. Well, not so fast: it seems that rather than give it a location as you’re pounding through the air at a blistering 3,139 inches per second, you have to be sitting still. I typed in a couple of airports as I flew over or by them, but no luck. As soon as I stopped at KVES, POW!, it found all the satellites it could ever want.

That solved, I got the CEO settled into the right seat and we were off on the trip back to Columbus. The whole VIP thing kind of went sour, though, since I had forgotten to bring the passenger headset. He had to endure the full, unadulterated cacophony of Papa at full gallop. At first I tried cruising at a sedate 2,000 rpm to keep the noise down, but I quickly got bored with that and poured on the coal. After a fuel stop at MadCo, we landed at Bolton and hangared Papa. It was time to visit the shop.

I had the rudder pretty much ready to go for final assembly. Just to provide a complete picture of the work involved, I hadn’t deburred the rudder skin yet. A few passes along the Scothbrite wheel made short work of dressing up the edges of the skin and the deburring of the rivet holes is never all that time consuming. It wasn’t long at all before we were ready to take the rudder back to the hangar for riveting.

With the construction of the tail kit being well ahead of schedule and the lead time for the next kit (the fuselage) now hovering at somewhere around two months, and in consideration of the all too likely end of year price increase, the discussion turned to whether the order for the fuse kit should be placed. The timing of the tail is looking like I will be ready to assemble the too-big-for-the-shop tail cone by the end of December, just in time for the most inhospitable months of the year for working in the hangar. With the fuse kit on site, I could defer the building of the tail cone until Spring and concentrate on the first stages of the fuselage. Right up until the roll bars go on, the fuse is small enough to assemble in the shop.

As with CEOs everywhere in Corporate America, they need time to think about schedule changes. Deep in thought:

My only fear is that the vertical stab and rudder might be lulling me into over confidence. Maybe the horizontal stab is when this stuff really starts getting hard. I have to say, though, that the RV-12 so far has to be the simplest to build airplane in the world. Seriously, look at this:

The fronts of the rudder skin were already rounded into shape and fit right together with no trouble at all. The skin slid right onto the skeleton and the holes lined up with unconscionable ease. I don’t think you can build an RV-9 rudder in just a handful of hours, can you? This thing is amazingly well designed.

We hauled the rudder out to the hangar and pulled about 3/4s of the rivets before we started getting pretty hungry. Also, with the loss of an hour of daylight I had to keep a tight look on the time to make sure I could be back to base before dark. We decided that we’d get started back towards KVES with a lunch stop at Urbana. I always seem to end up at Urbana…

Hey, you know how you always want to impress your Dad? Well, I got a little help with that today from a couple of total strangers.

“See the kind of people that have planes at Bolton? The kind that drive Porsche and Rolls Royce:”

“I just drive a Subaru because I find spectacularly conspicuous consumption like that somehow demeaning.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

After lunch, I had him stand next to his artwork for a picture:

The flight from Urbana to KVES went fine, although I wouldn’t say it was the best landing of the day. The best was a greaser at Urbana. The rest were so-so. The winds were a bit shifty and three out of the six landings were made with light quartering tailwinds. I’m not saying that’s what caused the bad ones, but it could be.

The Sun was getting pretty close to the horizon as I flew back towards home, providing perfect lighting to capture a late Fall tapestry:

Bolton tower had been using runway 4 for most of the day but as I was approaching I heard the tower clear a couple of departures to go out on 22 since they were heading southwest. That meant that I had to land on 22 also, and that meant another landing with a slight tailwind. And, it sucked. I sailed right on past taxiway Alpha 3 and couldn’t make the turn off until Alpha 4. That’s not a big deal as there was another half a mile of runway after Alpha 4, but it’s still a bit below my standard. Eh, it happens.

Once back I finished up the remaining riveting and headed home with a completed rudder:

Next comes the anti-servo tab. I’ll ‘splain just exactly what that is next time.

Read Full Post »

Fall Colors

The forecast for this morning called for classic brisk fall weather, cool but clear. With that in mind, Co-pilot Rick and I planned for a trip down to Portsmouth for breakfast, hoping to grab some pictures of the stunning Fall colors we’re seeing this year. Unfortunately, the clear morning was running late – we had a light fog at Bolton and Portsmouth was reporting 1/4 mile visibility and 100 foot ceilings. Uh, no. That won’t do at all! We postponed our departure and I took the newly found time down to the Schmetterling Aircraft production floor to spend some quality time on the RV-12 tail.

Things at Bolton had cleared up by the newly established departure time of 10:30, but Portsmouth was still reporting horrible conditions. It’s an odd airport, though. They will sometimes be reporting conditions that would ground even the bravest horsefly on one end of the runway while the other end is sparkling clear. Worth a look, we figured. With the fallback plan of simply turning around and heading back, we launched ourselves to the south.

It was indeed a pretty Fall day:

At first, anyway. As we approached Portsmouth, it became apparent that we would be eating elsewhere. Still, it was pretty:

Somewhere down under that blanket of clouds lies Portsmouth.

We turned tail and fled back to the clear air of Columbus.

It was a nice day to fly, though, even without accomplishing the breakfast mission. And that left plenty of time in the day to get back to work on the RV-12. I got quite a bit done on that:

Read Full Post »

Rainy weekend…

Housebound for most of the weekend, although the rains did abate for just long enough to mow the lawn. While I was out there putzing about in the yard, I also decided to unclog one of the rain getters that I had seen overflowing during the downpour:

“I’ll take ‘Things That Shouldn’t Have Been a Surprise’ for $500, Alex.”

“And the answer is, ‘You get drenched with cold water.'”

“Ooh, I know that one! ‘What happens when you stand under an overflowing rain gutter and remove the clogged down pipe?'”

Ding ding ding! $500!

Later in the day, it was a trip to the mall with Co-pilot Egg for to procure a spiffy dress for the Homecoming dance. At Macy’s. On a Sunday afternoon. I thought it was bad enough when I was surrounded by a pack of ravening, giggling teenage girls, but no, the worst of the pain was yet to come. It was the 20 minutes that she was in the fitting room trying on dresses that really made me uncomfortable. Because, well, Macy’s thought for some reason that the optimal area to put the fitting rooms was deep in the heart of the ‘intimate apparel’ department. I retreated as far as I could without running the risk of losing the co-pilot, but that was only a slight improvement: night gowns and robes.

Salvaging as much of my masculinity as possible after that ordeal, we stopped at Lowe’s and bought pieces/parts required to build a work table for the RV-12 project. That marks the official beginning of the build process, in my opinion. But you’ll have to read about it at the Schmetterling Aviation blog.

Read Full Post »

New RV-12 Site

It makes sense to have a separate site for RV-12 related topics. There is a new image at the top of the right side bar showing the logo for the fictional Schmetterling Aviation. Click the logo to go to the new site.

The Papa Golf Chronicles is not going away; I still have an RV-6 to fly!

Read Full Post »

On building an RV-12

If nothing else, I think I will build the tail over this winter. I’m not a very outdoorsy type in the bitter cold weather anymore and I need a project to keep myself occupied. The beauty of the RV-12 tail kit is that the vast majority of the work can be done in my basement. Because it includes the tail cone, the final assembly of the tail would have to be performed somewhere above ground. I’m not keen on leaving the cars out on the driveway so using the garage is out of the question, but I have plenty of room in the hangar to do the final riveting.

The advantages of starting with the tail are related to cost. The kit is $2,150 plus shipping which is a very small initial expense when compared to the overall cost of the kit. Another benefit is that there is resale value for the tail should I decide that I don’t want to proceed with the rest of the build. There will be a very large number of RV-12s built, so there will therefore be a ready market for a completed tail. Why not buy one already done for the same cost as the kit itself?

The more important and difficult decision will be whether or not to continue to build the rest of the airplane. As the build process progresses, both the cost and the physical size of the components increases dramatically. I would be reluctant to build an entire wing or fuselage in the hangar, but if there is a reasonable ratio between time spent fabricating or preparing individual parts before assembling them into or onto a prohibitively large structure, well, that would be different. If I could take a bunch of deburred and fluted ribs out to the hangar to final rivet onto the spar, for example, the time spent in the hangar would be minimized. That’s only really important for the three or four months of bitter winter cold; a good fan would keep the hangar at a suitable temperature for all but the worst of the summer days.

Along that line of thought, I asked Wingman Ted, who is currently building an RV-10, what that ratio might be. His estimate is 50-50. So, half the time would be spent preparing parts in my basement, the other half would be spend assembling them in the hangar. This would inevitably slow the pace of the project somewhat, but I think it’s important to note that I have an advantage over the more typical builder: I already have an airplane to fly. What do I care if it takes five to seven years to finish an RV-12? And with the option to bail out and sell the partially complete kit any time I want, I don’t see much financial risk to the endeavor.

So, why an RV-12 in the first place? Well, I ain’t getting any younger and the LSA airplane has the benefit of removing any worries over losing my medical. That is, after all, how I got my RV-6. I think the guy that built it only put 155 hours on it before losing his medical. And, although the RV-12 is 30 knots slower than the RV-6, it is more capable when the winds get higher than my comfort level in the taildragging, small rudder RV-6. And with a nosewheel, the RV-12 would be suitable for flight instruction. That would be a boon to co-pilot Egg!

Read Full Post »