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Peter James from Australia sent me a great idea that his son Martin came up with:

Meanwhile, Martin came up with a great method for applying the colour scheme to the fuselage. We simply loaded the colour scheme in to Photoshop on his Mac, connected a projector and projected it onto the fuse. Attached is a pic of the dummy run. Aircraft goes to the paint shop Monday.

This is a very, very neat idea. It could help save a lot of time when marking paint lines onto the aircraft.

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I've been checking the Pro-seal on the fuel tank access covers. It is slowly getting harder, but I think I am a few weeks away from being able to leak test the fuel tanks.

I took a look at the wheel pants earlier in the week. I thought that all the major fibreglas work on them was finished, and I just had to fill a few very small glitches. But noted that my last mod on the wheel pants (putting a layer of fibreglas cloth over the Tinnerman washers) had created a step between the front and rear halves of the pants. So, yesterday I covered the aft edge of the front half with vinyl tape, and mixed up some filler to bring the surface of the rear half up to level. I hoped to sand it today, but it wasn't quite fully cured, as it was perhaps a bit too cold in the garage. I moved the pants down into the basement, and I hope to take a day off sometime this week so I can sand them outside.

This week I started fitting the NACA scoop under the bottom of the right wing. This scoop provides fresh air for the rear seat. Today I finished the job and riveted it in place.

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I had some spare time in the hotel room last week, and I took another look at the script that automatically generates flight test cards. I described the initial version  back in March. Since then, I've added a check to see if the weight and CG for the flight match that specified for each test point. I've also cleaned up the CG chart in the test card.

All the planned test points are in a MySQL database. There are also database tables with the aircraft empty weight and CG, the details for each flight (date, crew names and weight, fuel load, ballast, etc). Most test points have a template that gets filled out with the test point condition.

Once I pick the test points for a flight, I run a perl script that pulls the data from the database, creates a CG chart, populates the LaTeX templates with test point data, and about 10 seconds later I'm looking at a test card in pdf format. The script also alerts me if the loading for the flight isn't compatible with the weight and CG range I've specified for each test point.

I've got a few things to sort out, such as adding tracking of completed test points, test points that need repeating, plus create templates for some of the test types, etc. I'll release it to the world once I have it working the way I want. Here is an example of the automatically created test card. All the tests on that card obviously wouldn't be on the same flight, as they need different CGs - it just shows some of the different aspects of the test cards.

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I was on the road most of the week, leaving Monday, and returning Thursday afternoon. I checked out the fuel tank sealant after I got back - it is curing quite slowly. I must have been a bit shy on the catalyst. It should eventually completely cure, but it could take a few weeks.

I installed the last four nutplates on the inboard end of the fuel tanks. There were four holes next to the rear baffle that didn't have enough clearance to get the dimple die in. I ground a flat side on the die, but the squeezer yoke hit the baffle. So, cobbled together a tool that held the dimple dies, and allowed me to squeeze them with a big C-clamp.

I also did a bunch of filling, sanding and priming on the windscreen fairing and wheel pants.

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This week I was out of town a bit, and spent some time doing more "get the yard ready for winter" stuff.

There is a fairing that covers the gap between the inboard end of the wing and the fuselage. This week I drilled the holes and riveted most of the nut plates on the inboard ends of the fuel tanks and wing where that fairing. I ran out of nut plates before the end, as I guess I didn't order enough to replace all the ones I used to make the cockpit floors removable.

A local RV-3 builder had told me that he had quite a bit of difficulty getting the wires on his fuel gauge sender floats bent so the fuel gauge read empty when the float was at the bottom of the tank, and full when the float was at the top of the tank. I hadn't checked mine out, so today I installed the fuel gauges, and fished out the wires that go to the fuel gauge senders. I hooked everything up with jumper clips, and moved the tanks around to make the floats go to either the top or bottom. I must have gotten lucky, as the only problem was a bunch of wasted time sorting out which fuse I needed to insert to power up the fuel gauges. Once I got the gauges working, they read zero when the float is on the bottom, and full when the float is on the top.

This afternoon I mixed up some Proseal and sealed the fuel gauge senders and fuel tank access covers in place. I'll let the stuff cure for a couple of weeks then do the leak test.

I'm going to be out of town on a course all week, so no more progress until the weekend :(

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Last week I reported that I had problems removing the left fuel tank. Monday I spent an hour cleaning off my basement work bench, and then had Terry help me move the left wing onto it. I had no problem pulling the fuel tank off once the wing was located so I could give it a good tug.

Tuesday I put the left wing back in the wing stand, put the right wing on the work bench, then pulled its fuel tank off. Wednesday I started on the nut plate installation for the holes on the inboard edge of the fuel tanks and the wing where the wing/fuselage fairing attaches.

Thursday I didn't get any work done, as I needed to spend time with Terry before hitting the road again. Friday I left for Wichita, to do my annual Beechcraft C-90A simulator training at Flight Safety. I should arrive back home tomorrow night, and hope to be working on the project again on Tuesday.

Fuel Tanks Flight Test Data Plots 1While in Wichita, in my spare time, I've been working on Perl scripts to plot flight test data. I've written a prototype script that will take a data file from a flight, and plot specific parametres from specific time slices. I've got a bit more work do to before it has all the functionality I want, but the prototype is getting close to what I need. As an example, here is what page 1 of 4 from an engine test point would look like (pdf version). This plot uses data recorded from the engine at OFF in the garage, so all the plots make straight lines. But you get the idea.