Tag Archives: Factory

Cutting a round inspection access panel hole

Hours: 2
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One of the things that the factory forgot as part of the change from the Sling 4 to the Sling TSi was the required access to the internals of the wing next to the Pitot tube.

In the Sling TSi design, some inspection panels were removed including the one next to the Pitot tube. By itself, if someone was building the wings from scratch, that might be fine as long as the builder installs the Pitot tube beforehand and doesn’t anticipate to ever need to access it, such as if using an unheated Pitot tube.

However, I am going to use the Garmin heated & regulated Pitot tube, which not only requires wires to be run to the Pitot tube, but also that I need to mount the regulator unit next to it.

Since I ordered the quickbuild, I ordered it with this specification, but unfortunately the factory didn’t receive the Pitot tube from their supplier in time and shipped my kit without installing it.

So after I received my shipment and inspected everything, I realized that installing this after the fact wasn’t going to be easy, particularly with the lack of a hole in the wing. Unfortunately the factory also forgot to run the wiring to the pitot tube, which creates a whole second issue, for which I’ve been working on a solution.

I informed the factory a while ago and also gave Matthew, one of the other TSi builders a heads-up since he hadn’t started on the wings yet. The factory realized their mistake in the plans and promised to come up with a solution and send me instructions and a plan.

Drafting a plan

While I was waiting for the factory to come up with a plan, I actually started drawing up my own plans to fabricate the entire inspection panel myself and used it as an opportunity to learn and use Solidworks, which I can use for free as part of being an EAA member.
Initial draft of the panel on paper My panel design in Solidworks

Since I had the chance to chat with Mike Blyth at Oshkosh for a while and we chatted about my build, I mentioned that I was still waiting for the factory to come up with a plan for the inspection cover and he promised that he’d check on the progress when he got back to South Africa and indeed, two weeks later, I got an email with the plans.

The factory plans, in keeping with the other inspection access panels, uses the same flush round inspection cover that is used to access the Flaps and Aileron connecting rods.

Factory plans for the new inspection access panel

Since I am still busy with other things in the build and haven’t actually made my own panel yet, I am going to go with the factory plans that they have drawn up for me.

Cutting a round inspection access panel hole

There is just one difficulty to overcome – the access panel is round and large and I don’t think there are 143.4 mm drill bits I can buy in Home depot.

After a bit of research, I found a solution in using a drill attachment sheet metal nibbler that can cut around a center pivot and can attach to my Milwaukee hand drill.

Since this is quite an operation, I decided to get some practice with the tool on a piece of spare aluminum and also made a video of it, since I figured that it might be helpful for other builders in the future.

I started by marking out the circle using a drafting compass. It’s been quite a few years, but luckily I still remembered how to use it and how to find the center of the circle again by making two marks. Proof that you may indeed use what you’ve learned in geometry class sometime in life, even if it’s 15 years later. After that I clamped the piece of metal on the edge of the table.

I drilled the center pivot hole to 1/8th of an inch, which makes the pivot sit in the hole and then measured out the starting hole for the drill, make a starter hole and then used a step drill bit to upsize the hole until it aligned with my marked circle.

After that, I set up the drilling tool with the pivot and made sure that the outside of the cutting bit aligns with my circle and then attached the drill and went to work.

Here are a couple of pictures of the first circle I cut – note that briefly I had the pivot point jump out of the hole, which caused me to waver a bit which you can see towards the bottom where it’s not perfectly round, so make sure the pivot continues to stay in the hole.

Marking out the circle using a compass Clamping down the metal on the table Cut hole and the inside disk - I did waver a little bit on the bottom as I didn't hold the pivot in place perfectly for a moment. So practicing this will pay off to not repeat the mistake. Inspection cover "test fit" Tools used to cut the access panel

Annotated video of the process of cutting the hole

 

Horizontal Stabilizer wiring

Hours: 1
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I was busy on the weekend at the Northwest Aviation Conference helping sell Raffle Tickets for the Charity Airplane Raffle that my Flying Club, Puget Sound Flyers, is holding to raffle off a refurbished Cessna 150 Airplane to fund scholarships for kids that survived cancer.

While at the conference I also briefly met up with a member of the Sling Builders Facebook group, who is considering building a Sling 2 in Sequim. We were talking all things Sling for a while and I look forward to have another Sling builder nearby soon.

I also attended some talks and got to say hi to Jason Miller, who’s a CFII and has a great YouTube channel with training tips about The Finer Points of flying.
I met Jason Miller at the NW Aviation Conference

Horizontal Stabilizer

Now back to the building part. When I riveted the ribs and spars of the Horizontal Stabilizer a few days ago, I was short a couple of the 4.0mm rivets. In order to finish the part, I took some from the Elevator hardware bag.

Today I reviewed the rest of the steps for the Horizontal Stabilizer and realized I need a whole lot more of them to actually finish riveting the Skin onto the Horizontal Stabilizer. I also need some sealant to put between the Stabilizer Plate and the skin, which I know Matthew posted on his blog when he did the part, so I re-read his post and noticed that he was actually also missing a bunch of the 4.0mm rivets, so it looks like the factory may be short when they put together that bag, I’ll let them know tomorrow.

I did finish up the wiring that will connect to the elevator trim. This gave me the chance to make use of the step drill bits I bought. I used my digital caliper to translate the metric instructions (9.5mm) to the closest fractional inches (3/8th) to enlarge some holes for the rubber grommets.
After that I installing some flexible grommet edging I bought as spare as the kit was missing that since it was shipped based on Revision 0, which didn’t include that part. I’ll have to see if there were any other parts that were added in Revision 1 after my kit was put together.

Airplane Kit Arrival Day!

Hours: 6
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My Sling TSi airplane kit has finally made its way to my garage and arrived yesterday from The Airplane Factory in South Africa. Since I ordered the entire kit in one go as a quick build, it was shipped in one large 20 foot container directly to my house. The container arrived about two weeks ago in the port, but then the Seattle Snowpocalypse happened and we had the heaviest snow in February for over 70 years. The Seattle area is very hilly and so the sudden large amounts of snow and the hills made for impossible driving conditions and so while I couldn’t get a truck to deliver the airplane, instead we went skiing on our road sometime last week since our hill has a pretty steep incline.
It's not every day you can ski on your own street

Luckily it stopped snowing by Tuesday and warmed a bit and the City managed to start plowing neighborhoods and we could drive again by Thursday, so I called the Freight company and told them they can now give it a shot to deliver and the scheduled the delivery for Monday, which worked out great.

Unloading an airplane from a container

I set up my GoPro to try to capture the unloading process, it worked out fairly well to capture everything, so here it goes:

If this wasn’t enough, then here’s the complete story:

The Truck with the 20 foot container arrived just as my friends, who graciously were on standby the past two weeks to help, were arriving to help me unload and we went to work. The first order of business was to figure out the order to unload the container.
Container ready to be unloaded

Happy Airplane unloading crew
After taking out the big box with the Finishing kit on the side, we juggled around a bit to see if we could take the boxes on the bottom out, but they were blocked by the Fuselage Tail support, so we figured that we should take out the Fuselage next.
The wood that the Factory used to build the framing is of some impressive quality and the heavy screws driven into them were very tight, so it took some loosening by hand before even my impact driver could undo the screws, so I grabbed my trusty Milwaukee M12 Hackzall and made due process so we could get on with unloading and then undo the rest of the structure later. That and heavy use of my Utility Knife to cut through the many support straps that held down the structure.

After we got the Fuselage out, it was time for the boxes that were stored under the Fuselage, followed by the Wings.
Unloading the right Wing Wings in their happy hammock

After all that was said and done, we took down the rest of the wood framing in the container so the container was truly empty in the end:
Container unloaded and wooden frames taken down

We moved the boxes into our basement multi function room, next to our LEGO collection – building your own airplane is kind of like LEGO right?

Boxes of Airplane parts stored next to our LEGO
And the Fuselage and Wings found their home in the Garage on one side, leaving me with the other side as work space, plus I can easily move the wings around since I have wheels on the wing rack.

Fuselage and Wings stored in the garage

Cleaning up and taking inventory

I felt like the tail should have some extra support, so I quickly built a small stool for the tail to rest on, in addition to the existing framing that it came in, here is a quick timelapse of me cleaning up the workshop and building the stool:

Stool for the Tail to rest on: I built a stool to balance out the load of the tail

After that was done, I asked Juliana to come down to the Garage as I was pretending to fly the airplane as any reasonable person with a new toy in their garage would do:
Obligatory pretend flying in the airplane

And then we opened the Empennage box and started taking inventory so I can stop building wooden tables and stools and start building an airplane:
Taking inventory of the Empennage Kit

Now it’s time to build an airplane!

Quickbuild Factory progress

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I got an exciting progress update from the factory today on the coming along of my Sling TSi Quickbuild kit down in The Airplane Factory in South Africa.
The Fuselage is mostly assembled and here’s the pictures of it:

Aside from that, my tool collection is coming along nicely. I now have hundreds of clecos, various pliers, deburring tools, drill bits and countersinks. Just a few more tools to go from the list from TAF.
The project may also have been my excuse to buy a label maker, I ended up with the Brady BMP 21, so now I get to print nice labels, I started with some boxes for the clecos as seen below.

Another fellow Sling TSi builder received his Empennage kit today, so I look forward to following his progress until I receive my kit to start.