I was planning to finish to Ailerons, but unfortunately in my final prep, I realized that I received two right side balance tubes instead of a left and a right one. The missing tube should be here sometime next week, so until then, the Ailerons are on pause.
This gave me some time to finally make the big step of cutting out the hole in the Wing for the Pitot inspection panel. I received the heated & regulated Garmin Pitot tube from the Factory and verified that it will fit nicely on the back of the round inspection cover, so I will mount that and I can keep my square inspection panel I designed for some other time.
First I did a lot of measuring and marking based on the plans. Since this is truly a moment of measure-twice, cut-once I measured and re-measured a few times.
With all the marks in place, I started with cutting the pilot holes for the center mark and the cutting head.
The final moment of truth – Time to cut the hole for the inspection panel using my nibbler cutting tool.
I cut the first half of the circle and then reversed the tool since the Pitot tube mast was in the way of completing the cut in one direction.
The cut came out pretty well and I just had to do a little bit of sanding to smooth the edges.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Annotated video of the process of cutting the hole
As it turns out, cleaning the parts is a great time to chat with my mom over the phone, so she got to watch while I sat on my stool to give the parts a scrub using some Simple Green Cleaner to get them ready for priming.
Once that was done, I unfolded my small paint booth and primed all the ribs of the flaps.
Aileron parts inventory
With the Flaps primer drying, I moved on to unpack the Aileron parts and prepare them to prime next.
Unfortunately one set of ribs have some dents from the factory, so I will need replacements for those. The other parts were okay and just needed the usual treatment of deburring some of the edges and holes.
Then I went on a scavenger hunt to try to find an Eyebolt and Nut to go with the ribs as they weren’t in any of the bags of the Aileron assembly and eventually I figured that it might be on the pushrod that it threads into and I remembered that I have a separate Tube labelled Control Pushrods. So after opening that tube and pulling out a well packed bubble-wrap bundle I eventually found the rods for the Ailerons, and while I was at it, also the Flaps and attached to them were the Eyebolts and the nut mentioned.
The last thing I could not find, were the AN4-16A bolts, which are mentioned in the assembly instructions, but were not in the shipping manifest, so I added a request for those bolts together with the replacement for the damaged ribs.
I also found that I don’t have any 4.8x10mm rivets (HW-RIV-163) which I need for the Flaps assembly and those were also missing in the packing list, but need to be able to rivet some of the hinges onto the Flaps.
Hopefully I can get those replacements and missing parts soon so I can cut down on half-ready assemblies between the Elevator, Flaps & Ailerons.
I’m currently still waiting for the correct Elevator ribs from the Factory before I can continue to complete the Empennage. So in the meantime I’ve moved on to get started on the Wings. First order of business is the Ailerons and Flaps, starting with doing the inventory and parts check.
First I had to find the sub assemblies for the Flaps and Ailerons in the Wings crate. After a bit of digging, I got all the bags that had to do with those two parts out and then starting laying them out to check them off the packing list.
Once I had all the bags laid out, I started to check them off the inventory checklist and got out my tools for deburring a couple of sharp edges and holes.
I confirmed that I got all the parts out of the crate and went back once to find the Aileron balance tubes. Then I started to get going on removing the protective plastic from the Flaps parts and inspecting the parts, marking each part along the way. There were a couple of sharp edges and holes, but by and large most parts were good to go.
