Tag Archives: Practice

EAA SportAir Electrical Systems & Avionics Workshop

This past weekend I attended the EAA SportAir Electrical Systems & Avionics workshop at the Seattle Museum of Flight Restoration Center.

The two day workshop helped in explaining principles of airplane electrical systems, wiring and bringing everything together to design and build out your avionics.

Workshop Handbook

Aside from a lot of good learnings and explanations, there was also a couple of hands-on exercises to get familiar with crimping, soldering and connecting things.

The first exercise was to hook up a headset jack to a PM1000 intercom system. This was very handy, since whether you decide to build all your avionics or not, you will most definitely have to do the headset connectors.

I forgot to take pictures of the process, but here’s the finished headset jacks with the soldered connection. This included learning to ground the shielded wire, soldering the actual headset jack and doing some d-sub crimping for the intercom connector.

Finished Headset connector and crimped BNC Antenna connector

Also shown in the image above is the result of the second exercise, a crimped BNC antenna connector. This part, I was already familiar with from hooking up my NAV Antenna in the Rudder a few months ago.

The final exercise was to create a small electrical circuit. This includes a “master” switch, circuit protection in the form of a fuse and a dimmable “cabin” light that is tied behind the master switch. Aside from the practical application of the exercise, it also tied together a lot of the theoretical parts of the workshop and was a great finish for the weekend.

Getting started Wiring in progress System wired up

Here’s the finished working circuit in action:

I also ran into two other Sling Builders, Richard Howell, who recently started building a Sling 2 and Skip Jones, who is also building a Sling TSi. Now we just need to all finish building our airplanes and then we can be a chapter of Sling Pilots in the Pacific Northwest.

EAA Sportair Sheet Metal workshop

While the wait for the arrival of my Sling TSi kit continues, I got to do some sheet metal practice attending the EAA Sportair Sheet Metal workshop recently.

It was a two day weekend workshop that was held at the Seattle Museum of Flight Restoration Center, teaching the basics of sheet metal work with all sorts of various techniques used when building a sheet metal airplane.

Over the course of the two days each participant made two practice pieces. The first one was to get a feel for the different techniques, from drilling, to deburring, to dimpling and countersinking. Here’s the first piece:

The second practice piece was a cross section of an elevator, where we had to bend rib pieces, practice more match drilling and dimpling and then fabricate a flush inspection plate held in place using nut plates. Here’s some images I took during the process:

All in all, it was a great workshop, a lot of learning and building confidence in the skills required to build your own airplane. So if you’re toying with the idea of building your own airplane from sheet metal, but are unsure about the work involved, this workshop is a great entry point.
While I likely won’t need to use some of the riveting techniques I learnt in the workshop, since the Sling assembly mainly uses pop rivets, it was still great to get a good understanding of the different techniques.

Here’s a final picture of all the practice of the workshop put together (with an airplane drawn as a bonus).