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Cabin Heat Boxes

Hi Dave
Love your panel.
I'm getting ready to mount my cabin heat boxes. I'm also using two. Where did you mount yours cabin boxes.
Thanks
Russel Koch
RV9A
SteinAir will be sending my parts and pcs in the new year
 
Nice work Dave. Tell us about your switch labelling, I really like how yours looks. I've avoided that so far but it's got to be done!
 
Dave, I really like your panel layout. I have been day dreaming an almost identical design for my 7a. Keep up the beautiful work.
 
On the first day of the new year (1-1-11) a friend of mine agreed to fly me in his Ercoupe down to Northwest Regional Airport (52F) which is just about a mile away from the Texas Motor Speedway outside of Ft. Worth where I was having my RV9A painted. The painter is GLO aircraft painters. They had called on Wednesday the 29th to tell me my plane was finished and ready to be picked up after having it for about 3 weeks (I flew it down on Dec 3rd).

So Jim and I took off in his ErCoupe around 8:00 am Saturday morning to go pick it up. It was a very cold morning Saturday. The outside air temp gauge showed around 10 deg F when we took off. We had a pretty good North tailwind pushing us along in the Ercoupe so we got there pretty fast showing about 145 MPH ground speed. Grady O'Neal, the owner of GLO and painter of airplanes, met us there and opened the doors to reveal 446RV fully painted.







Well, I was stunned. What a gorgeous plane! I spent the next hour to hour and a half examining every inch of the airplane. I had heard stories of guys taking off to fly their newly painted airplane home only to have an off field forced landing because some component was not reconfigured correctly when the plane was put back together. No worries here however. Grady and his crew do a fantastic job. They pay attention to every detail and make sure everything is exactly the way it was when it came into the shop.

After Jim and I had a quick bite to eat and filled up both airplanes at the pump we took off for home. Although I had done a very thorough critical examination of the airplane and found absolutely nothing out of place I was still nervous about taking off. It was kind of like the first flight all over again. Of course all of my nervousness proved to be totally undeserved. I took off and the airplane flew just as fantastically as it had before the paint. In fact, as Grady had told me, it seemed to fly just a bit faster. All those nice shiny slick surfaces had to be giving me a couple more miles per hour in speed. It sure felt faster.

This plane is a blast to fly. It climbs like a rocket, it has speed to spare (only limited by how much money I want to spend on fuel to go fast), it maneuvers by just thinking about turning, climbing, descending. I cannot say enough about how much fun this plane is to fly.

So, heading back home, the North wind is now a head wind. I climbed up to 6500' (at about 2000 FPM) once clear of the DFW class B airspace; set up the autopilot to get me headed home; leaned out to about 30-35 deg lean of peak and trimmed out for a cruise speed of just around 145-150 MPH. All of this while seeing a head wind of about 12-15 MPH. Oh yes, and all of this while burning right at 7.0 GPH. Did I already say what a blast this plane is to fly?

After 1.2 hours I found myself setting up for approach at Thompson (53OK). I have never been comfortable doing low passes in the past but I could not pass it up this time. I setup for a low pass over the runway, came straight in on 35 for the low pass. Mary (my wife) was waiting outside the hangar along with others around the airport as I flew by showing about 165 MPH on the True Airspeed Indicator. Man is this plane fun!

I came around on downwind and made an uneventful approach with a slick soft landing on our grass runway that was a pretty as you please. I think this airplane really could land itself.

After 5 years, 1 month and 3 days of building I saw my first flight on July 20, 2010. I flew off my 40 hours of Phase I flying between July 20th and October 1st. The 41st hour saw me flying my new airplane to LOE in Weatherford, OK (KOJA) on October 1, 2010. Now on 1/1/11 I picked up my newly painted airplane.

Life is Good!

Keep bucking those rivets because it will very much be worth it one day!
 
Moving Day!!

Well - sort of moving day, that is...

Not ready to fly, not even ready to head to the airport for final assembly - but it's moving day nonetheles. I'm selling my house and moving into another place, so the project gets to move from my garage into a barn/hangar to share space with a couple tractors, a cotton stripper, a spray rig and a C-172. The price is right (family=free) and it's just a couple miles down the road from my new house.

Here's the fuselage being strapped down for the 40-mile trip.
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And here it is in place in it's new home.
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An interesting twist to this is that we have several non-english-speaking farm hands commonly moving equipment in the barn with forklifts and skytracks, so we had to let them all know that this is a special project and nothing but a man-powered broom is allowed in that shop space.
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Looks great Greg!!

She's starting to look like a plane! Greg, what does your fuselage assembly weigh at this point? The reason I ask is that I am building my plane in the basement and will need to lift it out of a window (garden height). I know I can get the wings out of the window and at least the canoe portion of the fuselage before I have to move to the garage. If you don't know the weight...how many people did it take to lift it onto the trailer? Thanks.
 
She's starting to look like a plane! Greg, what does your fuselage assembly weigh at this point? The reason I ask is that I am building my plane in the basement and will need to lift it out of a window (garden height). I know I can get the wings out of the window and at least the canoe portion of the fuselage before I have to move to the garage. If you don't know the weight...how many people did it take to lift it onto the trailer? Thanks.

We didn't weigh it, but I would estimate that at this point it was about 150 pounds, maybe 160. I had the seats out, the fuel pumps out, the flap motor and bar out (rudder pedals still in), baggage compartment bulkheads out, and all the panel and fore-panel pieces out. I left the main gear legs on simply because it was convenient, and that's probably 50 pounds right there. Two people did all the real lifting at the main gear legs, and the tail had a third guy holding maybe 20 pounds of weight and basically just guiding it.
 
Panel Work

I finally have my panel cut and painted. This is the third generation panel I've made.
TruTrak Efis/autopilot, Trutrak EMS, Trutrak Gemini ( just a mockup at this point)
PS Engineering 3000 intercom,Garmin SL40 and GTX327 and IFLY 700 GPS mounted on a Ram Mount
inside the opening so I can move it out and tilt it for best viewing depending on light conditions.
Below the panel is a hinged fuse panel with three separate fuse blocks, (Thanks DanH)
I'm loving this Rustoleum Hammered finish paint.

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Millie is making sure I do it right.
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Rolling over the canoe ...

Hi to the Van's community.
Great day for me and my project this saturday !
The D day for "rolling over the canoe".
Empennage and wings are totally finish, I think I am on the good way ...

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FUSELAGE%202.jpg
 
Empennage nearing completion

My last post here was a finished Horizontal Stabilizer. I now have the vertical stabilizer, rudder and both elevators finished, along with the trim tab. Just working to get the counter balance weights installed and then trial fit the components together. The wings are in my garage and the inventory has been completed. You can see the 2 wing boxes in the photo, with the rudder sitting on the spar box.

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TrimTabRivetComplete.jpg
 
Tail cone assembly

Ok, I read this site often. Figured it was about time I post a pic. Building the fuse is really fun. Found the c frame rivet kit from Cleveland tool, VERY handy! Check out the video on EAA.org. Great for assembling the center spar, small parts, firewall and bulkheads. Ensures consistency of riveting. This is a 9a by the way. Used a SEM rattle can self-etching primer from my local auto body supply. Use a good respirator!

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More time than money

Hello all,

Last year I became the proud fifth owner of a pre started 9A fuse, tail, and wing kit. Yep, you read it right. I'm the fifth owner; I have the complete history. Anyway this girl has been all over the states. She had been proverbially 'kicked around,' abused and hacked up in almost inconceivable ways; most notably one of the early owners thought it would be great idea to grind down one of the spar feeds into the fuse....:eek:. It’s ok Evans….breathe……breathe. Anyhow, Al Girard, the guy who sold it to me had taken her in and was going over her with a fine tooth comb. Al had already done a lot of surgery or her and was on the verge of bringing her to life when he had to switch gears and focus on some very important and pressing life changing issues. Al is a heck of a guy, a great person, and we have become good friends. He bent over backwards to divulge all this kit needed to be whole again. He gave me confidence once again that there are honest and fare people still out there you can do business with.

I got the kit for pennies on the dollar with full disclosure. When I saw the list of what Al had done and what still needed to be done, well, all I could say to describe what I thought was holy $#*+! The list as well as her prognosis however still didn't daunt me. Considering the asking price along with my shoe string budget and my willingness to spend the time after finishing my dissertation, I knew that all this Cinderella was coming home with me. I will always have more time than money and if I can do it myself well, I'll spend time over spending money any day.

Vans will sell me the spar for around $1700. That said. I have to carefully drill out the wing skins and remove the tanks to replace it. Again, potentially, the only cost to me is time and careful patience. The goal is to save and re-use as many parts and skins as safely possible. The pic is the first skin on the side and the guts of the wing after successfull removal the other night. Total time was about 2.5 hours for drilling out each rivet for this skin including cleanup of all holes. I was very pleased in finding I was able to get 99% of the rivets out without causing further damage to either skin or rib holes. Only a couple holes were slightly widened and will likely be fixed by 'oops' rivets. I hope to reduce this percentage on the next skin. I will get the next one off hopefully before I go to Iraq in April. I anticipate having plenty of time to spend with her after my six month rotation.

Firstskin.jpg


Just wanted to show and tell as I am completely stoked that I am now actually building/working on my own 9 instead of just reading about all of you and being so envious :D. It will be a slow process but based on the price I paid for this and only needing a finish kit, engine, and panel, I believe I will get her into the air for around $30K or less. I’ll post more later.


Best,


Evans.
 
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Panel

Hello all. Could not resist working on panel. Simple VFR, not that expensive really. Waiting for an EFIS. May mount a ram mount for an IPAD to the right of the stack. Foreflight seems to be a very nice flight app.

ins4li.jpg
 
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Here's my panel

This is right up there with flipping the canoe. It felt like being a kid again, putting a model airplane together, only this time I'll get to ride in it!

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Too Cool

Hey Jim,

Looking good in the neighbor hood. How do you know where all the wires in the back of that stuff go?
 
Wires? What wires? You mean there's more???

Just kidding... I paid a little extra and got wiring harnesses for each of these puppies, except the intercom. That may be a head-scratcher. One of the mounting nuts on the inside of the intercom fell off and I had to open the intercom up to put it back on. Luckily there were instructions telling you how to open the intercom box.
 
Al...

Hello all. Could not resist working on panel. Simple VFR, not that expensive really. Waiting for an EFIS. May mount a ram mount for an IPAD to the right of the stack. Foreflight seems to be a very nice flight app.

ins4li.jpg

Looks great. Simple and sweet.
 
Canopy Completed!

Hi all:

After what seemed like 40 days and 40 nights of rain here in Northern California, I finally put the finishing touches on my slider canopy today and took it out for some air. I think I can finally call the canopy COMPLETE!

The fiberglass isn't perfect but instead of spending a huge amount of time on it now, I'm just going to pay the paint shop to get it ship shape. I'll also throw some two part primer on the fiberglass before I fly as well.

I Sikaflexed it on...only one hole drilled into the Plexiglass and I made a fiberglass aft skirt (the ONLY way to go!).

Thanks for all the advice! Here are some beauty shots of it:


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There's nothing like showing off your Thing and your airplane in the driveway on a Sunday afternoon!:

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Contact!
 
Simply awesome Interior arrived today!!!

Abby from Flightline Interiors did a beautiful job on my new interior for the 9A.
I didn't realize how many different pieces there would be for a complete interior. It came with a full set of instructions on where each piece went and how to install them. I am more than satisfied with the workmanship and cost. Abby made this a very pleasant experience. the lead time was about 3 months but I knew that up front and the timing worked out perfect for me.
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Use what you have!

I decided to hang the engine (most of it anyway) so I could move to the cowl. I was too lazy to bring the hoist home from work so......
I fired up the trusty tractor.
enginehang.jpg


enginehang2.jpg


It actually worked pretty well, rolled the fuse up to the engine, started the top bolts, followed by to bottom and about 45 minutes later....
enginehang3.jpg


Now where did I put that cowl???? Note the special high performance cylinders! Really low friction and drag:rolleyes: Should make fitting the cowl easier though.
 
This thread reminds me of the fact that I am continually amazed by the large number of people that do not own a forklift. How do things get done without a forklift? Another amazing fact is that my brand new forklift is twenty five years old, it just seems like yesterday.....
 
Awesome Don!! I have a set of those con-rod covers...they are VERY handy. :cool:

Since cylinders weren't in the budget yet, I built the rest of the engine so I could hang it. Now I can do plumbing, wiring, control linkages, and fit the cowl. Maybe I will win the lottery so I can buy the rest of the stuff I need. Anyone want to buy a Piper????? Where did I put that lottery ticket, lol.
 
Mine's twice that age...

This thread reminds me of the fact that I am continually amazed by the large number of people that do not own a forklift. How do things get done without a forklift? Another amazing fact is that my brand new forklift is twenty five years old, it just seems like yesterday.....

...the old Yale that loads/unloads my farmers' chemicals.

Best,
 
Wings taking shape

Whew - well I finally finished prepping all the spars and edge polishing and fluting all the wing ribs and couldn't resist clecoing it all together. Sure is encouraging to see it taking shape.

wing1.jpg
 
Painting

1362 days, 270 hours, and two engines after the first flight, RV-9 N941WR is finally in the paint shop.

Dropped it off this morning and spent 2 1/2 hours taking it apart for the painter.

With luck, it will be finsihed in four weeks and look like this:
 
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1362 days, 270 hours, and two engines after the first flight, RV-9 N941WR is finally in the paint shop.

I first saw, 1362 days and thought, "oh man, I have a long way to go."

Then, I saw that I am already 500 days in, I think I'm going to be as many days as man hours.

Look forward to the scheme, Bill. Can't wait to see it.
 
panel update

Hope it all holds up in the sun and heat. Will have to see. I may leave it in my car on a hot summer day to make sure the veneer stays attached. So far so good. Anyone have a Dynon D100 for that hole?

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You were right...

It turned out great. What process did you use to apply it? It looks bubble free.

Hope it all holds up in the sun and heat. Will have to see. I may leave it in my car on a hot summer day to make sure the veneer stays attached. So far so good. Anyone have a Dynon D100 for that hole?

4u8jdc.jpg


286wh9d.jpg
 
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