3/27/2010 - Well I've completed the deal. The check has been written and I pick the kit contents up Monday. In the meantime I have cleaned and scrubbed the garage. Tomorrow I will paint the floor white. With all those little pieces, I do not want to have to chase washers across a grey concrete floor. I am also inventorying tools. Most on the Helicycle list I already have, but I do want to be careful about not mixing steel cutting tools and aluminum cutting tools. They stay separate.
4/23/2010 - Busy month. I finished refurbishing the garage, which is quite full at this point with the RV8A still in there, and all the fittings for the new project. I painted every surface white, and discovered something really cool. Periodically Lowe's has some killer deals on pre-fabricated bathroom cabinets. A couple of sections of those with a pre-fab countertop makes a nice workbench/storage cabinet. I am sure it is not precisely, perfectly flat, but pretty darned close. I will shim and do all critical tolerance work on my flush surface in the downstairs shop. The project is all here. I received the rotor blades from Eagle. The only thing left from them is the turbine itself, which I have no immediate need for anyway, so delivery, though promised "soon" is not super critical to me at this time.
Harbor Freight is my friend. I picked up a bunch of odds & ends I didn't already have; a 4" die grinder, more clamps, a 1" belt sander, blades, etc...
Real Project Work!! I first started by checking over all the Group 1 work done by the previous kit owner. He got as far as mounting the frame on the skids, then starting to clean up the seat pan. The gear mounting looks acceptable. His holes are square and I should just need to replace the hardware with known good and properly sized items at final assembly. Though his work seems acceptable, his color choices were not. Green?!? That'll change for sure. The seat cushions are also a hideous purple/pink combo which will probably end up getting replaced at some point.
4/24/2010 - Fitting seat pan. Cleaned up holes and edges. Mounted nutplates (with flush rivets, instead of the pop rivets), and started trying to fit the pan to the frame. The fit is tricky. A lot more material than I would have thought had to be removed from the outsides of the front of the footwells. Lots of small trimming, then refitting of the pan.
As can be seen below, a fair amount of material has to come off both sides of the front of the footwells to fit down between the two front frame tubes. The fiberglass is at least doubled up here around the bends, so hopefully the strength is not compromised too much. We shall see as this will probably be a high stress area in getting in and out of the ship.
As
can be seen below, a fair amount of material has to come off both sides of
the front of the footwells to fit down between the two front frame tubes.
The fiberglass is at least doubled up here around the bends, so hopefully
the strength is not compromised too much. We shall see as this will
probably be
a high stress area in getting in and out of the ship.
Shown
here
is the grinding I had to do on the control bracket to clear the seat pan as
specified in the video. Still seems to be plenty of meat between the
hole and the ground edge. There's about 1/16 of an inch clearance
between it and the seat pan. I DO plan on repainting the frame after
all the preliminaries are done just prior to final assembly. Green -
what was he thinking?
Here
are the control tube mount tab locations when the front of the pan is flush against the
mounting tabs. Pretty tight. I am going to shave a little off the
inside of the round to fit the front plane of the pan down a hair lower.
You
can see that the pan drops much further down on the left side now. So much
so that instead of being canted to the right on the frame, it is now canted to the
left. However, that single modification of removing that wooden piece
allowed the seat pan to "nest-in" much better, and the clearance between the pan
and the mounting tabs is now less than 1/4 inch all around. With my floxed
pads and very, very minor bending, this will be a clean fit (my prediction).
This view is looking up from the bottom at the back of the seat pan. You
can see now that the seat is offset to the left. I am discovering the
limitations of the "video" approach, instead of a manual and blueprints. I
would very much like to know the exact offset of the control rod clearance
tunnel at the top of the seat pan relative to the hood bracket at the top of the
frame. You really have to watch BJ closely. As far as I can tell, he
only mentions in one brief sentence, much later on, that the hump is intended to
be aligned with the hole at the top of the frame, and the seat pan edges are
centered relative to the frame tubes. Of course with some prints and a
manual this would all be immediately evident. Instead you have to watch
the same video over and over (drives my daughter nuts) to try to glean this.
Perhaps I just got spoiled with the Van's RV8A kit, which has great
documentation by comparison. Now don't get me wrong, I am immensely
impressed with the Helicycle kit so far. For the money spent, the
frame, fiberglass, materials, and especially the machined parts appear to be of
very high quality. The budget was blown on machining parts and tooling,
and not on documentation. 
The source of the misalignment are the vertical tabs next to the collective
pocket. Looks like those have to be bent inward a hair.
One thing I do not like about the fiberglass is the appearance of the bottom
surface. The whitish areas almost appear as if they weren't wetted out
fully. When I get my epoxy I will probably brush on a thin coat to "seal"
them. It doesn't look to be a structural issue, but certainly a cosmetic
one that bothers me.
05/09/10- I laid up a strip of fiberglass on the right hand side
between the tabs. The pan currently rests on the tab welds, and I don't
want to grind those or the flat part of the pan, so I will build up the area
between the tabs slightly. Two strips of cloth was not enough, so I will
probably build a little dam and pour a thin strip of flox (resin and cotton
fibers) between the tab locations and sand it down until the pan rests on it.
I made little U-shaped dams out of urethane foam to contain the flox "pads" for
the seatpan mounting tabs. The foam was tacked down with 5-minute epoxy,
then the flox was mixed and poured into the cavity. Flox is much thicker
than resin, but still thin enough to flow, so you have to either pour it
flat or contain it.
On the left side curve (second tab down from the top, the distance is quite
large. Instead of bending the tab a ton, which will draw the hole closer
to the curve of the seatback, I will just build this one up taller and leave the
tab only slightly tweaked to be flat with it.
Flox poured. In all cases I built the pads to be taller than needed so I
can then sand them down. The foam will then get sanded to a nice radius
and a layer of thin cloth laid up over the top of the whole thing.
I
cut the scribed slots in the fuselage halves. Overall the fiberglass
looked sound, and there are just a couple of locations on the edges where the
gelcoat got thick and there is a little separation between fiberglass layers.
Those will get sanded out and a new strip of cloth or two added since they're
right on the joggle lip mating surface and need to be strong. Gelcoat is
non-structural. The interior is quite sloppy. There are a lot
of little hairs and some places where resin pooled up. I will sand those
down and probably be able to take down enough to compensate for the weight of my
flox pads. Net sum zero on weight gain for my mods.
The
sanding drums for the die grinder are quite remarkable. They work great,
right up until you catch the end on a lip or edge, then they explode,
sounding like a gunshot going off and just disappear at high speed across the
room. I've used this thing a lot and have never done that before, then I
had it happen twice in ten minutes. Guess that means I'm getting sloppy
and it's time to stop for the day.