RVaiting 3: Heaven on a Hill

By Andrew Herd (23 March 2005)

Last time I wrote about our Vans RV9a home build project was a while back, and I had forgotten all about the series I had promised to write about it, until Nels Anderson (who runs FlightSim.Com) reminded me. So I guess it's time to play catch up - incredibly, the last piece we published went up over a year ago and a whole river full of water has gone under the bridge since then.

One change is that back in March last year, the plane was at Len's house - those of you with long memories will recall that Len is masterminding the project - and now it is in our hangar at Fishburn International Airport.

That's me to the left of the fin and there's a visiting pilot called Paul just behind it. Nick, the third member of our team, is pulling his fleece on, because there is an east wind blowing into the hangar off the North Sea and warm it is not. There is no flying today, because the easterly has brought fog with it, a phenomenon the Vikings called the 'haar' and it gave their longship navigators problems too. Relatively warm, wet sea air is blown over the land and cools below its dew point, the resulting fog hanging around all day; sometimes for several days. It can roll in with surprising speed and I once saw the haar come in faster than a horse at a full gallop - we only just put down before it obliterated the field and that was the end of flying for three days. Kind of tough if you only just flew in for a coffee, but the haar generally doesn't come in that quick; mostly you wake up and find it there in the morning and all the people who haven't got planes to build end up crammed into the club house, drinking coffee, steaming up the windows and bitching about the weather, as pilots do.

You will notice that the wings and the empennage are on now - last time I wrote, we had just finished the wings and the fuselage kit was still in transit, but now the plane is at the stage where all the control surfaces are connected up and you can sit in the cockpit and waggle the stick and things move. We frequently do this - every home builder gets into their machine from time to time and makes aeroplane noises and waggles the stick - because if you didn't make aeroplane noises and waggle the stick, you might allow yourself to calculate how many hundreds of hours you had spent building the thing, for no more reward than watching a large pile of parts get slightly smaller. And if you did that, you would run the risk of getting an attack of sanity and that might lead to going off and hiring a plane like normal people.

But fortunately for us and this series, home builders are not normal people, and there is something ever so slightly addictive about building an aeroplane. As I remarked in one of the earlier pieces, some people get so badly hooked that they end up doing nothing but build aeroplanes, and there are people I could name who spend more much more time building than they do flying. If you asked those people, and I am one of them, they would tell you that it is a remarkably cost effective way of being around airplanes, considering that you can't burn an Avgas if you don't have an engine yet.

Looking at these pictures gives me a warm feeling, because I can remember those wings as they used to be, a couple of spars, a stack of Duraluminum sheet, a stack of ribs and who knows how many thousand rivets. We put them together and with their help, we will be able to fly.

Moving the RV into the hangar has its pros and cons. It is great being at Fishburn, often described as 'heaven on a hill' because it is such a nice place to be on a warm spring day, with the birds singing and planes flying in and people sitting out having tea and bacon butties (a culinary specialty of northern England that may not have reached the rest of the world yet). If you wanted a British version of Emma Field, Fishburn is definitely it and I don't say this because I am biased, I say it because Fishburn is heaven on a hill and on the weekend people fly from all over the UK just to have a piece of it. I kid people that the only two thing that would make it perfect would be a trout lake, but I guess you have to take the rough with the smooth. On a fine day, there can be forty planes out on the grass the other side of those hangars and another half dozen on the way in.

Trouble is, when they visit, they all come to see us. At one time, I seriously considered painting 'The Swamp' on the door of our hangar, because that is what it feels like sometimes, when the place is half full and the door opens and another dozen people let themselves in. They crowd around and they stare at the plane and they say, 'Haven't you finished it yet?' and we say, 'Do you want to end up wearing this deburring tool?' and you can tell that, good friends though they are, they do not quite understand. With the exception of the people who are building their own planes - there are another half dozen projects going on nearby, four of them at Fishburn, one of those another RV9a, amazing though it may seem - most pilots can't quite get their heads around how much care is needed to assemble something that flies at 200 mph at 10,000 feet. When the safety of your ass depends on it, you want every rivet to be a good one.

The other disadvantages of being in the hangar are that it can get very cold at night, we are fighting a small war against an infinitely large mouse population (reminds me, I must get some traps) and there isn't an espresso machine. But we figure we will survive somehow.

See? You can't take a picture of the plane without a visitor in it. The shot just below has Len on the right of the rudder and a lady called Maggie on the left. I hope Maggie won't mind if I describe her as a kind of flying groupie, who came with some guy whose name I forget, liked it and never went away. She flies, too, sometimes.

Now it is nice to see people, but you can't talk and build a plane at the same time. There is another reason why we try to limit the number of visitors, which is that they can prove distracting; for example, on the day these pictures were taken we wasted hours making a template to check the rudder movement, as a result of which we remade one of the rudder stops, before discovering, when everyone had cleared out and Len managed to fight his way back to the bench, that not only had Vans laid down a method for checking the rudder, but it had been done a few months back and the rudder was in tolerance according to that.

We gave a collective sigh and clecoed the original stop back on. Sometimes, you need space to think and you can't do that if there are too many people around.

Visitors aside, one of the best things about a home build is that you can do it at whatever speed you like. Want to take five years to do it? Fine by me. Want to blast through it in twelve months? I wish you luck. It isn't like ordering a completed plane from Cessna, or whoever, when you do things yourself, you get to make all the choices about how you want your plane to be and if you want to finish the interior with deep pile carpet, that's fine too. Give you an example - I have rarely come across a tank selector valve that I actually like. Not only are most valves positioned in the last place you want them, they usually work in the reverse sense that you would naturally expect and half of them force you to turn the valve through the 'off' position when you are switching tanks. Flight Simulator doesn't really prepare you for this, but many real planes have the fuel cock on the floor of the cockpit, which means that you end up looking like some kind of circus act if you are flying solo and have to change tanks. If you ever have to perform the task in a hurry, you want the valve within easy reach, in full view and to be as foolproof as possible. Disaster beckons otherwise.

In an RV9a, the plans put the selector where the pilot's right hand naturally falls, right there between the seats. The position is great, but the unit Vans supply is not so great, so I bought us an Andair valve which can't be accidentally turned off, unless you actively pull the central knob up as you rotate the selector. This valve is as smooth as silk, but it costs $193, plus post and packing. At the time of writing, that would allow you to buy every single MegaScenery and MegaCity product PC Aviator have on sale, less a couple of dollars - which is one reason why simulating flight is always going to be more popular than doing it for real.

The hull looks pretty good with the wings on, or at least it does to us. Thanks to Len's apparently infinite stock of engineering knowledge and Nick's perfectionism, the wingtips are within one tenth of an inch of level with each other; well above the standard Vans set. I have since had some amusing moments measuring the height alignment of production aircraft wings and you would be shocked at the findings, but the planes I measured all seem to fly OK - though I will be interested when ours takes to the air, because the whole purpose of taking all this care is that we want it to be better than OK.

One of the hazards of working with a material like Duraluminum is that it is extremely easy to build in a twist. That's why clecoes are used to hold match drilled componenents together; if you work on one side of a structure in isolation, the stresses end up being spread unequally and when you assemble the other side, the danger is that it won't fit and the temptation to force it to do so can be overwhelming. I have seen at least one set of wings where the incidence varied continuously along the span, with all the ribs at slightly different angles, and another set where one tip was five inches higher than the other. In the latter case, one of the wings will almost certainly have to be rebuilt, which is three month's work down the drain, at who knows what cost. Care is everything and my advice is that if you want to build a plane, go along to some workshops first and learn about the processes involved - it will save time in the long run.

There is a good deal of sitting and thinking when you build a plane, even when you have a kit as good as the ones Vans supply. The manual weighs about ten pounds, but the build relies as much, if not more, on the technical drawings, which are a vital source of information about dimensions for components you have to make yourself. There are something like sixty drawings in the RV9 kit and ours are hard used, with scribbled notes, dog eared corners and nameless stains all over. We have an easel to hold the plans up alongside the plane and endless hours have been spent huddled around it, trying to figure out how to make a part and where the danged thing goes once it has been made. Part of the trouble is that good though the RV manual is, Vans appear to have got bored of writing it after the end of the section on the wings and the fuselage instructions are full of statements like: 'The seat backs are made as shown on DWG 30'. They don't actually add, 'Go figure', but it often feels like that. You stare at the drawing for a long time and then it takes half an hour to find all the parts, after which you have to get the dimensions for any drilling or trimming off the drawing, check there isn't a note hidden somewhere on the plans giving further instructions and then you have to look at the drawings for any parts related to the one you are working on, because sometimes there are clues on those about how the whole assembly goes together. Sometimes there aren't and you just have to work it out for yourself, or ask around until someone comes up with the answer.

Then you measure up. Twice. 'Measure twice and cut once' is advice that many home builders must have echoing in their ears as they fax Vans for a new part and rue the moment they thought, 'What the hell', took a gamble and ruined the original. The trouble is that doing it right means taking time to ensure that you have all the information you need to assemble a component and in my experience many pilots, being action people, aren't so good at doing that. The type A personalities have a tendency to jump in before putting their brain in fine pitch and my strong advice is that if you build a plane as a team, make sure you have at least one person in it who is one of life's natural bean counters. Listen to this person's every word, cherish them and encourage them because that guy (or girl) will save your sorry ass many times over.

Vans say that a dentist can build any of their planes. Well, yeah... maybe. I would definitely like to meet this dentist. Curiously, I think my dentist probably could, because he is that kind of guy, but the discipline involved in building a plane is phenomenal and it helps to have someone around who can share their experience and help you out of the holes you will inevitably dig your way into. At the simplest level, if you don't have a bolt measuring template, working out which bolt you need from the two hundred that spill out of one of Vans famous brown bags can be a challenging task, but it is extremely satisfying learning new skills, even small ones like how to sort bolts. And at the end of it all, you will have a plane that you helped build and there aren't many people who will ever be able to say that.

There is another thing. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge in the past year, a great deal of change has happened, some of it good, some of it bad, but the friendships I have forged through building this machine that have proved unexpectedly strong. The RV itself has become a friend to us, a recalcitrant one perhaps, that at times is reluctant to give up its secrets, but a friend nonetheless. To the three of us, the plane has become an almost living thing, a focus that has carried us through some difficult times. There aren't many hobbies I can think of that have the power to do that.

Andrew Herd