Chronicling my Long EZ construction (and a few other things).
Disclaimer
This blog is for entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to teach you how to build anything. The author is not responsible for any accident, injury, or loss that occurs as a result of reading this blog. Read this blog at your own risk.
In this post I am going to complete the longeron repairs by finishing the right one. I’ll mostly dump the photos here and add some comments. For a more thorough explanation of what and why, check out the left longeron repair.
Broken longeron with 3D printed ABS cutting guide nailed to it
Longeron getting cut along the 7:1 cutting jig
A top view of the surgery
Removing the damaged longeron from the fuselage
What it looked like right after the two sawing operations
All cleaned up and ready to get worked on
This fiberglass corner got damaged during the fall, and will need to be replaced.
I started by floxing the part where the foam got removed. I reused the jig to contain the flox.
After a little sanding, I had a flat base for the next operation.
The 3D printed ABS jig was used again (on a table) to cut this longeron splice
2 BID plies at 45º replace the original substrate. Most of this will be eventually cut off to accommodate the CS spar.
Right after peel-ply removal, the next day.
BID trimmed down to size
Getting ready for the longeron splice installation
Once again, flox only was used as a bonding agent.
Flox added to both sides of the splice, and the sidewall.
Careful longeron alignment
Pressure added during the cure
Laying out a plan for the outer fiberglass replacement
Original fiberglass sanded in accordance with the plans' repair section (page 3-22)
First layer of UNI being laid
UNI saturated with epoxy
Second layer of UNI laid with opposite orientation (as per plans)
Second layer wetted with pure epoxy
Additional BID layer to cover the repair
With the surgery completed, this patient needs some rest time to be fully cured.
Peel-ply bandages, and Saran wrap to keep air from infiltrating.
Finished outer repair
Prepping for the "inside job"
BID pre-preg ready to be impregnated
Epoxy mixed with Cab-o-Sil painted over longeron and sidewall. A flox fillet was added in the bottom corner.
Pre-preg applied to the fuselage. All air bubbles were later squeegeed out.
This is my sixth consecutive year attending CSA’s Rough River fly-in, I am a proud repeat offender. As a canard builder it is more of a pilgrimage than just a fly-in.
In RR you feel like these people “get you”, and for a couple of days you are no longer the weirdo building a backward looking airplane in a space that should have housed a car, but a forward looking superhero able to create awesomeness from nothingness.
This year, Wade and I joined the ranks of those who flew there, and while we did not do it with our own build yet, touching down in Rough River was like a home coming.
Attendance was the highest I’ve ever seen, I think the count was around 80 planes, 69 of which canards.
Worthy of notice is the fact that Terry Lamp, the builder who’s plane I am now flying, was in attendance, and it was awesome being able to reunite the two of them after a 9 year separation.
Terry and I got to talk shop, compare notes, and go flying together. It was truly a fantastic time, highlighted by some of the best weather in weeks.
Terry's flight
I said in the past I wanted to give builders rides whenever I’d fly to Rough River, and I was able to keep my promise by taking Mike Beasley, Terry Lamp, and Wade Parton flying. Ary Glantz was unfortunately not in attendance, or it would have likely been my next “victim”.
The trip back (185 kts GS)was as incredible as the trip over (175 kts GS), we flew at 11'500 ft and 2500 rpm, and got 6.5 gph.
Terry has built an awesome airplane, and I can only hope that my airplane will prove to be as good as his.
I decided to use an OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screen for displaying Pitot probe and nose foam temperatures. OLEDs have a few advantages over regular LED displays among which is not needing to be backlit, which improves the depth of the black color, reduces power consumption, and eliminates additional sources of light in the cockpit.
The 1.5” unit I purchased (3.8 cm) came from Adafruit Industries, and was probably originally intended to be used on some older cell phone. The good news for me is that I should be able to wire it to the Arduino's digital outputs, and program its behavior via software (C++).
SSD1351 color OLED display
To answer your next likely question… “No, I have never done this before”, but then again, I also have never built a plane before, so we shouldn’t let a little challenge slow us down.
Back to the screen…
I only intended the screen to be used during the initial testing phase to verify my expectations of the Pitot tube effectiveness, and make appropriate changes to the power supply unit, but it could be left in the cockpit if one wished.
The main purpose of course would be to display the actual Pitot temperature, and also the temperature of the foam surrounding the Pitot installation. The foam being the weakest thermal link of this installation.
The display arrived with the pins not connected, so some soldering was required.
Back side of the SSD1351 as it came in the mail
With those in place, it was time to make the connection with the Arduino, and make sure I could get the screen to work.
The serial connection only takes 7 wires, and it's just fast enough for this project.
There are two different ways to hook this screen up, I had to go for the slower connection because most of my Arduino digital output pins were already spoken for. It’s still plenty fast for what I will use it for, but I also lost the ability to use the micro SD port on the back side of the screen.
With a little more work I was able to make the Arduino write some text on the display. The fist time you do this is very exciting.
Getting the screen to show something
When I went to integrate the OLED into the Pitot heating circuitry, I had barely enough digital output ports to connect it, so I ended up connecting the air/ground logic switch input to an analog port. Turns out you can use analog ports as digital, but not the other way around.
Here’s the “spaghetti diagram” of the working Pitot heating system with the OLED…
In case you were wondering how it all fit together
Because I needed a custom enclosure for the display, I decided to design one myself, then 3D print it in ABS on the Zortrax M200.
Of course I had to recreate the OLED in CAD first.
Virtual OLED drawn in Fusion360
Actual OLED
Yes, the bent pins and the soldered tips were a pain to draw.
With that done, I designed a small enclosure for the cockpit.
The base of the enclosure...
... with the OLED installed...
3D printed enclosure
... and the top cover on.
One thing that bothered me about having such a big screen, was using it to display just two numbers, so I started thinking about adding a graphing window for the probe temperature in the bottom section of the screen.
This is the part that took the most to get right, because I had to develop the code to control every pixel of the graph individually and continuously. For example, in order to represent the passage of time, I needed to shift the graph to the left, and to do that every pixel needed to be deleted individually (read "overwritten in black"), and redrawn one pixel to the left at every measuring cycle, while the new temperature reading would be added on the far right of the screen.
It all took some time to get right, but this gave me the ability to monitor the temperature trends in real time, all the while being able to look back at a couple of minutes of historical data as well.
I bet you’ll like the results.
Testing the newly developed graphing software
This almost creates a TMI (Too Much Information)situation, but it’s perfect for testing purposes, where you want to know everything that is going on with your installation.
Talking about TMI, I wanted to show Wade how the air/ground logic switch would affect the Pitot, so I shot a quick video for him that ended up being too long to sent, so I threw it on YouTube.
Testing the code for the air/ground logic
In the video I am doing the switching by hand, but on the final airplane installation an air pressure activated switch will automate this task.
The only thing left to do was to rig up my car and go collect some actual data on the road.
Official "EZ shop research/test vehicle"
Needless to say, this did attract a lot of attention on the highway
A view from the inside
After quite a few runs with marginal to disappointing results, I diagnosed a weak battery, and replaced it with a known good one. Things improved immediately, but it was too late in the day to run all the previous experiments again, tough I was able to run a static ice melting test.
"Severe icing" condition encounter
At this point, I am comfortable saying that I might be on the right path to cracking this "nut" once and for all. More testing will be necessary to confirm my expectations, but I feel like I am getting really close to a final solution.
While I have not posted recently, I have not been completely idle either. I am nearly done with the right longeron repair, and have made a lot of progress on the heated Pitot tube. More on these in the next few posts. Today I wanted to update you on my flying activity with N977JT. One of my biggest surprises came from the insurance company, when they required 10 hours of solo time before I could carry any passengers. Now, I usually log ten hours of flying time in just one day at work, so it really didn't sound like much initially, but it actually took forever to complete them, in part due to the terrible heat wave we have had in the past two months. With the hours finally checked off, my first order of business became to rectify a terrible wrong. There was still one builder out there who had worked tirelessly for the past 6 years building his Long EZ, and had never even been in one, let alone fly in it. I am talking about my buddy Wade...
Wade and me afterward
It was with immense pleasure that I was able to finally get Wade in the air on his first Long EZ flight. He will also forever be my first Long EZ passenger. Wade was able to get a few shots of our departure and put them together in a short video I will repost here...
We spent a good hour and a half having a great time, and he got to fly it from the back seat to his heart's content. He truly loved it, and the flight confirmed to him he had made the right choice of airplane. "Wade... I love you Man!"
Well, if you were following me on YouTube you would have already known, but since "the cat is out of the bag" I might as well make it official...
I have purchased a beautiful flying Long EZ, and made my first solo flight with it this past week.
Marco's new Long EZ
Before I go too far talking about it, let me just explain that nothing else has changed, I am still building my own Long EZ, perhaps with more gusto now. As a matter of fact, I have been putting quite a few hours in the shop lately, but this time I did it because I wanted to, not because I needed to. I went to look at this plane with Wade Parton for Chris, a friend of mine who was interested in purchasing it. Wade and I were the "experts" on Long EZ construction.
Wade, Chris, and me checking the plane out.
I loved the plane at first sight, and the closer I looked at it the more I liked it. Wade loved it as well, and we both told Chris to absolutely buy this plane. Talking to Chris the next day, I found out that he had decided not to purchase it. I think his wife was looking for something with more seats. Well, you can guess what happened next... rationalization is a powerful mental mechanism, and I fell for it head first. "Darn it!" ;-)
To get ready for my first flight I flew a few hours in a Diamond DA20, and a few more in a 200hp RV6A, all of them with flight instructors.
I really liked the DA20
First time in a small airplane in 20 years
This is one powerful aircraft!
I totally credit my easy solo flight in the Long EZ with the time taken to fly these two very different airplanes.
Because I am used to how a Boeing 767 lands, I needed the most help and practice in judging the last 20 feet of altitude more than anything else.
I am very thankful to my patient flight instructors for putting up with me in the 110ºF heat-index weather.
Let me take you with me now on my first solo flight in the exquisite Long EZ Terry Lamp built.
By the way, this video was not staged, I just thought of turning my iPhone camera on half way through the downwind leg, so please excuse the camera angle, perhaps you might see forward a little bit in my sunglasses.
Marco's first long EZ solo flight
The flight went great, and I had a lot of fun despite the heat. I'm not sure whether or not I should feature this plane in the blog in the future. Perhaps many of the lessons Terry learned that are embedded in this plane will find their way into mine, and then it will make sense showing them. Let me know what you think.
