This post will be the last one for this project. It was intended to cover the repair of an Easy Riser damaged in a training flight. Subsequent modifications to the Easy Riser is being covered in a seperate blog titled "Re-Thinking The Easy Riser" and can be found at
www.easyriser3.blogspot.com
RIGGING & FINAL ASSEMBLY
Ready for rigging now I've moved the right wing panels onto the frame I had bolted to the floor when I completed the pre-rigging from sheet #3.
www.easyriser3.blogspot.com
RIGGING & FINAL ASSEMBLY
Ready for rigging now I've moved the right wing panels onto the frame I had bolted to the floor when I completed the pre-rigging from sheet #3.
As I put the struts in place, I recalled the
problems I had noticed when learning to fly. I took great pains to
patch all the tears and holes in the glider I inherited only to have
the leading edge root strut bracket rivnut punch a hole right through the
nice patch I had put over the previous hole. Here is a photo of that
bracket “after” I drilled out the rivets, flipped it and
re-installed the pop rivets.
It turns out that there is plenty of clearance
now on both sides of this bracket and I get no contact with either
the fabric or the gusset with the bracket in this orientation. The
strut fit is not changed. If you don't do this, expect to see a
nasty hole punched through the fabric by the rivnut end as shown below on Darrel's upper wing panel trailing edge which I had just patched
prior to realizing what was causing it.
I found it far easier to do the tail swage
first, fit the cable loop over the bracket bushing, snug up the main
swage and then compress it. The plan sheet says to do the main swage
first which I tried at first and right away switched to doing the
tail first. Another thing I'd do different would be to thread on
shrink tubing PRIOR to all swaging. When I got to the end and saw
where the cable ends contact the fabric I found it necessary to tape
over all the swaged cable ends. In the folded storage/transit
position there was a fair amount of abrasion happening not to mention
getting holes poked in my finger tips from the cable wire sticking out
of the secondary swage during set-up & tear down.
In this shot I am setting the final tension on
this flying wire using two vise grips held with my left hand while
tightening the wire clamp with my right hand. Otherwise I'd have
needed to find someone to help. This worked fine.
I made multiple trials to get the tension on
all the cables just right and it took a fair amount of time to do a
decent job of getting them all “just right”. My swage tool (I
finally had to buy one) was a short handled Nicopress model 32 VC-VG
which does both 3/32 and 1/16 swages. It required quite a bit of
muscle for the 3/32 swages so I ended up cutting a pair of extension
“handles” from 1 ½ inch PVC pipe. The other critical tool I was
lucky enough to borrow from one of the EAA members was a Felco cable
shears. This made all the cable cuts a piece of cake producing nice,
clean ends.
No photos of my trials locating the control
cable inside the tip of the lower wing panel. Located a hole based
on how Darrel's cable was deforming the fabric and hot knifed it
free-hand. Turned out fairly crappy. Should have taped a nice
circle template and cut to that instead. Since this was a re-build,
the bushing was already swaged onto the cable end so I had to make
the hole big enough to fit the entire thing through the fabric.
Rather than do an actual fabric patch (would require me to do a spot
re-paint) I just used adhesive-backed sailboat Dacron patch tape
which worked OK.
Next I rigged the rudder return spring exactly
like I re-configured Darrel's where I removed the bungee approach
specified in the UFM plans (a poor solution I felt) and installed a
nutsert (that's what the guy at True Value Hardware called it).
The nutsert can be seen above laying on the wing to the right of the hole it will be installed into.
This shows the nutsert fully installed. It is nearly flush with the tip tube surface.
I picked out a spring from the hardware store spring selection and attached it to the wing tip using two nylon washers and a small bolt. I also picked out a steel pin, drilled it to
accept a safety pin and used this as a quick connect to attach the
rudder control cable during assembly. I replaced these soon afterward with a stainless steel spring (sourced on-line through Grainger) and aluminum binding post pin (commonly available at hardware stores).
The next step was to rig the control cable
which involved wrapping it around the twist grips per the plan so
that the rudders come back to neutral when released.
I really liked the grip material Darrel had on
his glider which was cloth handle bar tape for bicycles. I had a
hard time getting anything close to long enough. The best I did was
less than 10 ft so that's what I used. The underwrap was just
electrical friction tape followed by the cable winding then covered
by the bike tape and terminated with vinyl electrical tape on both
ends.
Now I am nearly done. I got worried about the
paint sticking to itself in the folded storage and transit position
so I decided to wax every surface except the bottom of the lower
panels using the Poly Fiber recommendation of a non-silicon based
Carnuba wax which took me a good part of a day to do but I'm glad I did
as you will hear about in a minute. So here's the completed glider
ready to pack up and take it's second flight (recall the first one
ended in disaster over 30 years ago...hence this project).
Here I am at the local test flight area the
next day on the Oregon coast (Cape Kiwanda) in perfect
conditions....low tide, dune to myself with a 9mph breeze right up
the hill.
Although you cannot tell from this photo, the glider is sitting on a tarp I staked down in the sand so that the glider never touched the sand. I just could not bring myself to allow that after putting all this effort into the build.
I weighed the finished glider just to have an
idea how much over weight I was and it came out at 66 lbs which is
about 16 lbs over. I can feel the difference just carrying the
individual wing assemblies and knew I was going to have my hands full
getting this thing up the dune. I was right, I made it up to about
2/3 of the way to the very top and just decided I'd be so wasted if I
went any further that I'd be too exhausted to safely launch it. I
was determined to not even allow it to touch the sand that when I got
as far as I was going I basically took off in what felt like 10-11mph
breeze. Launched fine, flew fine, rudder response was fine and the
landing was easy. I could not even visualize making another climb up
the dune so I packed it up and went home with a smile on my face.
This makes 19 launches in an Easy Riser for me to date. I have not yet learned to reliably get my feet up onto the leading edge to assume the proper flying pilot position. This is a critical skill in order to be in the air for any length of time and certainly at any significant altitude. If you are interested
in my experience learning to fly, please visit my other blog
dedicated to the learning aspect of the Easy Riser at
easyriser2.blogspot.com
I hope this helps anyone out there in building an Easy Riser as that was my original intent. Refinement of the rigging, designing a parachute pack mount, re-design of the internal rib layout are some of the things to be covered in a follow-on blog which you can find here:
easyriser3.blogspot.com
I hope this helps anyone out there in building an Easy Riser as that was my original intent. Refinement of the rigging, designing a parachute pack mount, re-design of the internal rib layout are some of the things to be covered in a follow-on blog which you can find here:
easyriser3.blogspot.com
