Canopy Trimming Completed

This task was spread out over two days and resulted in finishing the dreadful trimming of the canopy arms fiberglass.

Elizabeth and I put the canopy back on and raised it - which wasn't possible to the full extend due to the low roof in the carport. We got pretty close though, so it was good enough to get good trim lines.

Previously we had the problem with the upper edge bumping into the aluminum top skin when opening the canopy. Now we were struggling with the problem that the lower edges were under tension and snapped inboards a bit when they cleared the canopy decks. This caused a severe problem when lowering the canopy as the lower edge then would catch on the deck and get crushed when the canopy was further lowered. This was frustrating as it appeared I would have to remove a large amount of fiberglass to solve this. Much more than I had seen removed anywhere else before.

I didn't want to create another ugly gap and so I just marked the corner for a smooth removal of some material to see if that would get us in the right direction.

I also thought that adding a nylon washer on the side plates the canopy arms connect to might help to resolve this by keeping the arms a bit spread and away from the canopy decks. I epoxied one nylon washer on the left side and an AN960-416L on the right side which needed less clearance.

This was actually resolving the issue. However, now I had the problem that the arms protruded too far outboards and just looked ugly and also would have scooped in much more air than desired. A closer investigation showed that the solution is in the double bushings Van's is using on the hinges. I hadn't screwed the bolts in hard enough before to actually push the bronze bushing deep enough into the brass bushing in the canopy arm. It needs to be all in and flush on the outside which will then create that spread that I needed to clear the decks.
As a result I removed the washers and fit the canopy again, with perfect success. It opened and closed just fine now.

Time to roll the fuselage out of the carport so I could open the canopy completely and attach the gas struts to see if the full motion was undisturbed.
Everything turned out to be in great shape and working. Now that I could finally close the canopy completely I could also determine the final trim lines for the rest of the fiberglass edges.

And here the close-up of the end result of the trimmed arms:

Still, by far the ugliest part of the whole plane, but finally functional at least!
This concluded the canopy work on the fuselage. Elizabeth and I removed it and I finished the trimming of the rest of the edges and then just forgot to take a photo. I'll see that I remember to add that tomorrow if I don't forget. In any way, you will see the end product when it gets reassembled.

Here are the photos taken a day later.

Engine Arrived

The engine arrived around 10am an had a big boo-boo on one side. I was just hoping that nothing inside was damaged.

Anxiously, I took the box apart.

Peeking at the hole from the inside, I could see that it was unlikely to have caused any interior damage as there was just air behind the hole. Still, the Rotax box could have gotten a bit of a blow but that would probably not do anything to the engine.
I continued unpacking...

Wow! This must have been my lucky day. The little, lengthy box on the opposite side of the damage is the propeller. Had it been hit like on the other side, the prop would have certainly taken some damage.
I cleaned out the shipping crate until only the Rotax box was left.

I turned the crate on its side and let the engine box slowly slide down.

Then I helped the Rotax out of the shipping crate by sliding it out, pulling away the shipping crate.

Then the dolly came into play by providing a nice, movable platform for the engine crate.

That's when I noticed that the Rotax crate did get hit by this punch that caused the hole.

I cut off the steel tapes and inspected the interior. The tapes are the only things that hold the box together, by the way. There are no additional screws or clips.

I removed all the extra goodies that were in the box and unwrapped the plastic. Obviously the crate did a good job in protecting the engine. No damages visible!

Wow, there's the monetary equivalent of a new truck sitting right in front of me. I still can't completely believe it that I spent that much money on a little 100hp engine.
I will spare you the pictures of me inventorying the shipment. It's really the least enjoyable part of the build by far. Nothing was missing, not even in the bags. Good job, Van's!
I started building right away. Installed the battery in the tray.

Then manufactured the stand-offs for the bolts and bolted it down.

Following where the problem child in the form of the voltage regulator from Ducati.

Then the relays and the MAP sensor.

And finally, the battery cables and the fuel pressure sensor (on the right).

I had skipped the page that asked for installing more wires under the "hood" behind the panel. I do not want to take off that cover before finishing the fitting procedure of the canopy. So the plan is to do that tomorrow morning and then hopefully finish it, so I can move on with taking the cover off and installing those wire harnesses.

Dynon Responded

Remember my problems with the avionics and the Dynon return policy? You know, the one where you buy new equipment at full price but then end up with refurbished stuff that looks like crap and that only after much more time and money? Yes, that one!
So, without a contact point at Dynon to complain about my issues other than Tech Support and them stonewalling, I published my experience here as well as on Dynon's Facebook page. Someone must have finally read it and wrote me an email. The email is from Robert who's the Director of Sales and Marketing at Dynon.
What do you think he told me? An apology? Are you kidding me? They are the industry leader in experimental avionics! They don't apologize for nuthin'!
He explained their return policy again, detailing the problems of the vendor. Well, these problems are not unfamiliar to me. However, I am the customer in this case and their problems are really not mine. While I am sympathetic to their problems, I still end up with the short straw when they send broken units to customers.

Here's our email exchange which I assume to be part one - if they have any decency at all:

July 3rd, 2012

Robert,

thank you for replying to my report of bad experience with Dynon.
As you took the time to explain your reasons for the replacement policy I have so much grief with, let me explain how I feel as a customer.

I spent around $16000 on avionics for my RV-12 build. Some of it contained non-Dynon parts but for the most of it these are all Dynon Skyview parts. Overall there where 7 Dynon units, the SV display, EMS, ADAHRS, transponder, GPS and two servos. I put everything together as per plans and although this is my first airplane build, building an ELSA is not comparable to a full EAB approach where you had to invent your own electrical layout and wiring. Even if that would have been the case, as a software and electrical engineer, I had had enough background to tackle that as well.
The servos went into the plane a year ago when access was still easy but they couldn't get tested until the rest of the avionics was installed which was delayed about half a year due to Van's.
However, a couple of months back I was able to finally purchase the rest of the avionics and I finished the installation. When I was testing the system, I experienced very odd behavior related to the autopilot bus. I did a full check on the wiring, I traced every single signal through the bus up to the servo connections and I even swapped the Van's Control Module as I wanted to make sure it wasn't a problem with something I had my hands on. Finally, after around 18 hours of tracing signals, I could narrow it down to one servo being the culprit. Getting at these servos now is major pain and I'd rather had found a problem in my wiring! I contacted Dynon to get the servo replaced (remember, this is a unit out of the box, brand new that had never worked a minute before it failed and screwed up the bus so bad that when enabled it made the ADAHRS and EMS disappear!). They sent me a refurbished one which I didn't care too much about at that time. The servo I received was ok but not exactly what I would expect for a brand new unit for which I paid full price. I put it back in and everything worked - or so I thought.
After a while of learning the SV functions I noticed that my OAT display never showed a temperature reading. So I learned what type of probe this is and saw that it should just provide a varying resistance with changing temps. I traced the wires again, made sure that I got good and solid resistance readouts and that they made sense with the ambient temps at measurement. All this with the help of Dynon Tech Support. It turned out that the sensor appeared to be working fine and it was suspected that the connector was faulty, so they sent me a pre-wired connector which I crimped on, verified for a good crimp and connected it to the ADAHRS - to no avail. I analyzed the problem a bit more and with more hours of debugging invested, finally found that the culprit appeared to be a bad solder joint or a crack in the PCB of the ADAHRS as the problem disappeared when the ADAHRS was chilled down and then reappeared and was persistent when the unit reached a certain heat level. We swapped the ADAHRS with a refurbished one. The unit I received had brass connectors for the pressure line hook-ups that were so oxidized that they looked like the unit was installed on a boat instead of an airplane. I can't say that I was happy at that point.

Let's summarize, shall we?
I paid $16000 for avionics. I suppose that $12-13k went for Dynon products. I received 7 units of which 2 failed out of the box. One of them is a unit that is pretty important for the safe flying of an aircraft. I spent shipping expenses to have these unit sent back that should have never been faulty out of the box. I even debugged the problem for the techs to a level where they could quickly verify that issue and fix it.
I spent around 30 hours on determining the problems and ensuring that they were problem with Dynon and not with me or Van's and I wasn't coy about letting Tech Support know what I did, why I did and what I found, so they could tell that I knew what I was doing and that I didn't just sent stuff around to cover up my own incompetence.

What did I expect to receive from Dynon for my money? How about tested equipment? It's well known in the electronics industry how electronic products fail. There's a high failure rate in the beginning of its use which can be dramatically reduced in shipped products by providing a burn-in test to eliminate duds before they get to the customer. I am sure you are aware of this as you mentioned 'burn-in; yourself. So, I came to ask myself, how is it possible to receive 2 defective units out of the box from the industry leader in experimental avionics? While only you can answer this truthfully, I wonder if Dynon does perform burn-ins on new products. I wonder if the burn-ins are long enough to avoid a failure rate of 2/7 = 28% in my case. Is Dynon really testing all the functions of a unit before shipping or just browsing over some of them quickly?
After all you charge $1200 for an ADAHRS unit. Is it too much to ask for if I expect a unit that has been fully tested to specs and that is working right out of the box and hopefully for quite some time in return for this huge amount of money? I don't think so.
Instead though you took the money, you kept it even after I told you that this just not acceptable for me (for the above reasons) and even made me pay for shipping in addition to hours of debugging time (which in other cases would have been much longer with less experienced builders).
Why did I not opt for the repair option for my faulty equipment? Simple! After spending so much time locating the root cause of the problems, I didn't want to spend even more time shipping in the stuff, waiting for the repair and shipping turn around on top of what I had already lost. The point is simply that this equipment should just not have been broken out of the box to begin with. I discovered the ADAHRS OAT problems when I had taken time off from work to get forward on my build. Wasting this time by waiting for Dynon to repair brand new equipment was simply not an option.

I understand that you have to be sure that you're not swapping working units for new ones due to builders making mistakes. In my case, I can assure you I gave Tech Support no reason to believe that I hadn't done my part of the end to ensure that there was no other possible cause for the issues I had seen. With the OAT I even took the old, cut off connector and soldered on a 10k Ohms resistor to ensure that it was neither the connector nor some funky OAT sensor problem and let the Tech Support people know that I did that.

So, what was my summary of these incidents?
As mentioned above I paid a large amount of money and I did not receive from Dynon what I should have received. I feel ripped off and taken advantage of as I do not have an option to go with an avionics package from a competitor when building an ELSA project that calls for Dynon avionics. The Tech Support was helpful but did not direct to anybody else at Dynon to address my complaints about these policies. No attempt from Dynon was made to address the issues mentioned above, nor was I told who to talk to.
It also left me with that bad taste of distrust in the QA process at Dynon and the reliability of the products. If they fail at 28% right out of the box, what can I expect when the plane finally goes flying? If the products are reliable, where do all the refurbished items come from?

Anyway, Robert, if you got that far, I think you understand why I am still upset about this. And believe me, I understand you side of the problem as well. However, I am the customer in this scenario and it's my hard earned money that I spent for expecting working products when I receive them. And Dynon did just not deliver their end of the deal. No, they cost me even more money and a lot more time to fix what I shouldn't have had to fix.
An apology would have been nice. A check to compensate for the trouble, the time and my expenses would have been even more appreciated.
Nothing like that was offered. I felt like it was all my fault and I should just be darn happy that I was sent refurbished equipment, that looked like it went through a war in one case, so I could get a working system.

Sorry, Robert, that just doesn't do it for me. My decision to not chose Dynon in my next project results directly and only from this experience. When it works, it works nicely, as I said. But 28% failure rate out of the box? Not acceptable!

Regards,
Torsten.

On 07/02/2012 04:43 PM, Robert wrote:
> Dear Torsten,
>
> I think I talked to you at one point about your OAT probe, and your need for a two-pronged plug. I just read your post on our Facebook page, and apologize that we didn't live up to your expectations about sending new units to replace defective units. We take product issues seriously, and work hard to have the highest quality products on the market. I flew a certified plane for ten years and had plenty of problems with my certified avionics, so I know the bar isn't very high in the industry. But we try to get as close to perfect as we can.
>
> I do have a question for you. Please tell me what you think of this policy after I give you the details.
>
> We sell to thousands of builders working on hundreds of different types of aircraft. Most of the builders are working on their first aircraft. So it is understandable that when there are product installation problems, the majority of the time it is induced by the builder. When we face a problem we always give the builder two choices; either we will look at their equipment and fix the problem if there is one, or we will send immediately a "re-manufactured" unit that is functionally the same as a new unit. Most often it has new components, and has undergone the same or better inspection, burn-in, calibration and test than even "new" units.
>
> If we didn't do this, then most often we would be sending out a new unit for a perfectly good but used unit, and soon would have thousands of returned units stacking up in the warehouse. I hope you can see our dilemma. We want to help customers as quickly as possible, with the best solution possible, but the nature of it is that we can't send a new unit every time. Numerically it doesn't work. And we hope it is fair, because the customer has the choice to have us look at their equipment if that is the best option for them. We pay for the cost of testing and inspecting and shipping the unit back to the customer, even when there was never a product problem.
>
> Does that policy make sense? If not, how do we improve it, without raising prices to cover the cost of thousands of perfectly good products being sent back to us?
>
> Best Regards,
> Robert

Engine on the Way

I just scheduled delivery of my engine for the morning of Thursday, July 5th.
I am excited!

Tail Fairing and Wing Connectors

I got a bit sloppy with updating the blog but I did get some work done, despite not telling you until now.
I have to admit though that working outside with the high humidity and the usual high temperatures over 100F does make it very hard to maintain a good pace. A few hours feel like I spent all day outside.

So on Friday night, I took off the vertical stabilizer and rudder assembly to get better access to the rivet holes in the tail skins.

In order to secure the rudder cables I connected them with a piece of safety wire.

Now I could get at that rivet holes and I started riveting the nutplates onto the tail skins, to which the fairing halves will eventually connect to.
I used the manual squeezer for this delicate job as I wasn't sure if I could get a good flat seating done with the heavy pneumatic squeezer. The heavy weight reduces the tactile feedback and just provides no feel as to how flat the die sits before squeezing. The manual is much better at that.
The first run was quickly done.

And the second one was even quicker done.

Without the rudder assembly the plane looks like nothing that could fly soon. That's a bit disheartening but fortunately I know better.

That ended Friday night.

On Saturday morning, I decided to continue Section 40, the lighting installation. One of the open tasks was to install the HAL9000 simulation in the cockpit. For the not so cineastic ones among my readers, this describes a red-light camera eye. Well, Van's didn't provide a camera feature but it definitely qualifies as a red-light eye.
I almost didn't want to install it as the light it creates is so faint that you could hardly find your panel if you wouldn't know it's there in the dark. To stay more ELSA compliant, I decided to install it for now before considering getting something that could actually help to read a map if needed.

So I ran the wire pair through the rollbar. I actually ran a thin wire, starting on the top running it down, and then connected the pair to the guide wire with duct tape (cutting off the excess as the hole is pretty small). Then I pulled the pair with the guide wire through the rollbar and through the hole on the top. The bushing was pulled out but as it is a snap bushing it snapped right back in.

Had I read the instructions better I wouldn't have had to this task 3 times before being satisfied.
The part I missed was that they wanted me to not just run the wire pair though but also a 1/4 OD plastic tube to protect the wires from chafing. The other time I had to redo it was owed to me not caring about the routing of the wires below the rollbar plane. It is actually much more reasonable to route the wires BEHIND the ELT frame instead of in front of it.
Once I did it all correct, the back of the rollbar structure looked like this.

Finally I could install the actual light feature.

The riveting was quickly done and I also added some RTV on the back of it to hold the splice connectors in place. The clamp is actually doing this in the picture while the RTV is curing.

That concluded the activities on Saturday and today I was focusing on the electrical wing connectors, aka Section 31A.

I had never installed the flimsy connectors that Van's had come up with initially. I assembled them but decided that I would use trailer light connectors in lieu of a better connectivity solution.
Well, Van's came up with something better than that and after a lot of studying I decided to do the change to the new connectors. For now, I decided not to do a big wire retrofit of the wings, so I won't install separate wires for running the Nav lights without the strobes and I will also not install the sync wire to keep the strobes synchronized over a long period of time.
This is all extra weight and a lot of work at this stage but I do not see the necessity or even a real benefit. I might change my mind later when flying but I seriously doubt it.
I started by removing the old connector plates and marking which part of the connector has what reference number. Trust me, this gets confusing quickly as Van's did not do the installation as you might expect.

Then I installed the capacitor on the left side wiring. This ensures that you're not cutting off a spade connector that you actually needed. The plans do not do this in this order.

Then I cut off the spade connectors from the Stall Warning and the Ground wires and crimped on the new connectors onto the Ground, Stall Warning and the new Nav light wires.

Onto the right side. This was easier as there were no spade connectors that were still needed, so all the old connectors were replaced by new ones.

Then I inserted the connectors into the new plug for the right side.Watch out!
The plugs are different on each side. The right side wants the plug that has the thick plastic pins sticking out, whence it's called a male connector.

The same happened on the left side, only the plug is a female one which has the metal bushings that allow it to float.

Time for drilling the seat pan in the cockpit. Again, Van's provided a template that uses existing rivet heads to position it.

The HF angle drill is just a bit too deep for one of the 4 holes. I drilled 3 holes and clecoed in between. For the 4th hole I used my close quarter angle drill and I opened up all the holes to #19 with that drill as well.

I vacuumed the interior of the gills to remove the debris from the drilling (and a lot of dust from just sitting around) and then went on to prep the angles that would hold the connectors in place.
The top 4 holes that connect the angle to the seat pan needed tapping in 8-32.

The wires on the left side needed to get tamed with some cable ties and then the angle went on.

When installing those angles be careful again. Look at the connectors, they can be rotated and present a different connection pattern if you do. Each connector has a female and a male section on its face. The male section should always be below the female section. Here are the pictures, left side:

... and the right side:

The next steps will be to close up the openings on each side and to install a snap bushing on the left side where I will run the AOA tube through. Then I will work on the wing connectors.