Scott & Tanya Card RV9A build log (N4822C)

I finally got my GRT XM weather unit the other day. I spent a few hours getting it mounted in the plane. I’m having some problems getting it to activate that I’ll work on some more next time.
This GRT XM setup is cheesy to say the least. It is an aluminum GRT box with the WxWorx consumer hardware screwed to the top. It looks like they chose not to actually license the technology, but rather just resell the WxWorx receiver. This is what we accept for a low price. The WxWorx hardware clearly isn’t what I would call “aviation quality”. It is a big plastic box with an antenna connector, USB connector, and a normal consumer electronics barrel power connector. This whole setup weighs surely twice as much as it has to. Oh well, once I see radar on the displays, I won’t care.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

Another evening, another wheel. This time I tried a little bit different method of drilling the cotter pin hole. First off, I immediately removed the gear leg and put it up on the work bench. Then, instead of marking the hole and grinding the threads first, I simply ran a long #30 drill bit in the hole in the nut as a drill guide. I did that just a bit for a mark. Then took the wheel off and made sure I would still be able to get the nut off. Yep, all good. I put the nut back on, without the wheel and proceeded to use the hole in the nut as a drill guide until I had a real hole started (through the thread). Then I removed the nut to keep from messing up the aluminum too much and continued to drill the hole in the axle. No marking, punching or other grinding shenanigans. This was much better. First side hole drilled slow with a lot of boelube, put the nut back on, indexed the hole (with a drill bit), and did the same on the other side of the axle. Much better results with less hassle.
So now it is all sitting on two main tires! Woohoo! Kinda cool actually. Next we move on to the nose gear. Tanya came out to the garage this evening and her only comment was, “Wow, the airplane got a lot taller.” Yep, I’m glad I waited until the very end to put the wheels on it.

I got all three gear legs lifted and blocked up high enough to get a wheel on one leg at a time. I started with the left main. I installed the wheel after cleaning up the axle enough to get the bearings on. I then threaded on the nut. The next trick is to figure out exactly how tight is “sung”. I decided snug, in this case, meant the nut only tightened by hand and only so much as to eliminate any play in the wheel and cause just a hint of rotational drag in the bearings. That is the tightness of my wheel axle nuts. Ok, so then I used the automatic center punch to mark one top cotter pin hole. Hmmm… It landed directly on top of a thread. I looked at it and thought about this for a few minutes before I made a big fat mess of things. I just barely hit the thread with the center punch, not enough to deform it. I took the nut and wheel back off (no problem spinning the nut back off because I was careful not to hit the thread too hard). More looking and thinking about how I was going to drill the hole on the other side of the axle (bottom). Yeah, I could get under it with a right angle drill or something, but I sensed hours of frustration down that path. Ok, we’re going to pull the gear leg back off of the plane and do this on the bench. Oh yeah, and I’m drilling the holes with an electric drill by hand. I can do this kind of stuff (drilling a hole through a threaded axle) better by hand than in my current drill press. Yeah, I have a little disdain for my old crappy Jet drill press, but I’m about to resolve that :). A big pretty Clausing is in my near future.
So, I jacked the left side up a little more and put a saw horse under the fuselage just in case and pulled the one bolt that holds the gear leg. It slid right out as expected and was up on the bench in just minutes. No need to do all that mess on the floor with limited access. What next? Up on the bench, I clamped it in a drill press vice just for some stability. I then ground down the thread with my punch mark on it. I used a tapered grinding stone in the dremel. This created a flat spot where I could start the drilling and worked like a charm. I turned the drill pretty slow and kept it lubed. I opened the hole up to #30 and touched up the threads a bit with a file. I threaded the nut back on and indexed the hole to mark the other side and repeated the process. It all worked out pretty much as expected with little frustration or misalignments.
Ok, so this all took me a couple of hours to drill two slightly tricky holes. I got things cleaned back up and the gear leg reinstalled with the wheel on it. One down two more to go .

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

Yeah! I finally put the cowl away after installing the camlocs. I did paint the inside of the cowl with white high temp engine enamel in a hope to make it prettier and be able to see oil drips easier. Oh, yeah, I had also previously brushed a thinned layer of epoxy on the inside surface too.
Moving on to getting the wheels on the gear. I’ve already done some of the prep work that I could do without a bunch of hoisting. The wheels were assembled long ago and most of the parts identified. If you’ve been following along, I put the fuselage up on the gear legs just before hanging the engine. Each gear leg has been sitting on a small 1×6 wood block on the floor with no wheel components on them. This has made for a very stable platform that is about 6-7″ lower than if the wheels were on it. All good things, but now it is time to put the round turny things on.
The only problem is that it is kind of a precarious situation to lift one leg up 7+” to put the wheel on. It feels like the whole fuselage could roll forward and over. This is probably just paranoid builder syndrome, but I’m taking no chances. So, I’m going to go a little more slowly and get all three legs up on wood blocks incrementally, then install one wheel at a time.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

Here is my attempt at the form-in-place gasket trick with proseal. Even though it hasn’t been tested, I think the results look great. I used some proseal out of the freezer that I mixed up months ago (experiment). It worked fine. I used regular plastic wrap from the kitchen between the proseal and the removable panel. I’m very happy to report that it didn’t stick at all!