Monthly Archives: December 2017

Today I finished the baggage door. There’s a problem with the RV-10 baggage door. The top surface of the door structure has a curve in it, which doesn’t match the fuselage. The plans instruct you to build the door on the bench. If you do this, it may not fit very well, and it’ll bulge out about 2mm due to the mismatched curve problem.

I got some advice on these issues, and built the door on the fuselage, forcing it into the fuselage shape while riveting it together. I built the door from the hinge out, and it worked out really well. In addition, like many builders I arranged the hinge pin as two halves, which can be inserted from the inside, making the baggage door easy to remove. This also allows the hinge to be set almost flush with the fuselage, rather than protruding out as the plans indicate (since in the standard plans, the hinge pin is inserted from the outside).

Riveting the outside skin of the baggage door is a bit awkward. I managed to slip once and put a very slight dent in the skin near the hinge line. This is easy to fill prior to painting, annoyed me a bit though because it’s the first rivet gun blemish on the entire fuselage.

I’ve now done enough to the fuselage to paint the interior. Before doing that I have to make a water trap to properly dry the compressor air before the filters.

I’ve been working on the baggage area and rear seat floors, and associated systems including wiring conduits, extra inspection covers and A/C hose routing. This work has spanned a number of sections in the build manual, there are a lot of inter-dependencies and I spent weeks hopping around while seeming to make little progress.

In the end I wound up with a large pile of parts to prime, and once that happened a lot of assembly to do. I’m near the end of all the assembly work and must have made some progress here because non-flying people who look at it now recognize it as an aircraft!

Here in no particular order are some notes on some of the non standard items:

• Added inspection covers for the steps, as is commonly done.
• Added access covers for the antenna positions, so that I can install or uninstall the COM antennas that are mounted under the rear seats.
• Made a lot of 3D printed parts to support conduits. Some out of Nylon, some out of ABS. These worked out great.
• Ran the required A/C hoses to the positions in the tunnel where the connections to the A/C condenser are made.
• Ran a bevy of electrical conduits, overkill probably but at least I’ll have plenty of capacity for wiring front <=> back.
• Ran the static line
• Added a small hinge piece for a POS-12 based flap position sensor
• Added some extra nutplates for Adel clamps to support wiring through the flap torque tube area.
• Added conduits from the flap torque tube area down to the rear of the baggage area

Overall a lot of work to get to this point. A slow build RV-10 is a big project.

One other work item – we assembled the Aerosport seats and couldn’t resist putting one in on its slides to see how it looks. Picture below.