I got an E-mail from someone wondering why I stopped posting.
I’ve been steadily working the project, but having reached the “90% done, 90% to go” stage, it’s been hard to progress many tasks through to completion. Winter down in Tassie was long and cold as usual, and the short days tend to slow down workshop hours. Thankfully that’s now behind me for the year.
The inlet plenum 3D printing work reached a stalemate. After many Covid delays, I received the second prototype and it was damaged in transit due to poor packing. I worked with the vendor and insurance to have it replaced, and after yet more Covid delays the replacement arrived, also smashed in shipment. I was able to tape together enough pieces from the two parts to decide that the shape was going to be correct; however, I lost faith in the high temperature epoxy material – it was clearly too brittle. The correct material is ASA, but the quality of the first prototype was not good enough. In order to compete in online 3D printing services you need the lowest price, and there’s a big difference between how this first prototype was printed and how I would want it done. I talked to a few vendors in Australia, and it was clear that the cost would rapidly escalate into the thousands of dollars, for each printing, and I might want to do more adjustments yet. I decided to shelve the work, and ordered a commercial grade large form 3D printer. After months of delays, some again due to Covid-19, this thing will arrive here next week. The only problem is it arrives in 8 boxes and I have to assemble it. Once I get it up and running, I’ll be able to print the plenum as many times as I care to, with the quality I want, before calling it right.
I designed all the overhead panels, some auxiliary panels for headset connections etc, and settled on the replacement lower panel arrangement for the Aerosport 310, which was previously incorrect. I worked with AFS to get these designs finalized and the panels are being cut and printed at this time. In the meantime, I made some cardboard replicas and used these to do most of the overhead wiring. I’m not willing to post a photo of that.
I’ve been doing the wiring, which is a big job for an RV-10 made bigger by my choice of 2 batteries, 2 alternators, a 3 screen panel, A/C and SDS EFI. The wiring is about half done overall, and currently looks like a disaster. I started out wanting to simply do the wiring behind the baggage bulkhead and through the overhead, so that I could finish up the tail and put the final skin on. This plan rapidly devolved into an acceptance that I had to do all of the wiring, there are too many interactions to lock up one part before all parts of the puzzle are solved.
Associated with the wiring are some custom electronics. These pieces are:
- Backup EFIS power. The backup EFIS power nominally comes from the second battery/alternator supply. However, what is the action in the case of an electrical fire and smoke starting to fill the cabin? It has to be “both masters off”, there’s no time to figure out which system is the problem. The engine will keep running because the EFI system is separately powered, but in order to keep minimal EFIS functionality, the regular backup battery must be used. So, I designed a board which will supply backup power to the AFS system, which will come from the secondary battery/alternator system if it is running, otherwise will come from a backup battery. Changeover is automatic, and the functions are ground tested as part of the runups.
- SDS EFI power. Although the ignition systems, the two fuel pumps and the two ECU’s are on physically redundant battery+alternator systems, there is only one set of injectors so I needed what some would call an “essential bus” to run the fuel injectors. Any place physically redundant systems have to come together is a problem so I’ve applied some effort to this which I’ll post more about in a few months time.
- Monitoring and logging. Between the extra TFT display on the panel, the EFI power system, the battery backup system and the A/C there are various sensors and data monitoring that I wanted brought back to a central non-essential point. A small embedded computer system sits under the pilot’s seat and has various communication methods to collect data and present information on the extra TFT display. This may eventually be a last resort backup EFIS, but not initially. I needed a set of interfaces for this embedded system that went beyond what is commercially available, so I’ve done a board for that as well. The prototype worked OK with a couple of jumpers and I’m re-spinning the board now.
In between all these activities, I found I was missing various miscellaneous/low-cost parts, which I’ve procured on a slow track with a few consolidated shipments from the US, again affected somewhat by Covid delays.
Reading through all of the above, it’s clear that I’ve done quite a bit over the past few months, but haven’t managed to actually finish anything. When I finally do manage to finish something, I’ll put up a celebratory post that will include some photos.
I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent on the above over winter – quite a lot – but I’m just going to log 100 hours because I really haven’t kept track of it all.