Here’s the fuselage rolled out and ready to go.

Thanks to Jeremy for coming over on Saturday to help out.  Here I’m putting in 4 temporary bolts (from the hardware store).  We used only 4 of the 8 main spar bolts to temporarily hold the wing.

First step after attaching the wings is drilling the rear spar bolt hole.  On other RVs, the builder has to make sure the wings are set exactly right before drilling the hole.  On the RV-10, the holes in the spar and spar attach point on the fuselage are pre-drilled with a 1/8″ hole (i.e. the tolerances on the predrilled parts are so close, it just works out).  At least that’s the idea–ask me in a few months whether our plane flies straight.  Anyway, because of this, all that’s necessary is to drill the hole out to 3/8″.  To do this, I first drilled to #17 (what was already on the drill), #10, 1/4″, 5/16″, 11/32, then finally 3/8″ with the reamer.  I’m always nervous drilling big holes in hard-to-replace parts, but both holes ended up fine.

Here’s Kelly match-drilling another attachment point (in this case, the fuel tank attach angle)

Next we attached the flaps.  Unfortunately, the inboard side of the flaps, when raised, interfered with the fuselage (whereas a 1/16″ gap is called out).  Therefore, I had the tedious task of trimming aluminum off the flaps until we got the right amount of clearance.

With that done, we could attach the pushrods.

We were then finally ready to test the flap actuation.  Here are the flaps at 0 degrees, which is the takeoff setting, but not full-up.  The RV-10 has a “reflex” setting of about -2 degrees which is used in cruise.

Halfway down:

Full down:

Next up was drilling the gap seals (which covers the gap between the fuselage and wing).  They were pre-drilled on the wing side, but the point where they attach to the fuselage was not pre-drilled.

While we had the wings attached, I wanted to test the electrical systems in the wings.  Here’s a picture of us with the nav lights (red and green) lit up after we got them working.  The right one didn’t work initially, due to a bad ground crimp.  Kelly made me give the thumbs up.

Tired at the end of the day.

We didn’t get to do everything we wanted today, especially installing and rigging the ailerons.  Because we can do that once the wings are permanently attached, that was secondary, and we ran out of time.  I also messed up when testing the strobe lights–I forgot the tail strobe wire was attached, and unfortunately the wire was shorted, so when I fired up the lights, the tail strobe capacitor popped.  I’ll need to get that repaired.

All in all, though, it was a successful day.

They’re on for good!  Well, at least until it’s time for paint.

Hard to tell from the picture above, but I’ve been doing a lot of wiring lately.  I’d say it’s about 95% done now.  You can see the engine controls are in now (bottom center of the panel).  It’s a common question from non-pilots, so here’s a description of what the engine controls (colored knobs) do:

• leftmost, small, black knob - alternate air control - Pull this to open a door on the bottom of the air box, which lets in air in cases where the main opening is blocked by something like ice or an unlucky bird
• black knob - throttle - Controls power to the engine
• blue knob - propeller control - controls the speed of the propeller
• red knob - mixture - controls the fuel/air mixture going into the engine.  You adjust this based on the air density, power being produced, and other factors

You can see the breather tube in the picture above.  This is near the top of the engine and vents the engine case to the outside.

This is where the breather tube exits.  In this position, it’s not below the bottom of the firewall and won’t drip on the exhaust (which would burn up the oil), so we may end up with an oily firewall.  I called Van’s, and they suggested flying it and later adding an extension, if necessary.

Not a great picture above, but you can see there’s a clamp holding a gray wire.  Because of the way the Van’s baffle mounts, I had to re-make the mounting bracket, figuring out how it should be made and making it.  Not a big deal, but it illustrates why the “finishing” takes so long.  Lots of unplanned stuff like this.

The fiberglass comes with a ton of holes (known as “pinholes”) that need to be filled before it can be painted.  We’re going to have ours professionally painted 6-12 months after flying, so for now, priority one is making sure those holes don’t get filled with dirt, grease, etc that’ll be difficult to remove later.  After talking with the paint shop we’ll probably end up using, they said they can do all the work to make things look nice (e.g. transitions from the plexiglass to fiberglass, filling the rest of the pinholes), so we’re going to do the bare minimum at this point.  We’re not great at body work and don’t care to learn or spend the time doing it.

As such, Kelly did some basic filling with an epoxy/acetone mix, then after curing and a little sanding, we sprayed with some high build primer.  Here I am doing the doors.

Here’s Kelly working on the cabin top.  You can see the parts that are shiny (done) and not shiny (not done).

We’re still deciding whether we need to prime the top.

First test was the flaps, which didn’t work.  After looking around, I realized I forgot to put the fuse in the circuit that feeds the essential buss from the main buss (and the flaps are on the e-buss).  After putting that in, they worked great.

Next up was testing some of the sensors.  For this, we temporarily installed our Dynon D120 engine management system.  Here’s a picture of it fired up.

Hard to tell from the picture, but here’s what we verified is working:

• Manifold pressure — in the upper left of the screen; you can see it’s showing the atmospheric pressure
• Oil pressure — showing 0
• Oil temp — showing 75 degrees, which was the temp of the garage
• Battery voltage — showing 8-something, which is really low.  Need to charge the battery
• Current draw — showing 1A (from the D120).  Went to 2A when I hit the flap motor, so that seems to be working
• Fuel pressure — was showing 0.something, not 0.0.  Not sure why, but will worry about this later

That’s all for now.  We’ll do another test once the entire panel is in and a complete test when the wings are attached.

Note to avoid any battery shorts, we didn’t connect the real 2 ga. ground wire to the battery; rather, we used a smaller wire with an inline 20A fuse.  We’ll probably keep it this way until we’re ready to start the engine, since the starter is really the only thing that needs such a fat wire.

Here I am testing the fit of the top of the box.

Here’s what the box itself looks like.

The bottom portion is fiberglass.  The filter is slightly compressed between the fiberglass bottom and aluminum top to create a seal.  Note the cutout in the box (closest to the camera)–this is for the mixture control arm, which would otherwise interfere.

After the whole thing is assembled, we needed to create a tunnel in the cowl to connect the cowl inlet to the air box.  This needs to be aligned pretty well, so the instructions call for attaching a foam block to the inlet and the cowl to be put back on.  We then used a hacksaw blade to cut a tunnel in the foam block.  Here’s that process in progress.

When that was complete, we laid a layer of fiberglass in the inside.  That’s curing now.