Category Archives: Aviation

Aviation

The workshop and stuff

It’s been a really long time since I posted here on FlyBoyJon. I have been posting sporadically on Facebook and at my new haunt LumberJocks and you may be thinking “what’s up?”

Here’d the deal, Aviation is my primary focus in career and for pure enjoyment. I am also a toolmaker who really wants to improve his skills. One of the ways I have made a living in the past was in tool repair. It is something I also enjoyed very much. Throughout my life I have always made or modified the tools I was using at work and at home, so it would be no surprise that this tradition continues in aviation. Building jigs and other job aids is very common in the experimental world as is making and modifying tools to meet the task at hand.

So what does all of this have to do with, well, anything? I have been in A&P school for a year and a half. I have earned my Airframe Mechanic certificate from the FAA and I am over half way through my powerplant program to add a Powerplant rating to my mechanic certificate.

That’s great but what happens when you get your Powerplant rating? That’s a good question. What I really want to do is restore aircraft that were made from 1915 to 1935, or there abouts. It is however not likely that I will just fall into a gig like this right out of school so I need to get something going while I work into what I really want to do. There are a number of components that I can overhaul like magnetos and carburetors, or a variety of things that  don’t require a hangar or large shop.

All this means I need to get the work and clean up the shop and get it set up to do some real work.

Aviation, School

Fall 2012 Almost A Memory

This semester has just flown by at mach speed! It seems like just yesterday we were out at the airport picking our engines for the overhaul project and now we are a week from finals and the last day of class and only 175 days until the last day of next semester and completion of  the two year AMT program.

Since my last post I have had some fun working on a couple of other projects at school. We removed the engine, a Continental O-470, from our Cessna 182. I had the opportunity to work on the Pratt & Whiteny PT-6 removing the fuel controller and finding a low pressure fuel leak. And I had the chance to finish replacing the ignition switch on our Cessna 172 and run it up. It felt good to be sitting in an airplane doing a run up, although it did make me a little homesick for flying. I need to get back in the air.

There are several possibilities floating around for after graduation, but nothing even remotely solid. There are a couple of FBO jobs that may or may not be open, there is the possibility of teaching, and of course there is the need to finish my degree. For now, I’m keeping my ear to the ground of job stuff but focusing on head-down-full-speed-ahead on school and studying.

Blue skies and tailwinds,
~FlyBoyJon 

Aviation

First semester of powerplant

July 20th passed and somehow August came and went without my noticing. Now here we are in September already. The airframe/general class has had there mid-term and we are a few days away. I have been so absorbed in class I haven’t spent much time on anything else.

My engine is coming along nicely with a milestone being achieved yesterday; I now have more parts on my engine than I did when I brought it in to the shop.

That’s all for this post.

Aviation

Test Pilot: 101

Test Pilot, one of the most glamorous titles for a pilot, right? Well, sort of. The adage goes, if you deviate from limits or design you become a test pilot. This usually is intended to make you think twice before deviating from said limits and/or design. In the movies the Test Pilot usually pulls up just before impacting terra firma, or in the more intense films he ends up climbing out of the smoking or maybe not. The realities of flight testing seem to be that it is a much more mundane job, or at least it is supposed to be. When it gets exciting, something has gone wrong.

None of this comes from experience as of yet, it comes from doing some research on test flying amateur-built experimental aircraft. I have been wanting to build or restore an airplane for a long time and as the primary worker-bee I want the spoils of war, namely, I wan to test fly my work. Many experimental builders think of the test period required for the airworthiness certificate is just the need to fly off the 40 hours without attracting any attention from the FAA or NTSB; this was never how I saw the test flight. I had always planned on a full and thorough flight test program but I wasn’t really sure what that was.

Flight testing is apparently akin to an aviation black-magic that only a few initiates have a deeper understanding of, or at least that what it seemed like. After poking around on the internet for a couple of years I gathered a few resources but was still somewhat in the dark. Many moons ago I put a book on my Amazon wishlist “Flight Testing Homebuilt Aircraft” by Vaughan Askue. This was the only reasonably priced reference book I could find and it didn’t require an engineering degree to read the table of contents. This week I finally purchased the book. I am only about half way through and already I have had dozens of ah-ha moments of clarity that merged my pilot brain and mechanic brain in a way that they both benefited from the point.

As I said, I’m only about half way through this reading, I am sure I will be reading this book several more times. The biggest thing I have learned is that a good flight test program begins long before a single part is constructed or reconstructed as the case may be. Since I am inclined to move into restorations what this means for me is that I need to start thinking about the flight test program before I start the work.

By approaching the restoration as a test pilot as well as a mechanic I can head off some of the things that slow down all of the phases of a project, as a mechanic it gives me a closer relationship with the airplane from a systems and structural perspective.

I will be finishing the first read of the book fairly soon and I am looking forward to putting some of this new found  associative knowledge to good use.

Blue skies and tailwinds,
~FlyBoyJon 

Aviation

Airframe Mechanic: I R 1

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 was the day of my General and Airframe practical exams. Coincidentally, that is the date on my newly minted temporary FAA Airframe Mechanic certificate!

It’s been three weeks since my practicals and most of that time has been spent doing non-aviation stuff. I have managed to plow through a six-month backlog of aviation magazines which was no small task, mind you. I hate to get so far behind, but study time comes before recreational reading, though much of the stuff in these mags is relative in some way. Speaking of study time, next week is when I start prepping for the start of the Fall semester. Powerplant, here I come. 🙂

This last week was a flurry of activity cleaning out various spaces around the homestead. After clearing out a space we filtered through the stuff creating Garbage, Recycle, Donate, and Keep piles. We managed to recover over 200 cubic feet of space in one of our spaces. I may seem a bit overly proud of that accomplishment, but getting there required me to let go of a lot of stuff I was “saving” that really didn’t need my “saving.” What prompted this desire to clean out stuff was my renewed, and now shared, desire to move on, figuratively and literally. We still have at least a year before we can even start making any real plans, but we are beginning to make those long term preparations like paring down the accumulation of over 16 years in the same place, and we are setting up little recon trips to potential locations to feel out the scene.

Once my A&P program (two more semesters) is finished, I will be needing some shop space to exorcise my Airframe and Powerplant ratings to there fullest; a hangar preferably or at least something adjacent to an airport. It’s going to be a little difficult working on an airplane in my 6′ x 9′ shop with the scant 12 square feet of open floor space and 8 square feet of bench space. You may have gleaned from the pictures in my previous post Knowledge test done, that I had to squeeze in and do some interesting maneuvers to work on the Stearman wing rib jig. The jig board wouldn’t fit on the bench, so I had to set it up on a moving table in front of my shelving, which made it interesting getting at stuff I needed on the shelves.

The lesson learned was that it is possible to do the work in a very confined space, and it encourages pre-planning the work, tools, and materials before getting started. It also made it very clear how important it is to have a larger space where you can spread out and work efficiently. A lot of time was wasted shuffling around for this and that, and planning how to deal with unexpected surprises. There are of course safety concerns as well. It’s not so much the need for a lot more storage space, rather it is the need for open work space, somewhere to set up a table or bench and have full access all the way around it.

But I digress. The biggest thing now is not to think about what happens after I get my Powerplant rating and focus on the now. I recently had to bow out of two separate and unrelated business ventures and a project. It might have been possible to squeeze in one of the three, but that would detract from my ability to give school the 110% needed to keep the grades up and stay on target. I have two things non-school related on my plate to get done before school and about four weeks to do them. I guess I should get on that then.

Blue skies and tailwinds,
~FlyBoyJon

Aviation, DIY

Knowledge tests done

Stearman wing rib jigOn Monday, June 4th I went down to Ocean Air Flight Services with my classmate Rob where we took our General and Airframe knowledge tests passing them both handily. With that behind us the next step is to head out to Byron Airport, again with Rob, and take the practical for General and Airframe which we already have scheduled for Tuesday, June 12th.

Today I took the day off from studying, got side tracked by a little “work”, then got to take a few hours of mental relaxation and headed down to the shop to work on the Stearman wing rib jig I started working on back on May 29th.

Working on the Stearman wing rib jigI started off by trimming the blocks I milled the other day down to the right size. After trimming things down a bit, I gathered the rest of my materials. With brass tack nails, glue, and a couple of hand tools on the jig board I got started nailing the blocks into place.

After a few hours of tacking and gluing the blocks in place I had almost all of the inside blocks in place and nailed down. There are just a couple of blocks left on the interior to install then I get to extrapolate the nose-block and figure out how to block the furthest aft vertical truss piece. That last item is going to be interesting because there is no room to block in the piece with the gussets in the way on the sample rib I have.

I learned a few things while doing this today; the most important of which is to not hold out on the good lumber for the jig blocks. Another thing is that lots of small blocks is much better than fewer large blocks. While your at it, if you use a good medium/hard wood, take the time to pre-drill the blocks. As it is, there are 73 blocks on the inside (or will be anyway) and I am estimating 60 blocks on the outside, that’s a total 133 blocks for this wing rib jig.

Were I to start over on this one, I would take a lot of time to pre-cut, pre-drill, sand, and set nails in 250 or more 3/8″ x 3/8″ x 5/8″ long blocks of Douglas Fir. In fact, I am sure I will be doing another jig sometime in the near future so I think once this jig is done, I am going to prefab a box of 500 or more jig blocks. Of course to fabricate that many blocks I will need to build a jig-block jig to make all of them. 😉

☮ ♥ ✈
~FlyBoyJon

Aviation, Development, School

A OF A&P

Again with the long time between posts…

Stearman wing rib jigSchool has been quite the load this year. 21 units a semester is keeping me very busy. On May 25 I finished my second semester of A&P school which means I can take my FAA tests for my Airframe Mechanic Certificate. I am scheduled to take my first two knowledge tests on June 4th and my two practical tests on June 12th. I will post more about them after I take the tests.

My finals went very well. I got 99% in General and 98% in Airframe. Results that I am not at all unhappy with. I have been busting ass studying for exams; school really has taken over my life, in a good way.

Plans for the summer break are to build a wing rib jig for a Stearman. I borrowed a repaired rib from one of my instructors and started work on the jig Tuesday (Stearman Photo Album on Google+). I picked up some nails for the jig and for making a rib on Wednesday. I should have the jig finished in the next few days but it will be a while before I can do the ribs.

I need to source some 1/16″ mahogany plywood for the rib gussets; this stuff is a bugger to find locally and I don’t want to have to get it from Aircraft Spruce. The shipping costs are really high and it would almost be cheaper to organize a will-call run down to Corona and split the fuel costs with some fellow pilots, mechanics, & builders. I need to get some Alodine and Alumiprep anyway and I could save about $40 in shipping and hazmat costs on those alone.

Building a rib jig and wing ribs are fun distractions to relax with when I need a break from studying. Another allowed distraction is catching up on my aviation magazines, with lots of maintenance and restoration articles. Less the two distractions above, the blinders stay on and my focus is on finishing my Airframe Mechanic Certificate before next term starts. I don’t want to have anything hanging over my head when I start Powerplant.

Time to get back to the studying and practice tests…

☮ ♥ ✈
~FlyBoyJon

Aviation, Sustainable

Tribal Knowledge

While reading through my monthly yard of magazines I came across an article that sparked my interest. It wasn’t the whole article, or even a complete section, it was two paragraphs that grabbed hold of my attention.  The point the author was making was that in the aviation maintenance industry, thought I think it holds true for many industries, pass-down is an endangered skill set.

For those who don’t know, pass-down, typically found in law enforcement or in the military, is when a shift changes hands the person going off-shift meets for a few minutes with the person going on-shift and gives them a briefing on what transpired and what new bits of information may be of importance or value to the next shift.

Pass-down is a simple process and can be vitally important in dangerous environments. In aircraft maintenance  when a particular job will take multiple shifts to complete, taking the time to pass along information about the previous shift can prevent things from being missed, or provide a clue on a difficult problem that will save the next shift a lot of time and frustration. In short it can save money and lives.

In the short term it is fairly obvious how this can be an important part of many industries saving time and money by passing along information and lessons learned from one person or team to the next. Where this becomes really beneficial is in the long term. It is that shared knowledge base that can keep us from having to relearn the same tasks over and over again. By now you are probably going “ya, duh” but here’s the rub, it happens far less than you might think.

Accumulated knowledge does happen, and it manifests in many ways, books, documents, magazines, websites, wikies, and more, but the volume of what doesn’t make it to those resources is staggering. There is so much OJT knowledge that can only be found through experience and working side-by-side with someone who ether had it passed down ti them or had to learn it on their own.

As a society we have thirst for knowledge, or at least experience, in our hobbies and recreational pursuits we are more than happy to pass along information, it seems to be very different in our professional lives. It seems as though we treat those bits of knowledge as trade secrets that we have teased out of our jobs. Something that will make us look good before reviews, or let us shine above our fellow workers.

Accumulate this store of knowledge, we stash it away for a rainy day. I understand the mechanics and psychology of it, it is a convoluted combination of motivations, but it really isn’t helpful to us, our employers/clients, or our fellow travelers down the path of our chosen career. What we should be doing is mentoring, not only the skills that we have learned, but the pride and ethics of a job well done.

In truth, I think the decline of pass-down is more a symptom of the money-above-all-else attitude that seems to be pervasive in business. You still find active participants in pass-down among those whose lives are at stake every shift but in the day-to-day lives of the non-lifethreatened worker there is little incentive. Loyalty and trust are in short supply on both sides of the employer/employee relationship and this two way street doesn’t seem to see much traffic these days.

I believe there are five ways to show commitment to my craft/trade.

  • To always do the best that I can
  • To take ownership in my work
  • To continue to learn and hone my craft
  • To encourage those who show interest and promise
  • To always practice my craft/trade with honor and integrity

Following this path, at lest for me, is how I combat this money-first attitude. Sure I want to make a profit, but I am willing to take a few points off the top to maintain my personal standards and integrity. Are you?