Eating the Elephant—Part 4

Airplanes are mechanically repetitive by their very nature. Because they have wings, they generally have ribs—and those ribs are often similar (if not identical) and numerous because wings are generally large. That means that you are going to have to build a lot of ribs—a very repetitive task. Even if the ribs in your kit come preformed, you are going to be fluting metal ribs to make them flat, deburring the many holes you find, or if you are—gasp—building in wood, the parts count for gussets alone is eye-watering.

And the repetition doesn’t end with numerous similar parts. In a typical metal airplane you’re going to be drilling tens of thousands of holes, then deburring them, and then (if it’s a fast airplane) dimpling them. Then—and only then—do you get to start setting rivets. Endless quantities of rivets.

Once you have parts that look like airplane parts, you’re going to be adding all sorts of fasteners…and yes, Mr. Nut-Plate, I am talking about you! Nut plates are riveted on blind-mounted nuts that allow you to mount fixtures, components, or panels by simply screwing in a fastener and not having to hold a nut behind. Most airplanes have hundreds. A typical nut plate installation in a metal airplane involves drilling a pilot hole, then enlarging the hole to appropriate size for the nut plates you’re using. Then you use a nut plate jig to drill two “wing holes”—one on either side. Now debur all three holes. Grab a countersink tool of some kind and countersink the two wing holes so that you can use flush rivets.

Cleco one wing of the nut plates in place while lining up the other hole. Set up your rivet squeezer, insert the appropriately sized rivet in the empty wing hole, and squeeze it. Under-squeezed? It usually is because you have to sneak up on the right setting—adjust your squeezer and do it again until you have a Mil-Spec shop head. Remove the Cleco, insert another rivet, and do it again (except you already have the squeezer adjusted). Now repeat a few hundred times for all the other nut plates.

If I have good access, or am working on loose parts on the bench, I can do a nut plate in about a minute and a half—but I’ve been doing it for 50 years. The task is repetitive and sometimes painful as you contort your body to get into odd places or positions to reach the work site.

But repetition is a key piece of the art of building airplanes—so how do we cope?

Get Your Zen On

Once you get good at a repetitive task, you can reach the point where you can do it with only part of your brain engaged, and the rest of your thoughts can go elsewhere. It is a very Zen-like phenomenon—your hands are busy with the repetition, and you can be thinking about some more complex original work down the line or listening to music. Deburring countless holes takes very little (or no) thought—you just spin the little tool in every hole. You can make it a little game of counting or develop a pattern as you debur around a rib or across a section of skin.

It’s important, however, to remember that you are building an airplane, something you will take aloft—so you still have to pay attention. It’s easy to get into a pattern of drilling holes and then forget to stop when you reach the end of the line where the holes need to stop! Or when you are riveting a large component with lots of rivets, and the rivet length changes halfway through because of a doubler plate—this often leads to a few bad words and the drilling out of some too-short rivets when you realize that you’ve gone too far. So…pay attention even when you’re not strictly paying attention.

I personally find that I can listen to music while doing repetitive work but have a hard time listening to, say, an audiobook. I will either not pay enough attention to what I am doing or have to go back and listen to the section of the book again because I wasn’t concentrating on what was happening in the story. My wife, however, can even write while watching a movie or TV show—I am not sure how she can string words together while hearing other words. But people are different, and you need to figure out what works for you when doing boring, repetitive tasks.

Go Work On Something Else

As we often say, there are 10,000 steps to building an airplane, and many of them can be done in any order—just as long as they all get done. So, when you get tired of fluting ribs, go inventory something else, or pull out your wiring diagrams and think about getting started on an avionics harness. Basically, just walk away from the frustrating stuff and plan to come back to it later.

This is one good reason to buy as many kit parts and accessories as early as you can—so that you always have something else to go work on. Yes, it requires more money up front, and lots of builders can’t make that work out financially—I get that. But if you can get everything on hand at once, you not only beat future inflation, but you can also go mount your tires on the wheels, and that is really different from installing nut plates.

One way to justify this approach to yourself is that there is another old saying—never drill until you have to and never rivet until you have to. In other words, fitting stuff together with Clecos and then walking away might just save you aggravation later on when you realize that you are glad that you didn’t rivet those wing skins in place because you decided to run wires for a heated pitot instead of an unheated one.

One caution about this approach of course is that if you leave everything you hate doing until the end, you are going to have a real slog at the finish of your project. Sometimes it’s OK to eat your ice cream first…but those Brussel sprouts are still going to be sitting on the plate waiting for you.

Reset—Clean Up the Shop!

There are times when I have so many projects going on in a particular build—wiring here, riveting over there, an unfinished elevator on that workbench, and some avionics warming up on the bench—that I simply have nowhere to put down my cup of coffee! When you reach that point, it might be time for a “shop reset”—and that can keep you busy for a couple of work sessions.

Now, there are many builders who put all their tools and equipment away at the end of every build session, and their shops always look immaculate. That’s one way of working, and I am not going to try and change them. I come from a different school, however: I tend to keep out the tools and parts I am working on until the task is finished. This way, I can walk out to the shop, add two more wires to a panel or dimple a few ribs, and pad back inside when dinner is ready 10 minutes later. If I put everything away after every work session, I couldn’t really do this.

Coupled with this is the fact that many jobs are so complex that if you put everything away every time, you’d forget where you were when you got back to it!

But eventually, it is a real refreshing break to do a complete reset of tools, parts, and assemblies —then clean the benches and floors of debris. It makes getting restarted a pleasure, although it can take a while to remember where you were when you stopped. Cleaning and organizing is, however, different enough from building or repetitive tasks that it will give you a break. And anyone else in the household who uses or works in the shop will probably breathe a sigh of relief that they can once again find the needle-nose pliers that were buried under piles of parts on the workbench.

Planning and Design

When builders tally up the number of hours they spend on a project, they usually only count the time that they are actually in the shop working. This is an unrealistic way of remembering your project, however, because many of us spend as much time outside of the shop “working” on the airplane as we do with tools in our hands. If I am not pounding rivets or laying up glass, I am thinking about pounding rivets or laying up glass. When I am in my office, I spend as much time shopping for hardware and components as I do designing electrical and fuel systems. There is much more to building than just building.

So if you find yourself wandering around the shop getting nothing done because you are tired of repetitive jobs (or simply stuck on all the jobs you have going and don’t know how to proceed), turn out the lights and go do some planning. “A failure to plan is a plan to fail,” as they say, and you need to go off and figure a lot of stuff out. Don’t underestimate the importance of scouring the internet for ideas from other builders of your type or homebuilders in general. Knowing how others are tackling problem areas is an invaluable by-product of the information age—I have no idea how anyone finished an airplane before the internet! (The answer, by the way, is that many didn’t.)

Even though I have built quite a few planes, I still spend countless hours (no, I don’t count any of my build hours anymore) reviewing my old designs and modifying what didn’t work as well as I thought it might in the layout of panels, the choice of avionics, or decisions on engine accessories. Technology is always advancing, and it’s worth looking at the choices you have with every new project.

Planning is also important to make sure that you don’t simply build the same plane that you have built before. Sometimes, of course, you want to duplicate the good ideas…but there are almost always things you can do to improve the next one, so take the time away from the shop to investigate, evaluate, and plan for the future. Frankly, it beats sweeping the floor.

Go Shopping!

Well, “go” is probably a relative term here—unless it is July and you are headed to Wisconsin. But shopping for components is a big part of building an airplane—even an airplane where the kit is advertised as “complete.” I am a bit of an old-school builder: I assume that I am going to make lots of decisions on avionics, engine, firewall-forward accessories, and interiors (to name a few big-ticket items). The truth is that there are now kits that include everything but the fuel and oil if you want to go that way…and many do.

But the reason many people give for building their own airplane is that they can customize it the way they want, so we assume there are many, many builders who spend inordinate amounts of time (my hand goes up here) shopping for all sorts of items. And if you’re bored or stuck in the shop, getting online and doing some research is a way to break the stalemate.

The Rocket is a good example, since it is a kit from 20 years ago. I had a head start in figuring out the built-in oxygen system I wanted to install (I live in the West, where we always fly high) because I have been very satisfied with the system installed in my little personal jet. So all I had to do was adapt that to a two-place configuration—but that required a fair amount of research and shopping on the vendor’s site to figure out exactly what fittings and adapters I would need.

Right now, I am engaged in figuring out my oil cooler solution. For a four-banger Lycoming, I know exactly what to order—but this time I have a fire-breathing six-cylinder, so the equations change, and I am researching larger oil coolers. A friend has one installed in his Rocket that he describes as “the size of a carry-on piece of luggage.” He reports no oil cooling issues at all— and I am not surprised—but I will talk with a few other IO-540 flyers before I decide.

And all that research helps me stay out of the shop where those darned nut plates wait!

Break the Frustration Chain!

No matter what you are building, you will hit points during the process where you are just tired of doing “X” over and over (and over) again. Some of the ideas above should help if you get in that situation. Just find something to break the chain, then break up the repetitive tasks into manageable chunks. You’re going to be building for a long time, so if you just reserve every Friday afternoon for a portion of the repetitive task, you’ll get it done.

Oh…and nut plates? My design for the Rocket interior has me staring at 90 of them, all of the spots currently occupied with Clecos holding things in place. But I have a solution: I am going to cheat and use Click Bond nut plates. Drill a hole, clean the surface, spread some goo from a gun, and pop the nut plate into place—far simpler than all that riveting, and it just costs money. But in the big picture of the total project cost, no one will ever see it.

Repetition is part of building—so just find a way to cope that works for you!