Spot of good fortune today

I had a little bit of luck today that I’ll come back to in a moment. I originally volunteered to help Victor with the preparatory work on the new airfield today but as he seemed to have no shortage of labour, I decided that my time would be better spent pressing on towards completion of the work on 56NE as I’ve now got the finishing line in sight. I’d hoped to get all of the work on the engine and fuselage knocked off today but I didn’t quite manage it, mainly because I had to spend a bit of time sorting out the fuselage rear cover.

X-Airs are fairly typical in that their fuselage cover is tied with cords to the fuselage frame behind the seats and to the rear of the pod underneath and the cover is then wrapped around the fuselage with an overlap at the top secured by Velcro. Now here’s a tip for anyone who isn’t too familiar with this arrangement. Because the fuselage section is very large at the cabin end and very small at the tail, if the cover is pulled too far forward eg by over-tensioning the securing cord, this drastically reduces the amount of overlap available along the top edge. And the smaller the overlap, the smaller the amount of Velcro holding the cover on. Even a difference of 1/2″-3/4″ of an inch can mean that there is practically no overlap on the Velcro at all, making for a very unsafe fastening.

Here’s an example of just how bad this can be. An X-Air that I went to view as a potential purchase in the UK after losing MYRO that had been inspected and approved for permit by a BMAA inspector, had so little overlap along the top of its fuselage cover that the owner had punched holes through the fabric either side of the join and inserted cable ties to keep the cover from flying open in flight. And the BMAA insists that the inspection regime must be maintained for the safety of pilots, to protect them from themselves. I ask you. I’m just glad that I’m out of it 😐

So what’s the answer? Here’s how to fit the fuselage cover. Wrap the cover around the fuselage and secure the full Velcro overlap BEFORE attaching the securing cord at the front end. I’ve now done it this way twice, with both MYRO and 56NE, and it works. You may wonder why I needed to do this with 56NE when it was apparently quite satisfactory before. Well, it wasn’t actually. The amount of Velcro overlap was only about 50%, which was less than I would have liked, and then to make things worse, as cord from natural material had been used to secure the cover’s front end (rather than something like polypropylene), it had shrunk when I’d washed the cover, thereby tightening and pulling the cover even further forward. So when I went to reattach it, there was hardly any overlap at all.

This was a good thing because it forced me to re-fit the cover, even though it cost me some time because of having to go off to Les Briconautes again to buy the cord that I needed. And that’s when I had my little bit of luck. I’d made a rough guesstimate of the length that I’d need, then added a bit on and bought 8 metres. After first fastening the cover with the full Velcro overlap, I then cut a 1 metre length to tie the bottom of the cover to the rear of the pod – and it took exactly that! Gulp… I then attached and tensioned both front sides of the cover to the fuselage frame behind the seats – and the amount of cord required was exactly the remainder of the 8 metres that I’d bought! I could hardly believe my luck, because if it’d been even a few centimetres short, it would have meant another time-consuming drive into Montignac to buy a little bit more 🙂

I was very happy with the finished job and 56NE must now be one of the few X-Airs with a proper, full Velcro fastening of its fuselage cover, as the following pics show.

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It’s not rocket science but from the X-Airs I’ve seen, it’s a trick that’s missed by an amazingly large number of X-Air owners (and other types too).

And not only do you end up with a nice, safe top fastening but the Velcro strips that secure the side and top cover pieces behind and above the seats also end up where they should be – which is to the rear of the fuselage tubes to which the fuselage cover is tied, making for a better appearance, even for an older aircraft like 56NE.

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The final job for today was completing 56NE’s clean up, by washing the pod, undercarriage, rear cover and tail assembly. It wasn’t a fantastic day for this today, with a high of only 18 degrees Celsius, but luckily the sun seemed to come out just when I needed it to, and afterwards the whole fuselage assembly was soon dry. Here’s a shot that I took at the end of the day.

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I also fitted some new plugs, topped up the rad and gave the engine a quick fire up before covering 56NE up for the night. It started on the button after the usual hand prime so all’s well in that department. All I have to do now is a bit of white touch-up and then I can start thinking about getting it ready to fly again. It’s taken a bit longer than I originally anticipated and a possible problem is that the cows are now in the field where I want to take off from. I’ll have to jump that hurdle in a few days’ time 😉