Prepping the Trailer for Airventure 2017 and Finally Formed the Edges of the LE Skin

After a 2 month stint in the shop, I finally got my trailer back. I had delivered it back in April in hopes of beating the Memorial Day rush, only to see that holiday come and go with the trailer still in the shop. What a comedy (hardly) of problems - mostly weather related - but not all of them.

I had a larger than normal laundry list of fixes this year: Re-weld a broken step support, find and fix an air leak in my water supply line from the water pump, Check to see if I have a water tank leak in my spare water tank, fix a leaking gray water dump valve, re-attach and seal the driver side front corner molding that joins the corners of the walls of the trailer, and the annual wheel bearing repack.

Week one started with the shop telling me that 2 techs had quit that week, so they did not even look at it. Weeks 2 and 3 ended up with freezing cold temps that prevented any type of water  repairs. Week 4 was the week of softball sized hail that pretty much decimated the west side of Denver. Luckily they had pulled it into a stall to do the bearing pack by then, so I lucked out big time on that.

Then came the day that they called to tell me that my axles and were on backwards and my brakes were improperly installed and it would take brand new axles to fix it. Now folks, I have owned this trailer since 1998, and in all that time I have serviced the trailer brakes about once every other year for one reason or another. In all that time I have never had a single tech inform me that my brakes were upside down. This includes the previous 2 years where I did have extensive brake work done by the same shop! That led to several arguments, including comments like "what the hell are you doing with my brakes. That was not one of the things on the list of fixes, because they were working fine. You should not be touching my brakes!"

Then came the 2 weeks I had to wait because they found leak in my main sink's P-Trap, so it needed a new P-Trap. This turned into another nightmare because they had to order the right part. The first attempt at this ended up with the supplier sending the wrong part. Then, several days later, they sent the right part, but it was missing one of the required attachment fittings.So on and on it went......

Then, to top it all off, I finally went to pick it up, only to discover a problem with my front trailer brakes locking up under certain circumstances. So this ranks right up there with some of the worst trailer service experiences I have ever had. One thing I will never dispute - tent campers have it SOOOOO much easier than those of us that haul the boxed metal RV's around. Although they have to do without many conveniences and amenities that an RV provides, the reality is that RVs are pretty much an extremely condensed version of a second home, with many of the conveniences that a normal home provides.

Unfortunately they also require even more maintenance than a regular home to keep them operating properly, because of the pounding and vibration that they take while moving on the road. This is not unlike the maintenance requirements of an airplane, due to the vibrations and high stresses that they must endure. So I consider all the RV maintenance I have to perform as a kind of preparation for the airplane maintenance that will be required eventually.

A couple of years ago, while departing Omaha, Nebraska enroute to Oshkosh, I encountered some of the worst road construction I have ever experienced in my life. I literally think that they forgot to leave cones up along a stretch of I-80, and as a result, I literally thought that the entire frame of my trailer was going to be ripped apart,  not to mention my truck.It's things like this that force you to keep maintaining the unit every year. 2000 mile long trips are also not the normal expected trip length for a small travel trailer. So I also need to pay extra attention to making sure that things like the welds for the spring suspension, the axles, and the bearings are all in tact.

Anyway, now that I have my trailer back, it was time to start on my usual list of chores and checks that I always have to perform when I prepare for the 2000 mile round trip to Oshkosh from my home here in Denver. After spending most of the weekend checking everything out, it looks like it should be ready for the next journey to Airventure, assuming my trailer brakes are working properly. I will be conducting more tests on those in the weeks to come, but everything else seems to be in good working order.

Since that took up most of my weekend, not much done on the plane. However, I did finally get up the courage to perform the edge bend on the left wing LE skin edges using my edge forming tool I mentioned in the previous post. I struggled a bit with how I wanted to do this. I was concerned about securing the skin to keep the edge from moving while I ran the tool across it. I did not want to reattach the ribs because this would have contaminated the cleaning job I did several days ago. So I came up with what I thought was a great plan - I would use a ratchet strap and my wood forming blocks shaped like the wing ribs to force the top skin down into its finished shape and hold it tightly in place. This did not work for a number of reasons - the main one being that the wood rib forms stuck out a little too far and would interfere with the tool, which requires about 1.25 inches of clearance to allow the slight bend in the edges to be formed.

So I abandoned that idea for a much more low tech solution as shown in the next pic:

I slid the skin as far out onto the edge of the table as I dared, and placed some weights on the skin. In retrospect I should have clamped the bottom skin down, but I got lazy - and paid the price for it. The first edge to be formed was the top one. I did my best to follow the setup instructions from Cleaveland tools, and then got ready to form the edge. The tool was drawn across the edge after being clamped to the skin. the slight bend, or crease in the skin as I prefer to call it, was formed as expected with no issues:

The last pic that I have shows where things did not go as planned because I did  not flip the skin and re-clamp it tight to the table. Instead, after I finished forming the edge of the upper skin as shown above, I decided to leave everything in place and turn the tool upside down so I could do the other edge without rearranging the skin.Notice the multiple lines in the next pic where the tool slid off the edge because I was not holding it properly. Fortunately this is not seem to deform the edge of the skin at all, so I think I am OK. If I had made the same mistake that many other builders do when they use this tool by tightening the clamping pressure of the tool on the skin too tightly, it could have been a much different story and a very bad outcome.

I basically went back over the bad areas where the tool slipped and reran the tool over them once or twice to make sure then bend was applied in all the right places. The slight line that runs through each rivet hole is the correct indication that the bend has been applied properly to the edge. This should keep the edges from curling up and creating a gap between the skin edge and the wing spar when they are riveted in place. Glad to get that over with. Now I can focus on getting some parts primed and reassembled so that I can keep moving forward.

KPR.