06AUG2022
Well, last week at AirVenture was awesome like always! The goal this year was to start research on engines. We talked to UL Power, Aeromomentum and Viking Aircraft Engines a few times. We decided to go with a Viking engine and now I'm just deciding between the 130hp and the 150hp. Leaning towards the 130hp mainly due to price, but I still have awhile before I need to decide.
I chose to go with Viking because their engines sound great and after talking with them I think the customer support will be really good (Jan and Alissa were awesome). Viking started telling us about their engines right when we walked up to their tent and they answered all of our questions (and we had quite a few, lol). The other vendors didn't talk about their engines and basically just let us stand there staring at the display engine. We asked a few questions, but overall we were just not impressed. The Viking engines are an auto-conversion engine which is pretty neat. They use Honda engines and do a little bit of modifications to make it appropriate for airplane use.
We also met Dave Tillema who just completed his 48 state challenge and set a new world record! Dave was awesome to chat with and he also has a Viking engine in his Cruzer and had nothing but great things to say about it.
We also talked to a handful of people about the A6 rivet "issue" I'm having on the wing tip. When I pulled the A6 rivets in the wing tip, the back side didn't look like if was fully seated. We spent quite a bit of time measuring the total material thickness and looking up what the grip range was for the supplied A6 rivets. What we found was that the supplied A6 rivets had a grip range of 0.187 to 0.437 inches. The total material thickness measured on my wing tip is 0.167 inches, which is below the specified grip range. So after figuring this out, we were confident that was the problem, but wanted to talk to people about it at Oshkosh to get other opinions.
We talked to a few people in the homebuilders hangar and the consensus was that "yes, something doesn't look right with those rivets". After explaining our thoughts about the grip range, people agreed that that was probably the culprit. We also talked to Rodger again while we were there and he said that it was possible that the grip range was off, but that it should still be ok for that location.
I order some different rivets from Aircraft Spruce that have a grip range more appropriate for this thickness. I ordered the Avex rivet part number 1661-0613 which has a grip range of 0.062 to 0.25 inches. I pulled those today and they look a lot better. I replaced the eight A6 rivets on the wing tip and the two in the nose rib with these new rivets.
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Zenith supplied A6 rivets - not pulled flushed
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New rivets - less gap between rivet and spar