The Dimpling Tool

Some of the rivets used to assemble the Sling are counter-sunk, that is, they have a flat head that is flush with the skin of the aircraft. This has the advantage of giving the aircraft a more smooth appearance and also improving the air flow over the surface. Having a smooth surface is most important on the leading edges of the wings and tail, and since countersunk rivets are less strong than their normal counterparts it’s only used where it matters.

In order for a countersunk rivet to fit, the parts naturally also have to have the corresponding shape. For thicker parts, like the spars, this can be done with a normal countersinking operation where you drill out a conical hole. Most of the parts in an airplane, however, are very thin. The skins and ribs, like in the picture above, are generally only 0.5mm thick, far too thin to countersink a hole. Instead, the sheet metal is deformed into a “dimple”, a cone where the rivet can rest.

Dimpling the metal is done with a “dimple die”, two hardened steel parts that are pressed together to form the dimple. This takes a significant amount of force, especially in the places where thicker 1mm sheets are used. You also have to be able to dimple holes in the middle of the wing skins, so whatever tool is used needs a fairly large opening.

The tool generally used for dimpling is the DRDT-2 from experimentalaero.com. This has a large C-frame and a hand-operated plunger. While you can buy the entire thing, the frame is very large and heavy and I neither wanted to pay for shipping it to Hawaii or fit it in the move. The alternative is to just buy the plunger and manufacture your own frame, so that’s what I was planning to do.

The first problem was figuring out where I could procure the quite large 150x75x5 rectangular steel tubing that’s required. I’m not familiar with any place selling steel for fabrication to private individuals here, so my Dad gave his old employer a call to see if he could figure it out. He used to work at Nordic Road Safety, which manufactures guardrails for roads. They told us to come by and happily told us we could take anything we could find in their storehouse. They had some 120x80x5, not quite as large as the original, but I figured it would work. Big Mahalos to Åke and Birger at NRS!

The tubing was at the absolute max of what my Rage 3 miter saw can cut, and by the end of it, the saw blade was almost unusably dull. It did work well, though, and I got the angles of the cuts almost perfect.

The dimpler frame is assembled from three pieces of tubing and a flat plate. The important thing here is to ensure that the flat plate in the upper left, where the plunger mounts, is exactly orthogonal to the tubing under it, where the other die will sit.

Now it was time to see how much my welding skills had atrophied, but the first hurdle was that argon bottles in Sweden have a totally different thread than my (quite nice) US regulator. I ended up replacing the part that attaches to the bottle, because that is threaded into the regulator with a simple 1/4″ NPT. The easiest solution was to buy the cheapest possible Swedish regulator and unscrew the bottle attachment tube. This of course does not attach to the regulator with a NPT thread (since NPT threads aren’t used in Europe) so I had to find an NPT die and re-cut the thread.

Cutting the thread in the brass tube that attaches to the Swedish Argon bottles. I first had to reduce the diameter of the tube a bit, and since I don’t have a lathe I milled an approximate circle consisting of 16 flats.

The bottle attachment ready for threading into the regulator.

The regulator with its new bottle attachment.

Since this connection is under full bottle pressure, which is 2500psi/170 bar, the fit has to be pretty good or you’ll lose a lot of expensive Argon. It actually turned out to be very tight, I can close the bottle valve and have the needle barely move in a day. Ok, ready to do some welding.

The parts tacked together.

Frame welded together.

A close look at the welds.

Even the inner corner weld looked ok. Usually I can’t manage anything close to that nice in aluminum.

When using the dimpling tool, it’s important it can be moved around and be placed around the work benches so the large skins can rest on the bench tops while you dimple them. To make this possible, I attached the same adjustable legs and retractable casters as on the workbenches.

The assembled and painted dimpling tool on its stand. The stand is quite narrow but reasonably stable since the wheels are on the outside.

Continue reading ‘The Dimpling Tool’ »

Amateur building in Sweden

Once it became clear that building was going to take place in Sweden, I had to start educating myself on the difference between homebuilding an aircraft in Sweden vs. in the U.S.

The legal requirements in the U.S are amazingly minimal. As long as at least 51% of the tasks have been completed by people doing the work for “recreation or education”, and you can prove that this is the case (for example by using a kit that the FAA has approved as having more than 51% of the work remaining, and having a build log of who performed the work) you can just build whatever you want. Once you’re done, you call a DAR (“Designated Airworthiness Representative”) who comes out and inspects the airplane and, more importantly, your documentation. and you get an airworthiness certificate.

The amazing thing about this is that the authorities basically give you the freedom to kill yourself, as long as what you’ve built more or less looks like an airplane you can do it, the important thing is that it’s not done for profit. Still, most builders get more help, and EAA has people available that can come and look at your work during the build, they have workshops available that teach various building techniques, and the vast majority of homebuilt airplanes today are built from kits where the kit manufacturer usually provides help and support if the builder has questions.

The process in most European countries is, maybe not surprisingly, quite a bit more regulated, but while some rules are EU-wide there are still large variations in the regulations between countries.

The situation in Sweden is interesting, because the Swedish authorities have delegated the administration of homebuilding to the Swedish EAA. That means you rarely have to deal with the actual authorities, but on the other hand means that your project is in the hands of people who are pretty much doing this on a volunteer basis.

The first hurdle that had to be surmounted was that before an airplane can be homebuilt in Sweden, the design must undergo a technical study to prove that it fulfills a bunch of safety criteria. Once a model has been approved, this study applies to all subsequent builds of that model but, as you might guess, I’m the first builder of a Sling TSi in Sweden. There were two issues with this study. The first is finding a person approved and willing to do it, which took a little back and forth with the EAA people. The second was that the person who was going to conduct the study had a bunch of detailed design questions they wanted the Sling factory to answer. The factory, in turn, was a little hesitant to provide “proprietary information” to some random guy in Sweden (since usually this would be done by someone working for the authorities) without an NDA. The EAA person, for their part, were unsure whether they could sign an NDA since government information in Sweden is, by default, public.

Luckily I was not ready to start actually building so this hangup didn’t affect me. The details of how this was worked out were not communicated to me (since they definitely weren’t providing their proprietary information to me) but all of a sudden I got word that the design study had been approved. They did an independent calculation to conclude that the design safety factor for the main spar at +3.8G and max gross weight indeed is 3x.

Another thing that’s quite different from the FAA rules is that you need ongoing inspections of the build, at least before every surface is riveted shut. (I believe this was the case for the FAA as well back in the 80s but has since been removed.) Luckily I found out that one of the EAA people with inspection authority, which means they are the equivalent to the FAA DARs that sign the final approval of the aircraft, lives in Sundsvall, and he agreed to be the inspector for my build. He’s one of the founders of Flygfabriken, a company that manufactures kits for an amphibious homebuilt aircraft, so it’s nice to have someone knowledgeable nearby that can put a second pair of eyes on my work.

With those hurdles worked out, I was finally awarded the Permit to Build (Byggnadstillstånd) in late February. Not that I was ready to start building then, either, but I could no longer blame paperwork.

While the build progresses, I have to file annual progress statements with the EAA. but until the plane is ready for final inspection there should be no other paperwork. However, in order to actually be allowed to do flight testing of your homebuilt, you need to be approved to act as test pilot. We’ll cross that hurdle when we get to it.

New workshop setup

Our new house has a very nice garage that measures 8.4m deep by 7.4m wide internally. This equates to a two-car garage with extra depth, not a ton of space. But because it was built to house machinery, it has 3.7m high ceilings and garage ports going up to that full height. As such, there’s plenty of opportunity to use vertical space.

The garage is heated, but did not have any ventilation when we moved in. This is suboptimal since it often leads to high humidity, especially if you park a wet or snowy car in it, so one of the first improvements I did over the winter was to add an FTX ventilation system. This is a ventilation that both sucks and blows, so to speak. It has fans for air supply from the outside and for air evacuation back to the outside, with a heat exchanger that heats the supply air from the exhaust air. This is quite common in modern houses here in Sweden since it makes it possible to get good airflow without wasting a ton of energy by just exhausting the warm inside air in the winter.

The ventilation unit, with three of the four air connections completed. The insulated pipes on the right are the outside connections.

The installation of the ventilation was a bit nerve racking since it required drilling two giant 150mm (6″) holes straight through the wall. Then the cold air pipes need to be insulated inside the garage since otherwise water will condense on them. Never having done anything like this before it took me a while but by November last year the ventilation was up and running, significantly improving the air quality in the garage.

The completed installation, with the exhaust intake near the floor on the left and the supply air going off to the right along the ceiling.

Another improvement to the garage was the lighting, which was not very good. This was replaced with 6 7800 lumen LED luminaires, which should result in an illumination consistent with what’s recommended for “precision industrial work”. I don’t have a lux meter, so I can’t confirm this, but the lighting is good enough that I haven’t felt the need for any additional lighting.

The garage has water, a water heater, and a floor drain. There were also two extra drain pipes coming up out of the floor, and an old IKEA counter with a sink left over. I snagged a couple of IKEA cabinets in their second hand store and mounted the counter and hooked up the water and drain to the sink, which not only meant we have a sink but also some more storage space.

The water for the sink was branched off from the existing utility sink.

The counter with the three second-hand IKEA cabinets, hence the diversity of colors.

Speaking of storage, the biggest challenge was to try to organize everything to fit in the garage and still have sufficient space to work on the plane. The crates themselves are very large and will be around at least until you’ve completed the wings and start the fuselage. They take up a lot of floor space, so I came up with this idea of building a “bridge” of sorts over them to be able to use the vertical height of the garage. We also mounted some shelf braces high up on the wall and put the wing spar crate there.

The wing spar crate was stuck up on the wall onto three large shelf braces.
Using two 2×8’s and a latticework of 2×2’s, we then built a “bridge” over the wing and fuselage crates, which gave us storage space for stacking boxes on top. The landing gear crate was also unpacked. The landing gear itself is hanging against the wall under the “bridge”.

I also bought some undertable drawers and mounted under the work benches. One holds the CNC tools under bench with the CNC mill, the other will hold airplane tools. I also made use of a pair of drawer rollers that we had left over from Hilo and made a large drawer under another bench for Ryobi tools.

I built a large drawer under one of the workbenches for storing all the power tools and batteries.

This all took a lot longer than I had hoped (story of my life) but the garage should now be ready to actually start building!

Plane updates

It’s now 12 years since I first posted about airplane building and announced that I was going to build a Long-Ez. Since then, our life situation has changed considerably, we’ve moved across the world, received kids, changed jobs, and no plane building whatsoever has taken place…

Once we had one kid and were thinking about another, I realized the Long-Ez did not really fit the mission any longer, so pivoted to aiming for a Cozy Mk.IV, the 4-seat cousin of the Long, instead. It’s built in essentially the same way with the same materials, but since it’s larger it takes a bit longer to build.

About 2.5 years ago I finally thought the situation through and realized that we had fully transitioned from the “more time than money” state into “more money than time”. The chances of me actually completing a Cozy in anything like the next 12 years would be slim, so I started reevaluating.

While I really like the composite construction of the Cozy and Long-Ez, there’s no arguing that manufacturing all the parts from plans takes a loong time. In the meanwhile, aluminum airplane kits have come a long way, exemplified by the RV series of kits from Van’s aircraft. Building one of these is now more like assembling a puzzle, albeit a very large and complicated one, since the parts fit together really well. Gone are the days when you had to manually drill the rivet holes, in the CNC-stamped kits manufactured these days the parts are essentially complete. This comes at a cost in kit price, obviously, but it also cuts down on the amount of work needed to complete an aircraft. At this point, I was willing to accept that.

The majority of kit aircraft are 2-seaters. I still want a 4-seater to haul the family on trips, and the two main alternatives in that category are the RV-10 from Van’s aircraft and the Sling TSi from Sling Aircraft. While pretty much everyone interested in general aviation will have heard of Van’s, Sling is not quite as well known. This South African company has been building complete airplanes and kits since 2008. The 4-seat TSi, introduced in 2018, is quickly gaining popularity around the world. While the planes are quite similar, the Sling is a bit smaller and lighter, with a 150hp Rotax 915 engine as opposed to the 260hp Lycoming IO-540 engine in the RV-10. The smaller engine translates to a bit lower cruise speed (but not much, since the Rotax is turbocharged and keeps its power at high altitude) but also lower fuel consumption.

The big difference in construction is that the Sling kit uses pull rivets (or “pop rivets”) while the RV uses solid aviation rivets. The advantage of pull rivets is that it’s considerably faster to build, and also doesn’t require two people like the solid rivets do in many cases (since there needs to be a bucking bar held against the back of the rivet). The video below gives an overview of the TSi.

I had the opportunity to go for a demonstration flight in the Sling at their North American distributor in Torrance (just a short drive from SpaceX’s headquarters) and really liked it. I also flow a couple of flights with an instructor in the 2-seat Sling to get some more feel for how they work. In general I’m a fan of the Rotax line of aircraft engines, since they’re about the only ones really innovating and bringing modern electronically fuel-injected and computer controlled engines into the airplane world, with all the improvements in fuel consumption and reliability that this brings. I was sufficiently pleased with what the kit looked like and how the plane flew that I went ahead and put in a deposit for a Sling TSi kit in March of 2023. The kit arrived in November, and since then I’ve been working to get the garage in shape to begin building.

The Sling kit as the crates were pulled into the garage.

The great Hawaii-Sweden move

We’d been planning the move from Hawaii to Sweden for a long time. Because the Swedish immigration authorities are ridiculously overburdened, the processing times for residency permits is counted in years, even if you’re married to a Swede who wants to move back home. There are entire web forums dedicated to the trials and tribulations of people trying to navigate the hurdles associated with moving (back) to Sweden. The rules about how this is supposed to work might have been reasonable when they were put in place, but are not when the wait time is 18-24 months, you don’t know when your application will be processed, and, according to the rules, your application will be denied if you don’t show that you have a clear intent to move soon after your application is approved.

So you have to show that you’re ready to move with something like a month’s notice at some unknown point in time 18-24 months into the future. Works great for planning. The absurdity continues with the fact that unless you show that you have a place to live in Sweden set up, you run the risk of a denial because not having it indicates that you do not have intent to move. The result is that people have to buy or rent homes years in advance of needing them.

Our situation was slightly better than it could have been since we are in a long-term relationship and I’m a Swedish citizen, which gets rid of the rule that you have to show that you have an income (after the move) sufficient to take care of your family.

Anyway, there are small signs that politicians have realized that if they want Swedes to move back to Sweden, they need to make this easier. On the other hand, the immigration debate is dominated by the right wing yelling about how it needs to be harder, not easier, to immigrate to Sweden. They swear up and down that of course they don’t mean that it should be harder for Swedes to move to Sweden, only those … “other people.”

We had set a target of July 2023 for the move and applied for Kathy’s residency permit in December 2021. For a long time nothing happened but by fall of 2022 we were seriously scanning the housing market in Sundsvall, where I grew up. We did not want to rent something temporary given the extreme pain of moving twice, but I had a good idea of the places we’d want to live and the kind of house we wanted, so we started scanning for houses for sale. By winter we had the local representatives (ie my parents and my brother) attend some showings, and by March we put in our first bid.

The housing market was stone cold, I mean ice, ice, cold. The high interest rates meant that no one was buying, and few people were selling and most of those who were had not mentally adjusted to the fact that prices had dropped significantly over the past year. There was a lot of houses sitting on the market and the sellers refusing any bids in what we considered reasonable. By May we were getting a bit nervous but finally reached a deal on the house below in the middle of May with a move-in date at the end of July.

House

Our new home.

This house is nicely situated in a small residential area just outside of Sundsvall, but in walking distance (not a short walk, though) to the kids preschool and schools. And the garage should be sufficient for projects. It was built in 2020 so should be up to energy efficiency standards, but the drawback is that for some reasons new houses around here have almost no storage space so while the living space is a bit larger than our house in Hawaii, the total space is much less (even with that garage). They must not be very materialistic here in Sweden…

Luckily we could give power of attorney to my parents to sign the purchase contract, but what we could not do is pay for the house remotely. (Since we did not have any income in Sweden, no one would give us a mortgage. Luckily we were able to pay cash.) Money laundering and know-your-customer laws are very strict in Sweden so the bank refused to transfer the funds without us appearing in person. At least they agreed to transfer the earnest money remotely, but even then I had to show them a bunch of paperwork as evidence that the funds were above board. This created a very tight schedule where our stuff would get packed up and the container leave on July 22, the house get cleaned on July 23, the sale close on July 24, we’d fly out to Sweden on July 25, arrive July 27, and finally appear in person to close the purchase on July 28. What could possibly go wrong?

Amazingly enough, for all intents and purposes, it worked. We were pretty beat after the purchase was finalized on July 28, though.

One significant stressor was that all our belongings, including the minivan and motorcycle, was going to get packed into one 40-foot container and then go all the way to Sweden. The thing is, it’s really difficult to judge how much stuff you have before it’s all in boxes, and it’s also pretty difficult then judge exactly how efficiently that can get packed in boxes and packed into a container. The movers did not impress, they came over from Honolulu and did not have all the normal equipment you associate with a bunch of movers, and did not seem that concerned with packing stuff tightly into the container. At some point I realized they were not aware that the minivan was also going into the container. That takes up basically half the space, so is kind of important to be aware of. I ended up measuring off the distance and putting a big tape mark in the container, and then another tape mark so the motorcycle would fit, and we watched the belongings get closer and closer to that mark.

Container

The container being packed. As you can see in there, it’s not exactly just a bunch of boxes…

The good thing about putting the car inside the container, unlike if you ship it separately. is that you can fill it up with stuff. A bunch of the most fragile and expensive boxes I packed into the car myself, and we fully utilized that volume, including the front passenger seat and the roof rack. We had also prepared a list of “stuff that will only go if there’s room”.

All I can say is that we were lucky that we’d been getting rid of stuff before the move, because there was no. more. room. (Granted, better boxing and packing higher into the container could have been done, but it’s not like there was time to pull out a container-worth of stuff into the driveway and start repacking.)

We waved goodbye to our container on July 22. From now on we’d have what we had in our suitcases until the container arrived. We watched it slowly snake its way around the world on the container tracking websites, until it showed up on … December 6, 4.5 months later.

I had impressed upon the destination company that there was a car in the container and there was no way to drive it off here, but they assured me things were under control. The original plan was to transport the container door to door, to minimize risk of damage, but due to the need for getting the car out and the fact that getting a 40-ft container truck up to our house might be a tad difficult (especially getting it turned around], they ended up repacking it after it came through customs in Stockholm.

Even after driving the car onto the smaller truck, it seemed the moving crew hadn’t fully thought through how to get it off. They had thrown in two ramps, but they were different length and were not sturdy enough to take the weight of the car by themselves. Add to that the fact that the Pacifica has a fairly low ground clearance and the first problem getting it off was that the ramps were just too steep for the car to make it onto them without scraping the bottom (where the battery is).

Unloading car 1

The first attempt at getting the car off. Note the entirely sketchy reinforcements under the ramps.


This did not work, there’s not enough ground clearance to avoid the edge of the ramp cutting the underbody of the car.

After attempting to reposition the truck, we regrouped. The driveway in front of the garage slopes significantly down from the road, so by putting the truck in the driveway and the ramps out onto the road, we could minimize the angle enough to avoid scraping the underbody.

To minimize the slope of the ramps, the truck was parked in our sloping driveway, its suspension dropped as much as possible, and the ramps extended onto the road.

This finally worked. But now the car, with very much summer tires, was sitting at the top of the snow-covered driveway. Luckily it was a straight shot to roll into the garage, because he could not have stopped if it wasn’t. After almost 2 hours of trying, we had the car in the garage.

Kathy made a video of the entire process that you may enjoy:

After that, the exciting stuff was over and they got the trailer that had all the household goods unloaded in a few hours. But they did wonder what in the world they were thinking when packing the container. They made some comment like “normally you want to pack stuff in boxes”…

Anyway, after living without our stuff for over four months (although we’d bought some furniture since we didn’t have much of that in the container) we could now really move in. The kids were sure very excited to finally have all their toys back!

Next post will be about the airplane situation. Big news on that front!

1.5 years later…

Wow, that’s 18 months without an update. 2023 was pretty crazy. As I’m writing this update we’re living in a new house, in a new country, and I’m simply not going to be able to detail everything that’s happened. I’ll just give a quick summary.

The last house-related update was posted in June of 2022, where we had stripped and repainted the foyer. At that point, the living room and one of the bathrooms was the remaining lead-painted rooms so we proceeded directly to stripping and painting the living room in the summer of 2022.

The living room has been stripped and is ready for paint.
The living room all done, with paint and new lights.
Another view of the completed living room. Here the floor has been roughed up for a new application of Bona Traffic.

At this point it had been decided that our long-talked about move to Sweden would take place in summer of 2023, less than a year from now. This meant we had a hard deadline for the work we wanted to do to get the house ready for sale, so when my parents came for their customary “November in Hawaii” visit, my Dad and I decided to rip out the carpet to get started on putting in a new floor in the master bedroom.

The master bedroom, or “the addition”, was the part of the house that was added in the 80s sometime. It was in decent shape compared to the rest of the house when we moved in (and didn’t have lead paint) so it had never been a priority to do anything about it. However, it had a pretty bad carpet and paint, and some of the taped joints in the ceiling were loose. It should be “pretty quick” to just tear out the carpet and replace with click-in flooring and repaint it. Famous last words.

The carpet has finally been ripped out of the master bedroom.

Of course this is never as quick as you imagine, but it really didn’t take that long. Since this is the only room in the house that has drywall, being new enough that single-wall construction had finally gone out of fashion in Hawaii, I also had the opportunity to learn a new skill.

Initially we were just going to repaint the walls and ceiling but I really wanted to get rid of the textured ceiling and the loose tapes provided the needed motivation to tear off all the texture from the ceiling and redo the loose tapes.

The mud work on the ceiling about done.

In addition to the loose tapes, the boards themselves were sagging noticeably between the joists, so I ended up getting a fair amount of practice in filling in the depressions with mud. The results were by no means perfect, but it sure looks a lot better than it did before.

With that mud work under my belt I also decided to skim coat the walls to get rid of the texture in the old paint. This also took some practice but after watching a number of youtube videos of people doing this it came out pretty good, and definitely “better than before” which by now had become our motto since we were under time pressure.

The master bedroom repaint done.

After looking at a bunch of different click-type floors, “luxury vinyl plank”, etc, at the local stores and not being very happy with them at all, we went with engineered bamboo from Cali. Luckily you could order this through Lowe’s, I shudder to think what that would have cost to ship otherwise. I think the flooring weighed 150 pounds…

Putting the flooring in was straightforward, although there was a fair amount of complicated cutting in the closet and the entrance stairs.

The flooring (“Mocha” from Cali) is in place, only the baseboards need to be nailed in.
The flooring on the stairs almost completed.

When all was said and done it was now the end of January, so the “pretty quick” redo of the master bedroom ended up taking two months. Given how much nicer it ended up being we were kind of thinking we should have done it a long time ago…

By now the master bath stood out like a sore thumb, since it still had the same textured ceiling and walls the bedroom had. We pushed on and redid the ceiling the same way. The walls we just repainted without skim coating. It definitely looked better than before.

Now we were really running out of time, though. For tax-related reasons, it would be very beneficial to sell the house before we became Swedish residents (Sweden does not have any exemptions to the roughly 30% tax you have to pay on the gains from property sold abroad) and there were a bunch of little things that needed doing. For example, some of the cabinet doors (that we removed basically the day we moved in) were still not repainted. This became largely the focus of May and June of 2023, and on June 14 I finally mounted the last repainted door in the kitchen!

Finally, the kitchen is complete with all the cabinet doors refinished and painted.

There was also a lot of repainting of exterior paint that was in bad shape over those last months. In particular, the paint on the roof of the garage and addition was not in good shape. We had this painted before we added the solar panels, but I’ve been very unhappy about the performance of that paint. It was very chalky and did not have a tight finish, which meant that it attracted a lot of growth and quickly became almost black. I had just pressure washed it and decided I would just paint it with some high-quality Benjamin Moore DTM roof paint.

Halfway finished with repainting the garage roof with the DTM roof paint. (The garage wall did also end up getting a complete coat of paint.)

I painted this with a roller and it actually was pretty quick. The hardest was to find suitable times to do it since the roof is too hot in full sun and you obviously can’t do it when it rains. Finding those elusive “cloudy but not raining” times in Hilo is not so easy.

The garage walls had so far only been spot painted where the old paint was flaking (which is obvious from the picture above) but that ended up getting a complete wash and repaint, as did a lot of the addition.

Since we were working until basically a month before the move would happen, we’d all but given up hope of getting the house sold before the move, but with the help of our awesome realtor Chantel Smith at Century 21 in Hilo we managed to get an offer and close the sale on July 27, the day we left Hilo. I’ll talk more about the move in the next post, which hopefully won’t be in 18 months from now…

Pacifica Headlight Upgrade

Over 2 years ago, when we got the minivan, I intended to upgrade its crappy halogen headlights. (In fact, I started planning this upgrade before we even got it, since I new the headlights were bad.) 

To be able to work on this while having a vehicle, I ordered two used headlights from ebay, and on the assumption that I could figure out how to fit them, a pair of Morimoto M-LED 2.0 bi-led projectors for low/high beam, and a pair of Morimoto Mini HB LED dedicated high beam projectors. After that, the project sat on back burner for most of the time, first because of the absurd difficulty in opening up the headlights.

Back in the Passat days, opening up headlights was easy. The lens was held on with butyl rubber and by throwing them in an oven at ~90C for a couple of minutes it would soften up sufficiently to be able to pull the lens off. These days, a bunch of manufacturers have switched to a 2-component glue known as “Permaseal” which is, you might guess from the name, much more permanent. No matter how much you heat up the headlight, it remains stiff enough that you may be able to wedge a tool into the glue line and physically tear it. I attempted this and basically failed. Only after a major mutilation of the headlight did I manage to get the lens off, cracking a piece out of the lens and ripping parts off the base in the process.

For the second headlight, I did what other people have done and simply cut the lens with an oscillating saw instead.

After the extreme difficulty of getting the lens off on the first headlight, on the second one I just cut the lens with the oscillating saw instead. Much faster and much less damage to the overall headlight.

Looking at the headlight above, the projector on the left is the low beam, while the large reflector in the middle is the high beam. The small reflector on the right is the turn signal. The idea here is to simply replace the stock projector with the M-LED, which has a similar size lens, and to fit the Mini HB projector where the high beam reflector is mounted.

While the M-LED lens is similar size as the stock projector, the length is different. The projector is mounted on a plastic frame, shown below.

This is the frame to which the low beam projector was mounted. To mount the M-LED, it needed to be cut out a bit in the middle and have material added for the top holes. JB Weld to the rescue.

Because the M-LED is shorter, I also mounted it on the front side of that frame rather than on the back like the stock projector. (The four round pads are the back sides of the projector screw holes.) The layout of the holes are naturally different, so I had to make up new holes, but luckily I could use the back of the stock screw holes as the reference plane for getting the projector aligned.

 

The M-LED projector mounted where the low beam projector was.

While the M-LED is shorter than stock, it’s still long enough that mounting it on the front face of the frame still makes it protrude further forward than the stock one. To get it to fit, I had to cut back the shroud as much as possible. Luckily, that was enough. If I had to cut it more I would have had to start cutting into the frame and moving the projector back instead.

The Mini HB projector is easy to mount, you just put it into the bulb hole in the reflector. To get it to look nice, there’s a matching “gatling-style” shroud (similar to the projectors used in the NC23 retrofit), but when you add that shroud it’s a very tight fit to the covers on top and bottom. A large amount of cutting of shrouds and the headlight housing was necessary, but in the end I got it all to fit. 

Both the M-LED and the Mini HB projectors mounted. Looks pretty clean.

If you look at the original light at the top of the article, the high beam housing also had a large chrome-colored housing around it. This is not ideal because it makes all the changes very visible. It also detracts from the look of the light. This all got painted black to match the rest of the housing. Only the projector shrouds were kept chrome, to make it look as much stock as possible. I kind of wish there was an option for a smooth, round shroud for the Mini HB instead of the “gatling-style”, but there isn’t. In the end, I think it looks pretty clean anyway.

The M-LED projector has a power supply box that was mounted to the inside of the headlight housing behind the projector.

As far as wiring goes, the M-LED power supply has two 9006 headlight socket inputs, for low and high beam, so that makes wiring it very easy. The low beam input gets plugged into the stock low beam bulb connector, and for the high beam I had to make a splitter so the stock high beam bulb connector can be plugged into both the M-LED high beam input and the Mini HB input. Then I 3d-printed some brackets to hold the connectors and screwed them to the back of the lights so they’re not rattling around inside the housings.

To avoid the connectors rattling around inside the headlight housings, I 3d-printed some brackets that hold the connectors to the screw holes on the back of the lights.

 

To swap the headlights, you need to drop the entire front fascia. This is a bit time-consuming, but not very difficult.

Once all the wiring was completed and the paint cured, everything (especially the projector lenses) was cleaned up and the headlight lens glued in place with Permatex Right Stuff. It was actually easiest to close up the headlight I sawed off since it wasn’t mutilated like the one where I cut the Permaseal joint.

To switch the headlights, you have to drop the entire front fascia which was a daunting prospect but with the help of instructions and youtube videos wasn’t a big deal. It was even possible to do it without disconnecting anything (except the lights, obviously) which meant I could get by with not powering down the hybrid system and disconnecting the high voltage battery, which was nice.

I even had the privilege of having to do this twice because once I started adjusting the headlight aim it became clear that I had forgotten to engage the horizontal adjustment screw on one of them, so no amount of turning it moved the lights. Second time around was much quicker, I can tell you that.

New headlights in action.

So how does it work? They’re awesome. Everyone agrees the stock projectors are bad, but the M-LED low beam is very wide and even, and the high beam with both lights on is also something else. I’ll try to get a good picture of the beam pattern, but I have to dig out my 40D to get a good view of that. So it took 2.5 years, but it was worth it.

2022 House update: the foyer

Besides the large living room, there was one easily sealed off part that also needed to be stripped and repainted: the (unused) foyer. The windows and windowsills here were also in bad shape externally, so that also needed fixing.

We don’t actually use the foyer as an entrance (no one in Hawaii seems to, there’s always a side entrance used), so there would be no loss to sealing it off for a while. I had planned two weeks to strip and paint it, but as usual that was quite a bit optimistic.

The foyer is separated from the living room by a cased opening. This needed to be stripped first, before the opening is sealed with plastic.

The weird thing about the foyer is that the wall planking is not planed smooth like everywhere else, they’re just sawed and quite rough. The wall on the right in the picture above is the back wall of the kitchen cabinets, so I guess they just used planks planed on one side for the exterior wall and must have “forgotten” that the foyer was going to be here. I don’t know what the excuse is for the wall on the left side, which is an exterior wall, not being planed. (Maybe they accidentally put that facing outwards, I haven’t pulled off the vinyl siding to check.)

In any case, the rough nature of the wall made it much, much harder to strip than the normal, planed walls, since the paint sticks in all the valleys. Then there was the termite damage. This area had by far the worst damage I’ve encountered so far. I used more than a full gallon of Bondo for all the repairs.

The walls here had pretty severe termite damage.

The outermost (leftmost) plank in this wall was particularly bad. I pretty much reconstructed the entire plank in Bondo before I was done. I also encountered the back sides of some repairs I’d made from the kitchen side.

The walls are done here, but the white trim on the cased opening remains.

With all the painting done here, it was time to take the windows out for stripping and painting.

Once all the interior painting was done, we took the windows out for stripping, re-glazing, and painting, so we’ve had the window opening covered by a sheet of plastic for a while now. It takes a long time for glazing putty to harden here, I’ve been waiting to paint the windows for more than two weeks at this point.

At some point I also have to strip and paint the window frame, but I don’t want to do that too early since I don’t want to have to staple the plastic back up with fresh paint. Once the windows are painted, I’ll tackle the window frame. While I’m waiting on the putty to cure, I’m trying to make some progress on some cabinets doors instead. 

2022 House update: the kitchen

We already painted the lower kitchen cabinets and replaced the countertops back in 2016, but the upper cabinets and the wall/ceiling remained. Needless to say this would put the kitchen out of commission, but we also didn’t want Axel running around while doing the stripping work. We were fortunate enough to be able to stay in a friend’s Ohana for a month in September while we did the work.

The kitchen took a lot longer than I had planned. It’s amazing how much longer any form of corners, trim, etc, take over just a plain surface. Our ballpark rate for stripping a wall is 1m^2/hour. However, when you have to do rounded trim, or inside cabinets where you can’t fit the Speedheater very well, it takes many times longer than that. The kitchen had an abundance of such problems. Stripping and sanding the ceiling is also very hard on the neck, even if the weight of the Speedheater is carried by the stand. My generally unhappy neck just does not like looking upwards for hours on end.

This is what we had to work with. The lower cabinets there are done, but everything else needs stripping and painting.

 

Kathy plugs away at stripping the ceiling with the Speedheater.

 

This is the easy part of the stripping work. The flat walls go quickly.

 

The cabinets are not easy to strip, though. It’s very cramped, but the new Cobra from Speedheater made it a lot easier.

It turned out to be very difficult to get the large Speedheater into the shelved cabinets, so we decided to invest in the new “Cobra” from Speedheater. It’s a much smaller IR heater that’s perfect for doing detail work. It made it possible to get the paint out of the corners, but it was still slow work.

Lots of repair work

 

Priming in progress

 

Top coat on ceiling

 

Done

 

The final result

In the end it took 7 weeks from start to finish, so that’s how long we didn’t have a kitchen. Out of that, the stripping was just over a month, the rest painting. There’s always a long tail of painting, with a few coats of Brushing Putty on surfaces receiving the brilliant white paint, each requiring drying at least 48h until it’s easily sandable without clogging up the paper.

We’ve been  wondering how to finish the kitchen since we started it in 2016, so it feels good to be done (except the cabinet doors, of course.) The remaining large job is the living room. We’re still working out how to manage that…

2021 House update: the hallway

Things have been dead here for quite a while, but in real life we’ve made a lot of progress on the house. The process here has been described ad nauseam in the previous posts, so these updates will be pretty brief.

While Kathy and Axel went to visit the grandparents in July of 2021, I stripped and painted the hallway.

The doorways were sealed off with plastic and the doors to the rooms taped shut so lead dust wouldn’t get everywhere.

 

Ready to start stripping

 

This is the GrooveSander, a specialized tool for cleaning up the grooves in the planking. I affixed some sand paper to a foot-long length of square tubing with spray adhesive. The grooves often get a bit damaged from the scraper, this tool works great for getting into the corner and cleaning up the grooves.

 

All the old paint has been stripped away and the termite damage repaired.

 

All repainted, the color is “Saffron” and the ceiling is the same white as everywhere else. Looks good!

Feeling confident about being able to make progress (amazing how much difference working half-time makes!) we decided to tackle the kitchen. That’s the next post.