A new acronym has been invented and it's all over the place: LCP - Laser Cut Parts. Essentially Vans needed to speed up production and went for the unprecedented technique (in aircraft production) of laser cutting holes all the way up to the correct dimension.
When done correctly, this poses no more deterioration to the material than punched holes (all the way up to the correct dimension), according to Van's. This is probably correct because it is hard to think of a worse method to make a hole than to punch a hole, where 10% of the thickness is a clean cut, and 90% is literally torn out due to shear forces, leaving residual stresses at max around the hole.
However, the trajectory of the laser is of outmost importance, and the subcontractors did this the wrong way, leaving a large heat affected zone at one specific point. When dimpled and/or riveted, these holes have a tendency to crack. We don't want cracks in our airplanes.
All about this can be read at Van's site. Another thing that can be found there is a very unfortunate message by Van. He literally say the company is de facto bankrupt. They have run out of money, and a new team will lead the company in a transitional phase to get it back on it's feet.
Why this happened is many faceted apparently, I have no internal info, but I think it's safe to say that Corona is the main reason. This ended up in Vans selling kits at a loss, in the degree they even managed to produce kits due to lead times of materials and equipment that have affected every industry. Everything they did to try to fix it, only made it worse. A truly remarkable chain of bad luck as far as I can see. It didn't help much that lots of people working from home during Corona, figured out this is the time to build an aircraft.
I'm not too worried about Van's. Someone will surely inject money into the company, and things will get back to some sort of normal. After all, they are the world's largest manufacturer of SEP's, and all their products are highly popular.
What is more disturbing is the state of the builder community. Lots of builders are blinded by the LCP event, and create all kinds of phantasies of how this happened to them. I mean, the LCP thing is bad, but for each builder it will at max set them back a couple of thousands of US$, and that is if they have to re-purchase new parts, which they most probably won't have to. They also behave like they have no saying in the solution of their aircraft. I mean, who is producing this aircraft? It's not Van's, it's the builder! Sometimes the words "either you are part of the solution, or you are part of the problem" is more true than this worn out phrase usually is.
At least on VAF things seem to be going in the right direction now. Positive problem solving rather than negativity. Things will be OK IMO. On other sites, not so much. They are mostly used for the negativity that admins finally have managed to stop at VAF.
As for myself, I'm building my third shop now. The Onex is more or less finished. Soon it will be back to the -4 :-)
