November 30, 2020
Today marked the start of the cabin top installation. Which meant lots of cutting/grinding and being covered in fiberglass dust. But at least it was a warm day for late November. Also today I mounted the pitch trim servo and crimped/attached the connectors.
November 27, 2020
Fabricated the spacers for the horizontal stabilizer before mounting it to the airframe. All in all looks good but there were six rivet that the plans did not have riveted that I finished up and also noticed the squeezed rivets on the trailing edge were not properly squeezed. These rivets were done before I realized that the hand squeezer “walks”…
November 25, 2020
Whew, does that feel good. The wing skins are riveted which makes the wings basically complete. Also today the ailerons were attached. If only there wasn’t so much more to do before attaching the wings to the fuselage…
November 24, 2020
Knocked off the brakes today. Nice to have that done. Also finished up battery box I built yesterday. Now time for turkey!
November 23, 2020
I have been bouncing around a bit lately and not getting a ton of items finished. Today I was able to check off a number of items and the biggest on being the ER tank installation (ended up taking 58.5 hours). Installed the connectors for the roll trim servo. I can now properly say that the wings are just about…
November 22, 2020
Man, today was a day that was an uphill climb. Right off the bat, when I removed the air valve used to leak test the tank the Loctite 515 made it stiff. Removed, I used acetone to try to cleaning the bung fitting. Then I screwed in (temporarily) the new AD4 fitting – mistake. This messed up the threads. Ugh,…
November 21, 2020
Started with crimping the BNC connectors for the ELT antenna and the COM2 antenna before moving back wheels. Oops, started the fuel tank pressure testing on the right side. Made Lee’s suggested plates on the wheel pants bracket and got them glued on. Tomorrow I will add some rivets and then do the final assembly of the mains. Then it…
November 20, 2020
Today was a bit of jumping around. I got a number of the wires pulled through the airframe, mounted the magnometer bracket, got the static ports ProSealed. A big chunk of the day was spent on getting the wheels mounted. The Matco wheels/brakes was pretty straight forward to figure out the order of installation, wheels on the axles the next…
November 19, 2020
A big chunk of this week has been spent ordering electrical connectors and hardware. For me a painstaking process to determining what is needed, documenting it, and ordering it. It wasn’t only buying fun, I had four packages with items to return too. I’d much rather be building. I did manage to get a couple things accomplished today, the correct…
November 18, 2020
Finished up cutting the holes for the defrost fans (2 of 2) which went quick and then it was on to the day’s major effort – cutting/sanding carbon fiber. First I took on the vents on the panel which was a warm up to the overhead console. The console had four vents which weren’t too bad other than a lot…
November 17, 2020
I was so looking forward to getting the wheels on today. Landing gear installed – check. Tires, tubes, rims ready to go – check. Assembly, fuck me. Learned today that Matco wheels don’t use standard tubes. The hole for the valve is offet about an inch. Blerg, new tubes on order. On the positive side, ProSeal the bungs for the…
November 16, 2020
Today a few more items were banged out. Got the first tail section top skin riveted on, drew up on CAD the revised battery box and COMM antenna doubler. Ordered those to be fabricated along with another Left Upper Panel piece, which needed to be updated since I switched from Lightspeed to dual P-Mags. Fingured out a bunch of connectors…