February 17, 2021
With my inspection scheduled for Tuesday I am working long hours and on the items that affect airworthiness. Fancy interior and other bells and whistles will have to wait. I finished the last of the heavy lifting for sanding, woohoo! So today’s three hours of sanding included; pilot door sill and surround, the inside cabin top, and left wing tip…
January 25, 2021
So with some effort the door clecos/tape that was installed for curing the epoxy to seal the halves were removed and the doors were ready to have the mechanics installed. This was a bitch of a project. Specifically getting the long tube/pin into the 3rd door latch gear. Wow, who would think you could spend hours dealing with that. Took…
January 21, 2021
Big project today, getting the doors halves glued together. The prep involved drilling for more clecos, sanding (this seems never ending), mixing up lots of epoxy, flox, and taping off the fuselage. The actual gluing and affixing the doors to the didn’t take a ton of time. Lots of clecos and clamps to hold things in place. As there seemed…
January 20, 2021
There I said it – I am not fan of epoxy, flox, micro and sanding. My day was kicked off with 150 minutes of sanding and cleaning up. But the cabin top was to be installed! Whew. Next up was finishing up the door prep. Those door pins, filing the correct amount off the ends of the rods to get…
January 19, 2021
Big progress on the cabin top today. I figured out a way to apply micro to the vertical surfaces which greatly reduced the waiting time. All told today I major sanded twice and applied micro three times. I think after tomorrow morning’s sanding session I should be ready to attached the cabin top to the airframe! Also up today was…
January 18, 2021
So I started the cabin top fairing this morning, which meant three hours of sanding. The raw fiberglass out of the Van’s mold is wavy and full of fabric patterns so it was go time. That was a fun morning. I got a layer of micro laid down on the flat top section and put a first coat to smooth…
January 16, 2021
Sooo, I finished up the sanding/priming of the right elevator trip fairing before moving on to wiring the overhead console lights. I needed to get the console finished so it could be attached to the cabin top. This meant putting in the eight single lug nutplates that I had to order way back when I last worked on attaching the…
January 15, 2021
Seems I will be living in the world of fiberglass and epoxy for awhile. The engine cowling hinges are now all drilled, this took two people – one to squeeze and one to drill. After all the filling of the sides and back there is poor alignment on the front corners. Got a layer of flox down to start filling…
January 13, 2021
So the cowling fit is shit. To get it to line up in the back, the front is off – not terrible but off. The sides are the issue. On the pilot side there is a 7/16″ gap. WTF. So today the sides got built up to fill the gap. More fun tomorrow. The cabin top is now drilled and…
January 12, 2021
It started with the cowling. This things is way off, ugh. Even the top (without sanding the air inlets) will need a good 1/2 to 3/4 inch of fairing to make the cowling line up with the spinner. And the sides seams, yep that is going to be a ton of work too. Moving on… With a call to Stein…
January 8, 2021
The day started with mounting the engine. Only hiccup was “losing” one of the engine mount spacers. But thirty minutes later I found it in my pocket, please don’t ask… Then I got some work done on final wiring/labeling of the pilot switches. The only wiring remaining in the cockpit is the Starter/Mag switch. Probably knock that out tomorrow and…
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.