January 11, 2021
Oh my, oh my. The bottom cowling was not fabricated ideally from Van’s… Took a lot of cutting, grinding, filling, and sanding to get the cowling to line up pretty well. The sides, bottom, and front all look great. The issue was getting the curves on the bottom to match the fuselage. They are close but there will be some…
December 3, 2020
Today was spent finishing the nutplates on the wings for the wing root fairings and then back to electrical work. All of the rear plane electrical was completed along with the antenna connectors. Then moving forward I added snap bushings and adel clamps to the 2AWG power cable and finished off the cable with the terminal to bolt it to…
October 25, 2020
The day started with three hours of finishing the Elevators. Whew, this section too quite a bit more effort than I had expected. Will be interesting to see how long the Horizontal Stabilizer takes to assemble/rivet… From there, assembly of the aileron push tubes and aileron roll trim bracket. Fabrication of new brackets for the PH Aviation flap actuator. Started…
October 24, 2020
Man oh man, I thought by early afternoon I’d have both Elevators buttoned up (sans the leading and trailing edges). Ha! The counter-balance attachment (with six tough to reach rivets and rivets of various sized to keep track of) slowed me to a crawl as did Short story, right side is 100%, left side needs the counter-balance and rivets requiring…
October 23, 2020
The day started deburring the remaining parts for the Horizontal Stabilizer followed by dimpling the skins. Sweet Jesus are there a lot of holes to dimple. Then priming prep followed by priming the last Horizontal Stabilizer parts. Not to be forgotten the front and rear spars holes were countersunk. Back to the Elevators, I riveted the ribs and then installed…
October 18, 2020
So it was nice and quiet, just me in the hanger today and I was productive. I was able to finish up all the final prep work, knock out the three remaining skins that needed ribs riveted, and then rivet in the rear spar on the Elevators. That finished I cut the Elevator horn weights before moving on the last…
October 17, 2020
After playing hokey for five days to go mountain biking in Moab it was back to work. Cleaned up the tailcone light mounting before continuing the riveting the the Elevator trim tab bracket and the Elevator ribs.
October 10, 2020
Lots of riveting today. My skills are slowly improving and there were only a couple rivets that I had to redo. The day started with priming the Elevator skins. And finished with work on wing tip light installation from FlyLEDs (needed a break from the riveting).
October 9, 2020
So evidently there are a number of small steps I had yet to approach, so Elevator work continued. Drilled the trim hinge and primed the smaller parts. Next I took on cutting and sanding foam blocks for the edge of the Elevator and Elevator Trim. Those took much longer than I would have expected. Oh and I also scuffed the…
October 8, 2020
Big progress today, all deburring, dimpling and drilling completed. Tomorrow I should be able to start riveting. Woohoo. Nearly made my first major mistake by dimpling the read spar. Thankfully the trim hinge is drilled based on the skin and not the spar. Whew.
October 7, 2020
Finished up the rudder, sans rounding the leading edge. So next up was the Elevator. Made good progress today but damn 3 hours of sanding and deburring, shesh.