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…
November 15, 2020
Man the number of operations for each bracket to mount the ER tanks in insane. The middle bracket is the most time consuming. On the left tank I thought it took four hours to fabricate. But today on the left I took nearly six hours (for one bracket). Sheesh. And I’m sure I was faster today… So all that is…
November 14, 2020
Today was a good day, I felt like a lot was accomplished. I started the day fabricating a bracket and mounting the overhead vent servo from Aerosport Products. Also installed the vent flanges and connected them together with hoses. Then it was on to the GPS antenna mounting, just aft of the baggage area. I had previously made the doublers…
November 13, 2020
Damn, what a frustrating day, it wasn’t that anything went horribly wrong. Just one of those days. On the positive side, I did manage to get the left ER tank 100% bolted on, all that remains is running the fuel lines and tank vent. I keep going back to how much effort it was for the mid bracket (4 hours).…
November 12, 2020
Started the day installing the end ER tank brackets which went pretty smooth. Next was a bigger challenge getting the outboard tank mounts positioned. This seriously took way longer than I would expect but it has to be tilted so gravity moves the fuel to the inboard side of the tank, the wing tips have to fit, and there has…
November 11, 2020
Started with making a vacuum adapter for sucking the metal flakes when drilling the holes for the main fuel tank bung. Drilling went well but I did spend about 45 minutes deburring, vacuuming, and cleaning the tanks. I think and hope I got everything. Then it was on to installing the ER tank fuel pumps, once I deciphered how everything…
November 10, 2020
With three of us working I bounced around a bit but my main focus was finishing the Vertical Stabilizer. I had some rivets on the rear spar before I could assemble and start the not so fun riveting which involved reaching way up inside the cavity for a number of hours. I also helped with the fuel valve/lines installation only…
November 9, 2020
Finished up the deburring of the holes, counter sinking spar holes, cleaning the parts, and finally priming them. Cue the riveting, today I seemed to not have my head on straight. Half the rivets had to be drilled out either due to incorrect assembly or crappy rivet setting. Ugh, one of those day. But I did get the rear spar…
November 8, 2020
Well almost, first I had to build a new stand for the wings for the install of the ER fuel tanks. The current stand supports the wings from the ends which obviously won’t work when sliding a tank on the outboard side. A couple hours later I feel good about the stability of what I built. Then the final bit…