February 23, 2021
With four hours until the inspector arrived it was hustle time to knock off the last few items. First up was installing the lighting and Plexiglas in the right wing tip. After making a few passes on englarging the opening the landing and taxi lights slid right in and from there is was easy going. The wing root fairings were…
February 22, 2021
My work day started at 4:00am and I put in 16 hours getting my plane ready for tomorrows inspection. And yes, I am exhausted. But I should be ready to go after a few hours checking the final items off the list. Today I finally got around to the louvers on the bottom cowling. This was a time consuming process…
February 21, 2021
The day started off with making good time on the right wing tip access door. Everything fell into place and soon I had everything cleco’d together and flox between the fiberglass door and the metal stiffener curing. Then is was on to electrical stuff. I knocked out the prep wiring for the right wing tip light. So once the tip…
February 20, 2021
No not the Airworthiness, but rather certification of the transponder and static systems. This was a much more involved process than I expected. All told it took three and a half hours. A good chunk of that was fixing leaks. At every threaded fitting there was a leak. I had used teflon tape but the system still leaked. Could have…
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…
February 6, 2021
Boom two and a half hours later the right ER tank was installed. Of course it is a totally different position from the left or the first set of tanks. No surprise at this point. But after some monkeying I got it installed. Then filled it with fuel. Actually filled both tanks. Turns out they hold 14 gallons and not…
February 1, 2021
So yesterday I spent over an hour trying to figure out why the brakes were dragging. Today I was committed to solving this drama. I took the brakes apart again. This time I found that the bolt holding the brake assembly to the axle had an interference issue. Why was this not in the manuals??? Still the rear pad was…
October 11, 2020
So I didn’t expect this step to take so long. Total of 8.25 hours for the three light, well technically five light boards. The tail frustrated me, there is an aluminum “C” bracket to attach the light. The problem was it was too big to fit the Van’s supplied tail cone. I sanded fiberglass, ground aluminum and after 90 minutes…
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).