February 2001

No building

I got an email from Tony Krzyzewski a couple of weeks ago, he had been browsing my WEB site and he commented that the tail wheel mod. bracket seemed a bit too high.  I asked him to measure his and he found that it was mounted 100 mm from the base of the fuselage and the exit holes are 40 mm from the base of the stern post, then things seemed to work pretty well.  I checked mine and found that it was 150mm high so I set about lowering it.  This really meant that I had to remove some material from it to get it to sit down lower on the bulkhead.  After quite a bit of fiddling around I got it to sit down pretty well where Tony had his, so I drilled new holes and then removed it for final painting.

I tried mounting up the fuse block but I discovered that one of my mounting bracket's holes actually turned up in the flange for the cover, so I had to spend some time remanufacturing the mounting hardware.  I had to make a quick trip down to the hardware store for some more lock nuts, and once I had these I assembled it onto the bottom of the instrument panel.

I fitted up my nice cover so I decided to add some switches to see how it looked.  That's when it became apparent that things didn't want to fit too well.  The fuse block was too close to the switches and I couldn't fit on the crimp connectors.  I fooled around with it for a while and I think I am going to need to bend a whole bunch of the tabs on the switches to make sure things will fit okay.

I had mounted the fuse block pretty well centrally in the bottom of the panel and I really wished I had put it 25mm further to towards the back, but its a bit late now.  

One of the things on my long list of to do's in readiness for bonding the top on, is to make a cover to go in the roof between the doors.  I started off by making a cardboard template and it was my intention to make the panel out of thin ply.  The cardboard I had was pretty thick and it occurred to me that I could put a couple of layers of bid each side of it and make up a really strong panel.

I cut a bit of cloth this evening for the ceiling panel.  I decided to put three layers of bid on each side of the cardboard template.

Jenny and I did the lay up this evening.  I ended  up with 3 layers on one side and two on the other.  I put peel ply on the outer surface and weighted the whole thing down flat with lead shot bags.  I put my heat lamps on the whole job and called it quits for the night.

Thursday 8

I took at look at the new ceiling, and it has turned out to be a pretty strong & light structure.  The underside had bubbled a little bit and I suspect that was because the plastic was preventing the resin vapor from escaping.  I'm pretty sure if I had put peel ply on both sides that it would have been fine.  I trimmed it and it fitted in pretty nicely.

For the cover to secure nicely its going to need some anchor points, front, back and in the middle.  The only way I could see to get some in the middle was to Redux a couple of aluminum angle tabs so I made these and glued them in place.

The make some mount points at the back I put in a wood block, and for the front I glued in some Rawl plugs into the blue foam/epoxy block.   I used some self tapping screws and it all fitted up quite nicely.

It was cold outside but I really wanted to get the final coat of paint on the tail wheel mod. I find painting things always an interesting exercise this time of year.  I can't paint inside other wise the smell would blow through the furnace and all through the house, so what I do is to get the bits all ready, warm them up, run outside into the 10c degree cold, quickly spay it and bring them inside to dry.

The paint had dried on the tail wheel mod bracket so I set about remounting it.  Getting a drill in was quite tricky.  I managed to get this done with a combination of the angle drill for a couple of the holes, and some long aircraft drills for the others.  Since I didn't think that I would be needing to removed it again I assembled it with large washers and lock nuts.  Putting things on with such finality tends to lend an air of "it might get finished one day" to the project. 

Marty came by to say hi for a while, so since I had an extra pair of hands I crimped up the last section of rudder cables.  One thing I had been pondering was how I was going to get electrical cables up into the ceiling panel.  I went to the local hardware store and they had some nice flexible tubing that was 1/2" in diameter.  This fitted into the rear rim of the door frame, so I spot glued it with the hot glue gun and put a layer of bid over the top.

No building

One of the things I had meant to do before crimping up the last section of rudder cable was to put on some nylon tubing so it would not rub on the wooden support rails for the mass balance weights.  Unfortunately I forgot, however Marty came up with a better solution.  I split a bit of nylon tube and fitted it over the wooden support rails.  It actually worked out better because it will be easy to replace should  I ever need to do so.

Because my instrument panel is looking pretty full I have decided to fit my intercom in the roof panel.  I suspect that the cables hanging down may be a bit of a problem, but I can always change it later.  I have a nice portable intercom that I used in my C150, so  I cut a hole in the ceiling panel and it fitted up quite nicely.

Two of the jacks in my intercom are for a remote push to talk which I didn't really need.  I was at the local hardware store and I discovered that they had some blanking plugs which looked like they would fit perfectly.  I dismantled the intercom and it looked like it was not going to be too difficult to remove the jacks.  I got my soldering iron out and 15 minutes with the solder sucker had the jacks off the printed circuit board.

No building

Friday 16

No building

The spot where the intercom fits is pretty tight and I needed to fabricate an angle bracket with all kinds of clearance.  True to form I made it twice, and the second time took about five minutes. I put some Redux on the brackets and assembled the whole thing including the ceiling panel to make sure it all lined up.

The next job I had to get out of the way before the top can be bonded on, was to make a Marker Beacon antenna.  I decided to make a folded dipole out of copper tape.  The whole thing had to be 75" long so this meant it ran from the tail all the way forward.  I made up some waxed paper envelopes to fit the foil inside.  The idea it to allow the foil to be able to move so it would not crack if the fuselage top flexed. Once I had the tape inside the wax envelopes I spot glued them in place and covered them with one layer of bid.

I decided I didn't really want to attach a long piece of coaxial cable to the copper foil, so instead I  made up a mount bracket and put an RG connector on it.  I then made up a short piece of cable with a balum made out of ferrite beads.  I then put a wooden block on with hot glue just to hold the angle bracket in place while the Redux set.

I guess I didn't think the next step through.  Later in the day I decided that the Redux had set enough so I decided to pull off the wooden block.  The hot glue seemed to hold it really well so I decided to heat it with the heat gun.  In doing so I managed to spoil the gel coat on the outside of the fuselage.  With that I called it a day!

I took a look at the damaged gel coat to decide what to do.  It was an area about 35mm in diameter and the foam had delaminated away from the skin.  I drilled a couple of small holes and injected some resin in the space and let it cure. 

The repair had worked out really well.  I sanded it back and put on a coat of superfil to finish is off.

No building

No building

I looked at the spot where I had mounted the GPS antenna and decided that the strobe would fit there quite nicely.   I had been wanting to move the GPS antenna up to the top of the fuselage so I made up an aluminum bracket to hold it just underneath the fuselage top, on the back side of the luggage bay .  This should give the antenna an unobstructed view of the satellites.

One of the things I have been wondering about, was what was the best way to get cables out to the port wing.  What I decided was to drill a hole in the top of the cockpit module between the fuselage side and the head restraint.  I put in the cables and the pitot/static lines inside some 1/2" flexible tube.  I then fed this down under the CS bracket and fed it back up.  I then secured it with a "P" clip.  I put in my dummy spars to check and every thing seemed to clear okay.  I ended up with quite a few cables, one for the landing light, position light and a pitot heater.  I have found a heater that only draws 10 amps and I am hopeful that I "might" have enough juice to run it.

While I was in a cable running mood I ran the power out to the strobe and the position lights, so between the coaxial cables and the power cables it is really looking like some thing under construction.

I sort of lost a fair bit of the day.  We decided to meet a couple of friends for brunch and I found that the car had a flat tire.  After getting back it was pretty obvious that I needed new tires all round.  By the time that was done it accounted for most of the day.

I did have a go at trying to fit the top cap onto the fin.  I trimmed the top down, but it was still apparent that the foam was still preventing the stern post & cap from closing properly.  I spent a couple of hours sanding this back to a nice taper that was the same as the stern post.

No building

EAA Chapter meeting. It was pretty interesting, a guy came along that had the commission to build the engine for the Wright Flyer replica. He had actually built one, some 25 years earlier, but this one is going into the aircraft that will be used to reenact the first flight, 100 years later at Kitty Hawk

No building