A slow month because..........
May was a bit of a slow month because I started off with a serious "Aw Shit". I broke my Achilles tendon at Tae Kwon Do and I will have my leg in plaster for two months. Now as you can imagine this type of thing would slow down anyone's building plans as I expect to be on crutches for a good part of the month. after a couple of weeks of getting around on crutches I could stand it anymore so I put my blue foam and fiberglass skills to good use. The orthopedic surgeon was most impressed.
Painting jigs
I was in the middle of making rotator jugs for the flaps, ailerons, stabilizers and wings and its was something I really wanted to finish off so I could get the flying surfaces off to the paint shop. I had a good part of it done so my friend Gert (An RV8 builder) came by on the occasional week night so we could finish them off. The painter wanted to paint every thing flat if he could so I made jigs for the ailerons, flaps, stabilizers and wings. The wing jig was a simple rectangular frame where the wing was supported by a hole in the tip and the spar. I intend to have the wing tips painted a different colour so I will fill the hole latte on.
Avionics
Well this pretty well seemed like the only task I could tackle sitting on my backside. The panel is made up up the standard six pack (of the vacuum driven technology) and on the other side I have an SL70 transponder, a GX60 IFR GPS nav./com. and a Narco 122 VOR/Loc/ILS & marker beacon.
The first task I attacked was connecting the SL70 to the altitude encoder. The encoder is the parallel gray code type and it was mostly an exercise in "joining the dots". The first problem I encountered was I didn't have a tool for crimping the pins in the D sub connectors so I had to acquire one of those (40 bucks!) along with a bunch of pins (50 cents each!). This is the first time I have used crimp pins and I must admit that they work really well.
The next task was getting the GX60 hooked up to a CDI and annunciator and again that was mostly an exercise in drawing the circuit out and "joining the dots"
Feeling very brave I powered it all up and none of the smoke escaped from the instruments which is always a good sign. Actually with a little tweaking every thing worked, even the data transfer between the transponder and GPS!.
Last task that I accomplished for the month was to wire up the Narco 122 VOR/Loc/ILS & marker beacon. While this was not very difficult I have no real way of testing the thing, I guess it will have to go into the avionics shop for that.