Fuselage VI
6/5/2005 9 Hours
Over the course of last week, I put in some orders for various bits that need sorting out. I ordered a bunch of fittings from Spruce, and the banjo adapters from Andair. I ordered some balsa too for the cabin floor. I'm going to laminate it into the floor to make a sandwich (like on the C5 Corvettes) to help dull down the noise. Balsa is light and strong, and when it's sealed up in epoxy resin, it should last forever.
Today was quite a good day at the hangar, although it was a bit hot! I started by sorting out the fuel selector mounting. I got it positioned correctly in the console, and made a support plate for it. It's pretty secure now, and it helps to keep all the plumbing clear. It's all held together with temporary screws for now.
Next, I worked on the top of the console. I made a plate to support the fuel selector switch and the throttle quadrant. It seemed to take forever to do these things as it was a 'design & engineer' on the go! I got the fuel selector switch in pretty quickly. It was the throttle quadrant that took some time. You can see where I got the position of the switch wrong when I put it in the fibreglass to see what it looked like!
Now the tricky part. The quadrant comes with friction lock on the right side, since the basic design was for an RV-8 which is usually mounted on the left hand side. Well, I need the friction lock on the right, so I had to reverse the whole assembly. Trouble is, the top has a rebate milled out of it for the metal bracket. When I reversed the assembly, the levers all fell in the right places with no problems, so it was just a matter of spacing the quadrant for mounting, which turned out to be no problem really. Here's the hole cut.
Here's a view from the bottom showing the mounting. I used a couple of pieces of 3/4"x3/4"x1/16" angle. Since one side has to be close to the side of the console, it gets a bit tight fitting in there towards the edge. Here it is almost fully assembled. You can see the thumb lever friction lock. I need to extend the bolt that holds this lot together so it comes through the side of the console.
Here's a couple of shots of it in the plane. Sweet eh?! I'm really happy with how this is all turning out.
6/12/2005 4 Hours
It was pretty humid today, so it wasn't very nice at the hangar at all. To top it off, I didn't have the camera with me. It was in the car, but my wife took it out. Oh well. I'll take pics tomorrow after soccer of what I did today. It wasn't really much, I spent most of my time cleaning up the hangar as it's getting to be a bit of a tip. So, the four hours is all I could put to aircraft work even though I was there the whole day almost.
I carried on with the centre console (surprise, surprise!) and went ahead and made the rear floor attach pieces. I made them out of some thin angle stock. I also need to make a top support to attach to the flap motor cover to ensure the top is nice and sturdy. This is where I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I want to figure out some sort of storage in the armrest, but need to work out how best to hinge a lid.
I also cut the hole in the side of the console for the throttle friction lock. I need to get a tap and die set to make a special bolt long enough for the task. I'll modify an AN bolt. It needs more thread length in order to work properly.
Next, I made the metal cover plate for the front part of the console top. This piece contains the trim & flap indicators, the cabin heat knob and the parking brake knob. The knobs have a really long length of threaded tube on the back, which will end up going all the way through the console and out the other side. I'm not sure how this will work with my oxygen bottle plan! Also, the throttle and prop cables will have to come through this area too. I'd like to conceal them all as best I can, but I'll have to see how it works out. I'd like to put an alternate static source valve in here too, but need to track one down. I couldn't find one in the Spruce catalogue. I'll have to search the web. It was about at this point where I started losing momentum and switched to cleaning up.
I decided a while ago to put some sort of defroster duct up to the windshield on our plane, as it's quite cold here in Michigan. I got some vents from Aircraft Spruce for the glareshield which are closable. I'll only use one, but they came as a pair. Maybe I can give one to Mike for his RV-10 or something. I riveted a flange for some scat tube to run up to the vent onto the heater 'distribution' cover.
After cleaning up for a few hours, and vacuuming the floor and worktops, I decided it would be a good idea to assemble some of the tailwheel stuff before I vacuumed up all the bits! I stole some grease from Cameron and assembled the wheel into the swivel, and assembled the swivel assembly. The only thing I didn't do was attach the whole thing to the tail spring as I still have a band of bare metal showing after I masked off too short. It was too humid today to even think about painting, so I couldn't really finish this off either.
Seems we have some friends at the hangars too. I opened up my hangar this morning to see a swallow flying around in there. I'm not sure how or when he got in. He has to be careful flying around in there coz I have lights hanging from strings! He's quite a skillful flyer! Anyways, I made sure he wasn't in there when I left. When I went to put Camerons grease back, I noticed he had two of them in his hangar! I opened up the door and tried to chase 'em out, but the devils kept coming back in! Eventually they both flew out, and I locked up.
6/19/2005
In between FADEC wiring, I painted the tail wheel spring again to cover up the band that I missed last time. The weather today has been great, and the paint dried pretty quickly. I finished up the tailwheel stuff by adding the rocket steering link. Does this look nice! I was a bit surprised that the link attaches to the bottom of the rudder horn. This is to make sure that it clears the rudder bottom at full deflection. I guess the chances of the nut coming off are extemely slim, so I won't be losing sleep over it.
After I did the washers for the panel, I moved onto the fuel pump assembly. Namely, putting it in the plane proper and routing a fuel line from the pump forward to the firewall. I got my 90 degree bulkhead fittings from Spruce during the week, so I now have the parts to complete it. I'm still waiting for my banjo fittings to show up from Andair in the UK. Their quality is awesome, but man, it takes forever to get stuff.
Here's the pump end.
Here it is in the plane... Getting the length right was tough, and as you can see, I ended up snaking the line a bit. I didn't want to put any stress on the fittings. I also put some bolts intot he nutplate holes that are there for the Facet type fuel pumps. This being a quickbuild, these are already done. I made the most of the doubler though for the bulkhead fitting.
While browsing the McMaster-Carr site for the fibre washers, I decided to see what valves they had for my alternate static source. Bob next door said he had a static valve that might work, but he said it may be a little big. I found a valve at McMaster that looked like it might work out. It's pretty small, and looks like a toggle switch when mounted so I can put a red booty on it. Here I mounted it to a small piece of angle in order to space it back like all the other toggle switches in the plane. I got lucky with the barbed fitting in the end of it. It was one that came with my AOA Pro. This valve uses 10-32 threads, and fit's in a 7/16" panel hole.
Here is the faceplate for the centre console with some of the stuff placed in there to see how it looked. The LED bars are the trim indicators, and a flap position indicator (I know, I can look out the window!), then up top, cabin heat and parking brake. then alternate static to the right of the trim indicators.
Then, it was back on the centre console. I figured out a way to mount a hinge for the armrest lid. I cut a slot with a dremel, just wide enough for the hinge to fit through, cut a length of hinge, drill a bunch of holes in it for epoxy to bite in to, slid the hinge in the slot and epoxied it in. Ain't going anywhere that! It was very humid today, so it took a while to set up. I'm leaving it overnight in fact.
I also did some filling and sanding of the centre console while I was making a mess with epoxy. Here is a shot of the thing after some sanding and SuperFil. Tomorrow, I hope to get this thing primed.
