Fuselage VIII
10/23/2005 9 Hours
Continuing on with the fuel lines... These were a right royal pain in the arse! I got my order through from Aircraft Spruce which had some more fuel line in there the other day, so I could do the right side line. As it happened, I ruined the left one todat trying to bend it through the holes in the side of the plane, so ended up makig another one. Arrrgh!
Here I have got both lines in at the fuel selector end.
The other side. I also recapped the unused portion of the valve.
Now it's all in there, time to safety wire the banjo fittings. We don't want those coming loose!
Here's the pipe coming out of the right side of the plane. I made the holes with a fly cutter. I've yet to find a better way to cut holes upwards of 3/4" in diameter. Greenlee punches are fairly useless in my opinion, as they often suck in the material into the punch and make a right mess of the hole. I have some Rotabroaches too, they're good, but I've only got up to 3/4" for those too. I want a set that can do bigger, but I want a 1" size in there too. All the ones I've seen so far are much bigger than an inch.
11/6/2005 12 Hours
While we were mucking about with the cowling top, I decided now would be a good time drill the firewall flange across the top of the nose. I drilled, Steve cleco'd.
Then we went off on a tangent and started working inside the plane again. We made the contraption to hold the flap sensor. I gave the project to Steve. I laid out what we needed on a 'napkin', and sent him off to make it. He did OK after a couple of tries! Here he is concentrating on juglling a part, a square and a pen with only two hands and a stomach. We always keep the BFH handy in the background there for temper flare ups... It's a great tool for smacking things when it all goes wrong! The beer in the foreground helps with keeping the lines straight.
Here it is almost ready to mount...
The hinge design is probably a little over the top for something like this, but it gave Steve something interesting to do for a while. Pus, it works nice, is easily removable and will be geometrically better. Here it is in situ... All we need now is a means to connect the thing to the flap actuator. Hobby shop was closed when we zipped by there today. We missed it by about 20 minutes.
The outside...
1/22/2006 4 Hours
Time to make sure everything on the fuselage is ready for the wings. Something that needed to be done was the AOA Pro tubing. I made another hole in the side of the fuselage for the tubing and the strobe wiring. I also need to run a com antenna through here for Com 2.
On this side, I put in the extra hole for the autopilot wiring and also another coax for marker beacon antenna.
Here's where the autopilot wiring and marker beacon antenna will pass through the spar.
The AOA tubing follows the pitot line up the side of the fuselage and behind the panel. The hole there is for the ELT remote.
Here's the tubing terminating at the AOA CPU. Blue is the upper port on the wing and green is the lower port on the wing.
2/5/2006 9.5 Hours
Other things that needed to be done before the wings go on were the tank brackets, and the gussets to the spar.
Here I have drilled the lower hole for the bracket. The upper one was done a long time ago. There isn't a lot of room for a nut on the inside, because the angle only leaves a narrow channel. This means that you have to pretty much centre the bolts, otherwise you can't get on it with a socket.
Once the tank brackets were done, I went on to the gussets. These are something that may be easy to forget, so I've had them in a strategic place to keep reminding myself to put them in! I had to trim them a bit to clear a rivet in the spar bulkhead, but then they fit fine. I put the spar bolt in to hold them in place and match drilled them to the fuselage, starting with a #40, working up to a 3/16" (hence the gold clecos).
Here's the inside of the left gusset. It's quite difficult to get the inner big spar bolt in and out because of the turned up lip on the gusset, but it's not as bad as it is for those building a nose wheel. At least I can see what I'm doing here.
And just for the hell of it, the right side. I really need to vacuum in here!
I went to the hangar this evening to do a bit more preparation for getting the wings on for good. First thing I did was cut off the all that 3/8" tubing sticking out the fuselage for the fuel lines and put a fitting on there. This will make it a bit easier to route the rest of the tubing to the fuel tank.
Then I put the aileron pushrod booties on! This seemed the easiest way to mount them. I need to run a bead of silicone sealer around the perifery just to make sure there are no leaks.
I deburred the rear spar holes we drilled previously, and deburred and dimpled all the screw holes for the fuselage skin to wing connection.
I removed the gussets from inside the fuselage and deburred them too. I need to prime these. We're almost ready to put the wings on for good!
Since I had to mix up some proseal for the AOA ports on the wings, I figured it would be a good time to bond the OAT probe into the intake duct. While it's not the ideal location for this little doohickey, it's about the only real place you can put it. This sensor from Blue Mountain is nothing mor than a simple thermister soldered to some wire. It's not like the fancy Dynon ones that you can actually mount somewhere meaningful, like the underside of the wing. For the kind of money these BMA systems go for, they should at least have a better OAT probe. Yep, the proseal is a bit messy. I'll clean this up a bit and put some more on once this has set. That way, it won't be going anywhere fast.
Here's the stick end of the aileron pushrods. Took some fiddling to get those tiny little washers in there!
