October 22, 2005

I dropped Lucy off at the Airport for her business trip this afternoon, and then went down to the hangar. I started to work out the throttle bracket, since I got my 4130 steel I ordered form Spruce. I started by making a cardboard template to kind of get an idea as to where I was going with it. Once I was happy with that, I had a go at making it out of steel. Well, I haven’t got a bending brake, so I tried to bend it in the vise. The results were poor at best. So, I called Mike to see if he was going to be home, and he was, so I headed out there to use his tools!

First off, I drilled some holes in it where the bends would be about, to relieve any corners. Then I trimmed the shape to about what we needed on the bandsaw. Next up was to try to bend it. This actually worked out pretty well! We had to make one bend using some hand seamers, but it also turned out well. Fortunately, the length we had to hand bend was pretty short.

Once we had it all bent up, I wanted to weld along an edge to form a corner of a box and give the bracket a bit more structure. Mike has a MIG welder, so we made up a few practice pieces first and had a go. Well, I’m not the best welder, but I picked it up pretty quickly. For this material, we needed both the wire and the current set to their lowest settings. It was hard not to burn through the 0.050" sheet, and also fill the gap I had to fill, which was about 1/8" maybe a bit less.

After I was happy with the practice shots, it was time to do the real thing… Here we go! It turned out pretty good! Sometimes I even surprise myself! I certainly surprised Mike! He thought that since I was only welding for a few seconds that I’d surely screwed it up, but no! All was well! It needs dressing up some, but certainly not too bad. The main thing here is getting good penetration, and no voids.

Here’s the rough bracket. Tomorrow at the hangar, I’ll trim it to it’s final shape and try it for fit on the plane. You can see, I need to file the relief hole a bit to clean up the end of the weld, but other than that, it worked out nice.

Looking at the picture, the bent up tab is the front of the part, and there will be a hole here that attached to the lower right stud of the throttle body as it’s bolted to the sump. The foled wall at the back of the part will have a hole for the cable. The closest horizontal face will attach to a boss on the bottom of the sump with two more bolts. When it’s all shaped, lightened and drilled, all will become clear.

While I was at Mike’s, we had Pizza. It was good to visit, see Ella and Jill, and meet Mike’s Mum. Thanks for letting me use your stuff Mike! Oh, I forgot to put all the bits of the bending machine back together after I took it apart! Oh by the way, it was a 100 mile round trip from YIP to Mike’s, then back home to Dearborn!