January 9, 2006

Look who’s here! Dave is actually being put to work while he’s here on ‘vacation’. He’s got some serious catching up to do! We spent the day today messing about with the baffles. Basically getting them all trimmed up to a point where we can almost get the cowl on.

We worked on sorting out the rear corner for the oil cooler. We’re really worried about it cracking because of the weight of the cooler. We’ve also heard of a few horrow stories where it’s actually happened. Well, it’s not going to happen to us. We’re beefing it up. Big time. Here we’ve pretty much got the left side trimmed to fit the cowling.

Here’s the right side trimmed to fit the cowling too.

Here’s the oil cooler position. Some reinforcement required.

We started drilling the doubler to the baffle. We still have to make a spacer and a reinforcing angle.

One of the mundane tasks that Dave has to do to play 3 years of catch up. Deburring!

Ouch! Darn those clecos clamps. It got me again!

Here’s our reinforcement. We used 1/8" angle. We also ended up using a 1/8" spacer as the 0.063 wasn’t anywhere near thick enough to clear the shop heads on the rivets for the oil cooler doubler. We added the brace too, but instead off joggling it over the angle, we put it underneath. Looks way nicer!

Here’s a close up. We left the baffles at this point in favour of working on the wings. It was time to go home anyway. It’s a short day, but a start at least.