June 12, 2005

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.