September 24, 2006

More wrapping up. This stuff seems to take up a heck of a lot of time, and it seems like I haven’t done much. I also helped Larry roll some aluminium parts on my rollers for his friends aeroplane. It’s good to help people out around the hangars every now and then. It helps build morale.

During the week, I took a few things to be powder coated at a place calle Exotic Coatings. I dropped them off on Tuesday, and Friday they called me to let me know that the stuff was done. Sweet! That meant I could get some things knocked off the list this weekend that was waiting for this stuff… Primarily the baffle seals. The Exotic Coating guys did a great job too. I took the baffle seal retaining strips and my roll over bar brace to be done flat black. Excellent people to do business with.

Here you can see one of the retaining strips. A while ago (you may remember), I found some baffle retaining screws at Aircraft Spruce. Today, I decided to just use the female half of the screws, and use the rivets that Van’s supplied as the ‘screw’ part. I think that it’s a lot stronger, and there’s no chance that the crews will loosen. It also looks better than using a washer on the inside of the rivet. Fortunately, you can buy the female halves only from Spruce, so if you should decide to go this route, you won’t be throwing away all the male halves of the screws!

Here’s the outside. It turned out quite nice.

An overall shot of the baffle seals in place. I still need to make the front ones, but they won’t take too long to do.

The next task I decided to take on was the ignition lead routing. For some reason, this took me practically the rest of the day. Messing around with Adel clamps is not my idea of fun. By the end of the day, my fingers were sore from trying to hold multiple clamps together while simultaneously trying to put a washer and nut on the bloody bolt. Aaargh! Quite a few nuts and washers ended up on the floor, or being fired across the hangar when I accidentally let go of the clamps!

Here you can see the left side. This was the easy part. I have since put waxed cotton ties on the leads too, to keep them together and neat and tidy like.

This was the first set of clamps for the right side. Ugh. Here we go. I managed to get a nice routing since I ordered these custom length leads from Skytronics.

I put another clamp on the lower bolt for the ignition lead grommet through the baffles there to hold the leads that go to 1 and 3 bottom plugs.

I also tied all the leads nicely with waxed cotton.

The last Adel clamp arrangement of the day. Luckily for me, Mike stopped by with beer, so he helped me get this thing together and we called it a day and chatted. It was good to see Mike again properly. The last time I saw him, we were chatting on the phone and we waved to each other from either side of the freeway as we were both travelling home from work in opposite directions!

For some reason at YIP we have a bit of a bird plague every day at a certain time. They all come, land pick in the grass and then leave! Very odd. Reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock!