November 17, 2006

A long day at the hangar today! I started the day getting all the seatbelts installed. This meant making six little bushings out of aluminium tubing for the seatbelt bolts. I’m not so sure that aluminium is such a good idea here, as it will just mash under the loads that go through a seatbelt. I might change them to steel in the future.

Once the seatbelts were installed, I worked on the seats themselves. I had Piero fit stud fasteners in the seat back attachment flap that runs over the top of the seat back sheet metal, as the velcro was practically useless. The stud fasteners are positively attached, and they won’t come off.

Now that is done, you can get a cool shot of the (almost) complete interior. I still need a centre armrest, and when I’m flying I’ll fit the stick booties.

I had to trim the rear upper panel a little to fit around the turtle deck skin braces. I also had to put the hole in it for the canopy rear track bracing rod. You might be able to see that in this picture it’s not installed. I need to order up a nice ‘acorn’ nut to cap the end of it to finish it off neatly. Another order to McMaster Carr!

Once all that was done, I couldn’t resist taking the plane outside and making sure she was running nicely. I had the engine heaters plugged in all night, so it was already a little warm. I installed the cowling for this run too. I want to try to get the baffle seals to take a set. It ran like a charm. We’re getting very close now.

Time to move onto the weight and balance stuff…. I was planning on weighing the plane this Sunday, but I figured we could get it done today given the point we’re at. I made the inspection covers for the bottom of the wings that needed doing. For some reason (51% rule?), you only get 4 of the six cover made for you in the QB kit. The other two you make yourself! No wonder we couldn’t find them anywhere. We didn’t even think we had to look in the raw materials box! Here they are installed ready for weighing.

Mike came over to do a mock inspection, but he also ended up helping me and Keth do a weigh in. Everything is on the plane now. The spinner, the cowling, the access panels, etc. etc. The only thing that isn’t really done is the empennage fairing, but it’s not too big of an issue. I can put that in place for the weigh in. We also placed the wheel pants and gearleg fairings in about the right locations.

We pulled the plane up so the front wheels were on the scales, and then lifted the tail wheel up so the aircraft was in a level flight attitude. Then we took the weights. Front right was 524lbs, front left was 534lbs and the tailwheel was 63lbs, for an all up weight of 1121lbs. What a fatty!

I was so caught up in the action, I forgot to take any pictures! Doh!

After all that, we removed the cowling, and Mike had a poke around to see if he could spot anything that needed my attention. He found a couple of things where I needed to protect the wiring a little, but generally it looked pretty good. While we were messing with the cowling, we set the depth for all the camlocks too. I wrote down the things he found, and I’ll address them tomorrow. More things for ’tomorrow’!

Speaking of which… Priorities will be Mike’s list, empennage fairing lay ups, and the cowling hinge pin retainers. What a cool day. Mike couldn’t believe that there was actually a plane in our hangar. He and Cameron would always make fun of how long it’s taken to build this ‘Quickbuild’, but the day is almost here!