Not a ton to report tonight. As I may have mentioned previously, I’ve done as much as I can do with the seat floors until I get some stuff resupplied this week. So tonight I skipped ahead to the next approachable section, working with other interior stuff. First order of business here is to fit the two covers that go over where the mid-cabin braces tie the spar carry-through and the gear towers. On the left side, this is where the fuel selector will go, so the first order of business is to finalize the fuel selector mounting.
This is a spot where I diverged from the plans, ditching the cheap factory Van’s selector in favor of a nice billet Andair unit. Many months ago, I cut and fitted the two pieces of angle that bridge between the mid-cabin brace and the auxiliary longeron, and thus provide the mount for the selector. However, it turns out I did that a bit naively – not in a way that causes huge problems or anything, just stuff I have to pause and address now before I can proceed.
Basically, the way I have this mount setup now, there will be a 1/16-1/8” gap between the selector mount plate and the cover. The inconsistency is due to the difference in thickness between the longeron and the brace – the angles for the selector simply nest against the bottoms of those pieces, while the cover will sit on top of them. I could probably leave this as-is and let everything get pulled together when the selector is screwed into place, but that’s just a little too ghetto for me.
So after poking around for a bit, I devised a plan to fix this problem:
- On the brace side (thinner than the longeron), fabricate ~0.1” thick spacers to sit between the selector angles and the bottom of the brace. With these in place, the top side of the selector mount angles should be recessed the same amount from the top of both the longeron and the brace.
- Fabricate two ~1/8” thick spacers to sit on top of the angles, between them and the piece of sheet Al to which the selector itself will mount. These spacers will place that piece of sheet very close to level with the tops of the brace and longeron.
Between those two actions, I should solve my misalignment problem here. Now I just have to actually make this stuff. From a quick survey tonight, I think I have material on hand to make these spacers, but I can’t really cut the thick stuff easily until…I get the bandsaw going again. So here we are back to the part where I’m waiting on stuff.
In any case, by this time it was getting late, so I called it a night. I think I’m in good shape at this point to start putting this plan into effect for my next work session.