Welp, not the most productive weekend, but hey, I still did stuff.
All my various ordered came in, so I got the bandsaw up and running again. That allowed me to trim the corners off the flap bearing blocks, and since I also got the #10 drill bit, I was able to drill the bolt holes out to the correct size. I kinda stuck the flap linkage and blocks into the fuselage in place, but didn’t do any actual fitting – I wanted too focus on the fuel selector stuff.
On that point, I cut my 1/8” spacer pieces to go between the selector mount plate and the mount angles, got those drilled to match the plate, and then dimpled the plate and countersunk the spacers for flush rivets. I also countersunk the two screw holes I final-drilled in the mid-cabin brace last time out. Oh, and I fitted and drilled the holes for the nutplates in the selector mount angles that will accept the screws I countersunk the mid-cabin brace for.
While working through this stuff, I also got to thinking about how I was going to eventually actually mount the selector. There are three screw holes that go through the selector faceplate and the selector body. The body is already predrilled for nutplates. For some reason I had thought the selector would be screwed to the mount plate, and the large cover plate that covers the space between the aux longeron and mid-cabin braces would only have a hole for the selector shaft to go through. But the selector cover plates has to be on top (since it has the L/R/OFF/ indicators), so I guess the screws will go through all three pieces.
Anyway that left the question of what screws to use here. The holes are 3/16”; AN3 bolts would work here but seem like an odd choice. Maybe pan head AN screws, but I don’t have any of those lying around. I did find some flush head AN screws, maybe those would work. Hm, do I even want non-flush screws here? I assembled the selector and determined there’s room for the selector to move and not interfere with pan head screws, but hey, they might catch my knuckles or something. Eh, I’ll go ahead and use the flush screws.
So I countersunk the face plate for the screws, and riveted the appropriate nutplates to the selector body. Also – keeping in mind last weekend’s experience with “borrowing” hardware and then forgetting about it until way down the road when I needed said hardware – I decided to start a list of “borrowed” hardware. In some cases this isn’t necessary – for example, there are tons of surplus rivets, and probably certain screw sizes, and so forth – but in this case, both the screws and the nutplates are an unusual size that I only have small quantities of, so here I want to note the borrowing I did. Though I’m still not sure how I’ll handle this list – I could add these items to my ongoing shopping list, or I could try and figure out where they’re actually needed. The latter is kinda hard though. I had a slim hope that the electronic plan documents I had would be text-searchable, which would make this super easy, but alas, this was not the case. Oh well.
Anyway, that’s it for this weekend. Next up, now that I have all the selector mount stuff prepped, I want to get them cleaned and primed, and then I can get the selector mount riveted together, at which point I can get back to fitting the cover plates, which was the quick task that started this whole fuel-selector bazaar.