ELT switch, panel assembly

Posted on April 11, 2021 by pclifton

OK…time to get back towards wiring harness stuff. But first there was that pesky ELT switch that I totally forgot to mount before. Fortunately, I figured out yesterday that I had room for it on the right sub panel, so tonight I got that hole laid out, cut, and the mount holes drilled. That done, it was time to start putting stuff back together again. So as of now, I’ve got both the shelves back in place, and all the stuff installed in the panel again. Which, of course, means I can finally get a look at what my real-live panel will look like. Well, mostly, it’s still not painted or labeled…but anyway:

So yeah, a good couple hours’ work on a weekend. Next fun, I get to pull some string or ribbon or something all over the place to figure out the branch lengths for my harness diagram…and then things will really start to get fun.

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 2

Deburring stuff

Posted on April 9, 2021 by pclifton

No photos tonight, nothing especially cool to speak of. Most of the time was spent finishing the edges of the forward upper skin – filing off the little nubs from where I removed the unused sections, smoothing everything out, cleaning up the edges. I also deburred a few other remaining things that I hadn’t picked up yet, namely the baggage hinge support and spacer.

The other thing I wanted to get a bit ahead of was figuring out where to mount the ELT remote switch. I started trying to sort of visually estimate the fit of the switch on one of the panel wings, but it was far from obvious whether or not it would fit. So I ended up using some scrap to make a little rectangular plate the size of the switch mount face, just so I could get a better idea of the fitment. That allowed me to see that yes, it’d fit over on the right panel wing just fine. Now I just have to actually make that hole…

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 1

Forward skin disassembly

Posted on April 7, 2021 by pclifton

Well, my plan to leave the skin on long enough to do a trial fit with the canopy turned out to be a bust. Mainly this was my fault too, which is kind of the best part. Originally my estimated delivery date was this past Tuesday, and as off Monday my crate was in Dallas, so things were looking up. Well, I missed the call from ABF Monday afternoon, and then when I called them back it was just past 5:00…too late. No worries, I can wait a few more days. Except when I called back the next morning, I discovered that they only make a delivery run out here once a week…on Tuesdays…and I was calling on a Tuesday. So yeah, my delivery date will be six days from now. I didn’t want to let things sit that long, so I decided just to get going with things tonight.

First up was getting these skin support ribs fitted. I went looking for info on fitting these and found basically nothing. When I’m stressing about something and this happens, it’s usually a pretty good indicator that I’m overthinking things. What was getting me in this case was that while the manual says to just put the ribs in place and match drill through the skins, there’s plenty of room for these to move around – that is, there isn’t any obvious “this is the right spot” position to work with. I decided to draw a desired rivet line on the rib flanges, line that up with the skin rivet holes, and match drill that way. A little reworking of the ribs got them to fit snug against both the skin and the base of the roll bar:

With that done, I started taking things back apart. That aft upper skin I put on just for canopy fitting? Back to storage. I also went ahead and did all the demurring of the holes I’d match drilled, on all the different parts – skin, bulkheads, flanges, spacers, etc. Plenty of that to go around.

The last real thing I want to get done here is to get the edges of the forward upper skin cleaned up. There are still some little nubs from removing the cutout stuff, which nee to be removed before I move on to the usual skin edge work. What’s going to be fun is storing this thing, because the forward right side has just this long skinny strip sticking out that seems like it’d be really easy to bend up and damage.

Also, I realized something last night about the panel, which I thought I was done cutting – I forgot about the remote switch for the ELT. I think I’ll put the over on the right sub panel, but that’s another small hole I need to lay out and cut before I can get to wiring. Should be pretty straightforward though.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 2

Match drilling

Posted on April 3, 2021 by pclifton

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I did all the match drilling on the forward upper skin this morning, which is basically all the work to be done here. The only other thing remaining to fitting two ribs that go between the roll bar and the aft edges of the forward upper skin. I poked at those a little this morning before moving on to household stuff, and I think I want to go read some other people’s description of these because I’m kinda not super happy with the instructions. These ribs aren’t predrilled at all, so you have to manually align them with both the roll bar and the skin, which seems to leave a whole lot of room for variance…hopefully some other builders can shed some light on this.

So yeah, that’s about it for now. I did go ahead and cleco the aft upper skin in place today too, just as part of getting ready for the trial canopy fit I want to do once the finish kit comes in. We’ll see how that goes in a few days…

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1

Panel assembly, forward skin fitting

Posted on April 2, 2021 by pclifton

Tonight I got straight to work with the riveting on the panel parts. First up were the nutplates, by which the center panel section will attach to the subpanel “wings.” Then I got to rivet the attach strip onto the subpanels; in this case, only some of the rivets are set, specifically omitting some near where the subpanels connect on the aircraft centerline. If all of these rivets were set, the entire assembly would be made rigid, and it’d be impossible to get it in and out of the aircraft…and I’m not ready for permanent mounting yet. If nothing else, these things need to be painted…

Next up was installing some stuff preparatory to fitting the forward upper skin. In addition to mounting the panel assembly in the aircraft, I also brought the roll bar back over and temporarily bolted it into place. 

With all that in place, it was time to break out the skin itself for fitting. The manual specifically calls for removing the vinyl covering on the inside, presumably because this is a tight fit and that extra material wouldn’t be very helpful. I just want ahead and removed all the vinyl, in keeping with my general practice of just ripping the stuff of and not keeping it on like some people do. Then this skin needed some trimming – I’d removed one of the portions a while back, for reasons I don’t even recall – this was the cutout section where the skin wraps around the roll bar. Tonight I also needed to remove the section where the baggage area door will be.

With that done, and with the baggage door support strips prepped and clecoed onto the skin, it was time to attach the thing to the structure. This was a bit tedious due to the thickness of the skin and the curvature involved, but nothing too awful. Just got to be liberal with the clecos to make sure everything sits good and flush.

That got me to a good stopping point for the night, so it was just time to take some photos. It’s kind of impressive to see in person just how sizable the forward baggage compartment opening is:

It actually extends beyond the aircraft centerline:

And just for more illustrative purposes, I temporarily installed the baggage compartment floors and such to show the space available up here, with one of my milk jug cleco holders for scale. Not bad at all:

I guess next up I get to do a bunch of match drilling, though there are also a few more small parts to be installed first.. Reading ahead in the manual, I’d be removing this skin not too long after doing that work, but in this case I think I’m going to leave it a bit longer. The reason for this is that my finish kit will be here in a few days, and I’d like to at least briefly lay the canopy on top of the fuselage so I can get an idea of what area of this skin will be inside the canopy. That’s of interest to me since I intend to install both a GPS antenna and a couple of cooling/defrost fans on the glareshield, and I want to make sure I have a good idea of the space available.

Besides, it’ll just look cool, and that’s important too.

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 2.5

More panel prep

Posted on April 1, 2021 by pclifton

More of the tedious stuff tonight. Most of what I did was just cleaning up all the rough edges on the panel components, and in this case it was kind of a worst-of-both-world situation: the panel attach strip (which joins the panel wings to the skins) has a whole lot of nooks and crannies, but at least it’s made of thin material. Meanwhile, the actual panel components have mostly long straight-ish edges, but the material is super thick. So basically this was just a good solid hour of filing, followed by some final edge polishing on the bench grinder where possible.

After finishing that up, I went ahead and countersunk all the flush rivet holes on the panel components. With that done, I’m all set to do some more riveting here…but that’ll be another night.

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 1.5

Baggage bulkhead riveting, panel prep

Posted on March 31, 2021 by pclifton

Another quick work session. I riveted the baggage bulkhead into place after triple-checking that there wasn’t any remaining prep work or anything to do on it. After that I clecoed together the panel wings and the panel attach flange, and got all those holes match-drilled and then deburred.

Next up I’ll get to deburr the edges of the panel components and that flange, and get some countersinking done for all the flush rivets on the panel. Then the whole assembly goes in the fuselage and it’ll be time to fit the forward upper skin.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1

Roll bar fitting

Posted on March 30, 2021 by pclifton

First up on the forward fuselage docket was some fitting work for the roll bar/windshield support. This starts with two bolt holes per side, which are predrilled/punched in both the roll bar and the canopy rails; by temporarily installing bolts in these locations, the roll bar is held in place for the next operation, which is to take a total of twelve bolt holes that are predrilled in the roll bar base, and use them to drill through the longeron. That’s a lot of fasteners, but I suppose it makes sense if this is intended to act as rollover protection.

Look, a bunch of clecos:

Of course, the next step was in keeping with the usual build procedure: take the stuff right back apart and deburr those holes. So the roll bar didn’t really stay installed for very long.

Next up will be riveting the baggage bulkhead in place. I went ahead and got it clecoed in, but I decided that 10 PM was a bit late to be making noise with the rivet gun. Should make for a good place to pick back up tomorrow after work.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Interior paint touch-up

Posted on March 28, 2021 by pclifton

Once again not a super productive day, but hey, I still got something done. I started with the intent of getting the windshield roll bar fitted, and maybe getting the baggage bulkheads riveted, but first I was eying the paint on the forward floor. Specifically, along the rivet lines we shot recently, the rivet set had somewhat predictably marred up the paint a bit. In the long run this area is going to take a beating no matter what, but in the end I decided I didn’t want to start with the paint looking bad. So I re-removed the baggage bulkhead and panel, gave everything a good cleaning, and did some masking before laying down another coat of the granite texture paint.

One of the reasons I chose this paint was that I figured touch-ups would be easy, since the new texture ought to blend pretty well into the old. If nothing else, it can be shot with very little care since it doesn’t tend to run or anything. The main concern with this stuff is that it oversprays horribly if you’re not careful. This wasn’t so much of an issue shooting inside the fuselage, since it’s kind of self-contained, but this is why I took the time to mask a bunch of stuff:

Later, I decided to invert the fuselage and rig a heat lamp under there, which I’ll leave on all night long. Hopefully this will help the paint cure a little faster – it’s been my experience that this stuff can stay soft for a while. Probably not an obstacle to continuing other work, since I won’t need to sit inside or anything, but I still might drop something if I’m not careful. So now I’ve got what looks like some kind of odd Halloween decoration out in the hangar:

Tomorrow’s a busy night, so I imagine bye the time Tuesday evening rolls around I should be in good shape to get the roll bar and baggage bulkhead installed, and then I can get into the forward skin fitting with gusto.

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1

Random-ish stuff

Posted on March 27, 2021 by pclifton

Picking up where I left off before, the first order of business today was to remove the panel stuff again so I could drill that forgotten hole for the panel light dimmer. Nothing too crazy there, just a single hole to drill, not complicated at all. There was another item to take care of as well…while looking at routing for the fresh air vent ducting, I realized I needed an adapter/plenum on the back side of the vent. I found that in the box with the original plastic vents…the catch was it wasn’t drilled. So while I had the panel off, I match-drilled that to the vent, and reinstalled it with the plenum. My thinking here is that I’ll want the ducting in place while I’m working out wire harness routing.

Once I had the panel back in the plane, I started adding other parts back in, starting with the baggage bulkhead. My intent was to go ahead and reinstall the avionics and fuse shelves, but first I was eyeballing the rivet holes for the baggage bulkhead…should I go ahead and rivet those, or would there be reason to remove that again down the road? More thinking…but in the meantime I did go ahead and cut the ducting to length and temporarily install it:

Eventually I decided to sit down with the construction manual; first to make sure I’d checked off all the completed steps for the fuselage riveting, and then just to review the entire fuselage section and flag spots where there sections to revisit. Much better than my previous method of “uhh I think there was something back somewhere.”

In the process of this, I read ahead and realized that I should go ahead and work through fitting the forward upper skin – get everything match drilled and prepared, essentially to the point that all I have to do is riveting once I’m done with the wiring. Basically, this comes down to making sure I get riveting and stuff done before I add in a bunch of components that could get in the way.

So at the end of the day, I ended up removing all the avionics from the panel and storing them away again. Definitely don’t want that stuff inside while I’m match drilling and such. It looks like most of this should go pretty quickly, so I’m not delaying the wiring stuff by a whole lot.

Posted in Fuselage, Panel | Hours Logged: 2