Since I decided to go back to school, building has slowed down considerably, BUT we’re still getting stuff down. My goal for the year is to get the fuselage covered and painted so I can final install parts while I wait to buy an engine/avionics.

This past weekend was a good aviation weekend. I was able to meet another S-20 builder in the Midwest and we looked at my project and another local S-20 project. Always fun talking about airplanes. I did get about 1.5 hours of work done on my plane Saturday morning. The activity of the morning was finishing up the bottom boot cowl stiffeners. As of now, I am ready to start drilling holes into the boot cowl bottom and sides from the stiffeners.

(3 h)


One issue I ran into with the boot cowl sides was how they cover the tabs where the cowl will attach to the firewall/boot cowl (I’m assuming). My sides don’t completely cover these tabs completely. I’m a little worried about the edge distances on them, but I haven’t bothered to ask RANS yet. My weeks have been crazy busy lately. Go figure.


On Sunday, Maria was around to help and we got the “shop” all cleaned up and all the remaining parts on the parts board. I had originally put up most stuff paying more attention to items for the wings. That time has passed, so we re-organized the board and got all the remaining loose items on the board. Should be a lot easier to find things now (I hope).

We also worked on some of the aileron pulleys since we could work on it together and we would have something to show for our work in the end. I need to get the rudder pulleys installed, but I was thinking about those so we got some aileron cables done. There is one pulley that I will have to unbolt when I install the cables, but it won’t be that big of a deal to do.