Lots to cover in this update since I’ve been busy and haven’t written one in almost a month.
We’ve been steadily accomplishing fuselage tasks and it’s really taking shape.
All of the cabin flight controls have now been installed. I still need to tighten down the control stick nuts, but the cables and pullies are in as well as the elevator push pull tube assembly.
The rudder pedals are installed and temporarily attached to the rudder cables. The brakes have been installed with the hose fittings and I need to install a few more cotter pins. I also need to add the nut to the brake/toe pedal U-bracket. I’m not sure how much spacing needs to be on the brake cylinder rod, so I’m figuring that out this week. Once I get that done, I’ll install the brake lines and get my landing gear situation figured out. Maria built and installed all the pulley assemblies and installed the control stick torque tube.
On the topic of my landing gear, I’ve gone through a few phases on what I want to do to them. At first it was an obvious spray painting with the Stewart System’s paint. Then when that didn’t get done in time I moved to polishing them up and leaving them just bare aluminum. That has seemed somewhat of an elusive target and I haven’t tried it very much. I then cleaned up the landing gear legs with some steel wool and solvent/polishing compound and they looks pretty nice like that. So I decided that I will just clean them up and not polish them to a mirror like shine, but still leave them bare aluminum. In the middle of all of this I also thought about trying to roll on the Stewart System’s paint on the gear legs, which is where I’m at now. I want to get them final installed on the plane, so I’d like to decide and act on something soon, but I’ve said that for about 2 months now and I haven’t done anything. Stay tuned!
In other brake news, I had some friends over and we installed the bulkhead tee, reservoir, and the parking brake to the firewall, so the firewall is also now installed. I still have a few residual tasks to accomplish on the boot cowl, so I’ll probably do that once I’ve got my landing gear and brake line situation situated. Getting other people to work on the plane is always fun.
A fun task this past weekend was applying the vinyl N-numbers a local shop made for me. They look great and it really looks like an airplane with them on there. We had a lot of bubbles on one side which mainly happened because we didn’t really seek out the correct way to apply it until after we did the first one. The second one turned out much better after we watched a YouTube video :-). Really cool stuff!
My immediate plans for the upcoming 3 weekends is to take care of the final covering tasks. I still have flaps, elevators, rudder, and doors to cover so I can be ready for painting by the time it warms up. Hopefully it will go quicker with my now vast experience in aircraft covering haha. It’s been fun to use tools again though.
Lots of stuff still to go, but it is definitely an airplane now and the parts board is becoming a plain piece of plywood again.
For the Spring million-mile overview update, I hope to get the rest of the major painting done by the end of the summer (wings, control surfaces, doors) ad then start installing all of them in the fall in the hopes of having a proper looking airplane by the end of the year. We’ve got a move at the end of the summer, so we’ll see how this all plays out.
(25 h)
[wpvideo z3cFQ9Bg]
