Airplane building took a big hit this school year. The plane is in a hangar 50 minutes away now and the Fall semester was full of the usual projects and assignments to appease the professors.

Since the last update I’ve been working on mostly assembly tasks. The one thing that has kept me from positing an update is that I haven’t really finished any of those tasks. Sometimes due to a lack of time to finish and other times because I couldn’t find the right parts or I ran out of some of the more consumable parts (rivets and nylon lock nuts specifically).

But, things are still being accomplished. I’ll start from the present and work back to the last update.

I finally got the gear legs finished how I wanted them and installed onto to the plane. This involved installing the brake lines and fittings for the gear as well. I ended up buying new tubes with 90 degree stems on them because I could never manage to install the straight stem tubes in a way that would not interfere with the axle. I know it was a problem on my side, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. Another exciting part of assembling the main gear was not realizing I installed the brake caliper mounting plate in an incorrect orientation until after I had installed both wheels and installed the cotter pin. This was because I also failed to understand that I needed to install the brake caliper before installing the wheel since I no longer would have access to the back side of the mounting plate once the wheel was installed. Fixing that mess will take an hour or two I’m sure and I’ll be doing that on my next workday (Hopefully this coming Saturday).

I also managed to final install the tailwheel assembly and the horizontal stabilizers. The tailwheel assembly wasn’t hard, but my bushings between the blocks around the tail spring were too long and needed to be shortened slightly. Once that was done, I set to tightening the tail brace wires and rigging the stabilizer. I tried my best to complicate matters and be engineer-y about it to find a specific value that the tension in the wires needed. After bugging RANS and some A&P friends it was determined that there is not a specific value called for and “feels right” was the needed tension. Oh well… They seem to be tight enough and fall in line with what other similar brace wires I’ve dealt with before (Cub, Champ).

I managed to bolt on the left elevator and it is ready to be connected to the elevator push pull tube. One of my hinges was tweaked, but I put a wash in between the hinge and the stabilizer and it does not seem to be causing any excess friction. I’ll continue to monitor that hinge and check for any indications of excess stress since tightening the nut did apply what I consider more than normal force onto the hinge. The right side elevator is awaiting some more rivets to arrive so I can finish up the trim tab.

Onto the trim tab. I completed the assembly onto the elevator and had few issues. My assembly wasn’t perfectly straight and I needed to force one side of the tab maybe a 1/16″ forward in order for it to capture the bolt from the elevator. I also had to shave some material off of the most forward rivet on one side of the tab because it was interfering with the elevator. If any other builders read this and had a problem similar to this or no problem at all I’d be interested in hearing from you. I don’t have a ton of paint on my parts, but that and the fabric could definitely be contributing factors. The rivets are on order, so hopefully the right elevator can be mounted this weekend.

My list of things to do for the next work day are installing the brakes, get the control sticks mostly installed, and drill the stops on the elevator push-pull tube. Looking forward, once I have the push pull tube stops in place, I can place the aft baggage compartment and finally get it back off the ground.

Till next time…

(25 h)