Oct 17, 2021     Fuel Valve, Pump and Filters Category: C06 Fse Assb

This work is described in chapter 21.

  May 25, 2004     Contouring and Installing Fuselage Bottom - (29 hours)       Category: C06 Fse Assb

05/03/2004 (3 hours):

Tonight I laid out and glued up the pieces for the fuselage bottom. It actually took me six pieces, not three, because I only had two full pieces left over from making the sides. I guess I didn't lay the sides out very efficiently... Whenever there is any appreciable excess always read ahead to see HOW it is used. Not a big deal, stitching foam together with 5-minute epoxy is old hat now.

I wish I had made one of my work tables 8' rather than having both be 6'. I don't have enough room to set them both up AND the fuselage (I figured I'd have them in the garage by now). It doesn't appear this will be a problem much longer, since most of the rest of the steps appear to be done either directly on the fuselage (e.g. head rests) or on BOTH tables (e.g. wings and spar). But, since the plans have you lay up the bottom foam pieces off the fuselage on little wood forms (say hello to my leetle frame), this last step would work best on an 8' table (it's about a 7-1/2' section).

I did this a little differently. I laid a straight edge across the top, and measured down at several points along each side. I made a spacer for each spot double the height of each measurement, so my fuselage has now become my work table. It works really well provided you're careful to give it some horizontal stiffeners so the foam doesn't droop in the center. There are three big advantages to doing it this way:

1. The foam is pretty fragile, and it's easy to damage it while transferring it back and forth. With this arrangement, you never move it (except to flip it over).

2. I used brads instead of Bondo so there are no holes to fill when I'm done, unlike the sides, which are now full of divots.

3. "...crawl underneath and mark..." You've gotta be kidding me, right? Ahem, my fuse is on pivots! I just rotated the fuselage to 90 degrees to trace, then rotated it back. 60 seconds and no aching knees.

05/04/2004 (6 hours):

Cutting the foam was an easy enough step, just a bit of work with a Sharpie and a 2" utility knife. Before I did this I had to do a bit of trimming to clean up some flox and epoxy drips that had made their way to the bottom of the fuse. I'll have to be more careful in the future to catch drips with plastic or something else.

I got a little bit ahead of myself cutting out the landing brake. I was using a utility knife, not a saber saw, and my blade dulled faster than I expected. Always check your blade before cutting foam, especially PVC! It made a ragged cut in some areas. The second picture below shows a rough cut made with a dull blade, and the third shows a smooth cut (I bet you can't even see it) made with a sharp blade. I'm sure it will be OK since even after cleaning up the cut it's still a smaller kerf than the recommended saber saw would have made, but still.

I did encounter one fairly serious problem, though. I ran out of 3/4" Last-A-Foam to make the spacers with. When I asked around on the list, it seems this is not exactly unusual; many people have filled in with other foam types. The foam type I have the most of is PVC. Nat was kind enough to respond:

Dear Chad, You can certainly substitute PVC for Last a foam. PVC is better, but a little more expensive. That is why I specified Last a foam. Regards, Nat

So, straight from The Man. I'm filling with PVC. He's right, there's about a $10 price difference per sheet, but I don't really mind. I'd rather do this than wait a week for another sheet to arrive. Aircraft Spruce hasn't exactly been zippy filling my most recent order. I placed it last week and it hasn't even SHIPPED yet.

Anyway, today I made the 3/4" spacers that thicken the fuselage bottom. This was a real pain because of all of the pieces I was stitching together, and because the PVC and Last-A-Foam didn't sand at the same rate.

05/05/04 (3.5 hours so far):

I have now micro'd the spacers in place, and have begun making fillets with stiff micro to make smoother transitions. This step uses BID (unlike the sides) so I probably won't have any issues getting it to lay down without air bubbles, but I'm not taking any chances. It was too much of a pain to fix them on the sides.

Lucubration http://old.lucubration.com/cozy-mkiv/cozy-chapter-log.html?chap=6[6/19/2013 2:03:56 PM] Using stiff micro is an education in working quickly. When using all Slow hardener, I get hours of "pot life" and nearly a day to cure for normal epoxy usage. But with micro and its insulating properties, I got barely 15 minutes of pot life out of this batch, and that's with barely an inch of it in the bottom of the cup. The more micro you use the faster its insulating properties can cause it to exotherm, and the stiff (thick toothpaste) consistency I was using is about as fast as it gets. I've learned that the best thing to do is just get it out of the cup as quickly as possible, even if you're dumping on 10 times what you need in a certain area. You can always take the excess back off, and keeping it spread out keeps it cool.

05/06/04:

I got absolutely nothing done tonight because my Zaurus (for Galileo, see link above) came and I was playing with it. In fact, I'm writing this entry with it!

05/07/04 (5 hours):

Six cups of micro. Eleven cups of epoxy. Five hours. One layup. Phew. I'll be VERY glad when this chapter is over, but it's almost there! I made an executive decision to make the "scuff" layer of BID in a separate layup (probably at the same time that I do the BID tapes so the tapes hide the edges of the scuff layer).

I'll also never buy from Aircraft Spruce again. I placed my very first order with Wicks to be sure I got exactly what I needed (since I wouldn't have known the difference). This time around I agreed to give Spruce a try, so two weeks ago I placed orders with both Wicks and Spruce (the Wicks items were things Spruce was out of at the time). A few days later I got my Wicks items, just like my January order. The same day, I got a call from Spruce asking me how to ship a certain item. Since then, every other day or so I get another call asking how to ship one more thing. Jeez, I'm just about out of epoxy, micro, and fiberglass cloth. I'm glad I ordered a little extra with my first Wicks order, or I'd be stalled already. This order was no more complex than my Wicks order in January, but somehow it is taking Spruce a lot more effort to get it out the door.

05/08/04 (1 hour):

It doesn't seem like a big deal, but today Nicole helped me attach the bottom to the fuse. It IS a big deal - when you complete this step, you have a "tub" even though there's still work left to do in the chapter, such as making flox fillets, doing the BID tapes, etc. I weighted the bottom down with a lot of objects - I ran out of bricks so I started using tools and even a 24-pack of soda. (Hey, at 12 fl. oz. per can that's 2.25 gallons of soda, or almost 14 pounds!)

The skin is relatively stiff despite only having one side glassed, so I'm glad I did a good job with the way I supported it above the fuselage for glassing because if I'd done it wrong it would have been very difficult to correct with weights alone. As it was, despite all the bricks I had to help out by squeezing with my hands. I had used a ziploc full of flox to squeeze out a bead onto the fuse, and despite all the weight it wasn't compressing the flox! Flox is stiff even BEFORE it cures!

Anyway, despite Elliott crying for Nicole's attention we got it done and I'm happy to have this off my plate. A few more steps and the chapter is done.

05/17/04 (1 hour):

I'm changing employers so I had a short hiatus with all the fuss going on. I also screwed up mounting the bottom skin, so I got frustrated and let the project stall. It's not the kind of thing where you say "cut it off and fix the error" - I actually made several of the foam pieces too large, so I'd have to almost remake the entire bottom skin. The botch isn't visible from the outside. The issue is that the foam pieces the bulkheads and longerons sit on are too large, mainly along the sides and under the front seatback.

Rather than scrapping the whole thing, I'm using my Fein, a utility knife, and other tools to cut out the problem sections. Then I'll micro those areas, and when I BID tape I'll use two extra layers to simulate the BID that's on the bottom skin. This should produce a joint that's just as strong, if not stronger, than what is already there, so I'm not really worried, just annoyed. I'll post pictures when I get a chance.

05/23/04 (4.5 hours):

Almost done! I've fixed my mistakes in laying out the foam spacers by using my Fein to make flat cuts into the spacers following the surfaces of the seat back and fuse bottom. The two now meet in a straight angle with no more bump. This did involve cutting the BID that wraps over the edge here, but I solved that with the usual flox trick, including cutting interior flox-corner grooves. I also added two extra layers of BID to the BID tapes to make up for the missing BID in those layers. I then spent several hours making and installing BID tapes along all of the joints forward of the seat back. (I knew I wouldn't have time to do the rear as well in one night - it's already almost 2am.) There are a surprising number of them here - seat back to floor, floor to center brace/duct, floor to side (aft of instrument panel), floor to instrument panel (aft), floor to instrument panel (forward), and floor to side (forward of instrument panel). There are also two of each location, left side and right, for a total of 12 tapes just in the area forward of the seat back. To help the tapes conform better I did the forward side of the instrument panel with two tapes even though one would have technically worked - it doesn't add any extra strength because the holes from the heat Lucubration http://old.lucubration.com/cozy-mkiv/cozy-chapter-log.html?chap=6[6/19/2013 2:03:56 PM] duct basically eliminate that possibility, and it would have been much more difficult to keep out air bubbles. Another few hours doing the area aft of the seat back and Chapter 6 is history!

05/25/04:

And Chapter 6 is done! Phew, that was really a stinker. Getting the BID tapes to lay into the acute angle behind the seatback was a chore, and there are many feet of tapes to install in the rear. But that, as they say, is that.

  May 03, 2004     Center Keel and Seatback Brace - (19 hours)       Category: C06 Fse Assb

Laying out the center keel pieces went relatively smoothly. I'm definitely getting more confident at the basic tasks of applying micro and fabric, then wetting the fabric out. 2.25 hours for this step. I could have done it more quickly, but I wasn't in a rush. The first picture is of this work. NOTE: I later discovered that the layout guide in the first few pages of the plans does NOT indicate reversing the seat back and duct side pieces so one is the mirror image of the other. Don't lay things out the way I did! When you draw the seat back brace, for instance, don't draw a rectangle and bisect it to make two triangles. If you do, the fiberglass skin on one piece will be on the outside, but on the other it will be on the inside. Make sure your layouts are MIRROR IMAGES of one another.

It's also getting to be time to clean my epoxy pumps. I'm using the disposable West system pumps and they're getting all gummed up. I'll try some acetone and see if I can clean them up a bit. I'd really like to avoid MEK.

04/21/04 (30 minutes):

It doesn't sound like much, but tonight I did the important step of glassing the other side of one of the two seat back braces. I neglected to make one of the pieces a mirror image of the other (hint: don't follow the layout guide in the beginning of the plans) so one piece had glass on the inside, the other had glass on the outside. By the time I'm done, I'll have an extra layer of glass in there, but there's no sense stripping it off.

I made a major decision in this step. Because I am installing a fuel-injected auto conversion engine, and will be using the pumps themselves to select the source tank (see John Slade's site for a similar configuration) I don't need the fuel selector valve. So, how much do I skip of this step? I'd like to maximize my usage of the available space without making it impossible to retrofit an alternative down the road. At the same time, if I do go with my current plan it would be a shame to waste the space here. What I ended up doing was installing the plywood inserts to support the landing brake pivot, but not making the fuel valve mounting bracket. If I have to go in later to put it in, it will be a pain, but not impossible. I also need to return my fuel valve to Wicks.

4/27/04 (2.5 hours):

I've been very busy with work getting an important project out the door, and this past weekend was busy with family stuff. Like, ummm, getting my wife up in a Cozy! Marc Zeitlin came down and treated her to a ride from 3B0 to MMK and back. Not terribly long flights but enough to convince her I'm doing the right thing.

Anyway, my time has come in 5-minute chunks but I slowly managed to get the heat duct partially assembled. At this time I've completed assembling the unit, making the hole for the fuel plumbing (which I won't be using anyway, but if I need it for anything else the hole is there now...), installing the seat belt attach point, and making the 7-ply tapered UNI layup. I screwed up my measurements and made this layup a bit longer than it should have been, but longer is better than shorter. The extra length is near the instrument panel, and since there's nothing up there that's an interference fit (and some of this gets cut away for a throttle anyway) it's OK.

Avoiding air pockets around the seat belt attach tube was tough. If you're reading this and haven't done this step yet, I strongly recommend you use some extra flox on the top side to make a very gentle taper fore and aft. I made a fillet, but it was too tight and I had to use a lot of weights and clamps while it cured. I still ended up with a small bubble I had to fill.

4/29/04 (2 hours):

Tonight I glassed the other side of the seat back brace with 2-BID, as well as the top and side of the heat duct. (Yes, one brace side and one duct side; see above - my other side is already glassed because of a mistake.) I forgot to radius the edge of the heat duct, so the BID didn't fold over very well and I ended up with a radius anyway - of air.

I found a clever way to fix this before a cure, though, as long as the edge is straight. Basically, you use plastic and heavy flat weights (more drywall cutoffs) to weight down the top surface; don't lay the plastic against the side(s), just let it overhang freely. Then allow it to mostly cure - a little before knife trim, while things are still tacky but getting fairly stiff. Lay another strip of plastic against the side, and use a stirring stick or similar to burnish the bubbled area back against the foam. The bond won't be perfect but at least it will be flat. As you're doing this, if you want a good bond, you can inject a drop or two of epoxy as you work your way along. Burnishing will spread it out. This works on all sorts of bubbles; I wish I had thought of this while working on the fuselage sides.

4/30/04 (30 minutes):

I'm pretty happy today. I not only bought a bunch of materials for the next few chapters (I delayed the brakes and seat belts for now to save some money), I also bought a Sharp Zaurus SL- 6000. Unless something better comes along this is probably going to be the display module (four will be used) in Galileo, my glass cockpit setup. It's a sunlight-readable PDA with a drop-down panel for a keyboard, great for flight planning. Since it's a PDA you can bring it into the FBO for flight planning, weather avoidance, data analysis, etc.

I also took the small but important step of floxing in my center heat duct. I used the bottoms of the instrument panel and seat back as level-check points to the longerons at the front and middle of the duct, and laid a long straightedge across the back. I had to trim the seat back's slot for the duct a bit to get it to be perfectly level, but after that it worked fine. You can just barely see in this picture that I did NOT install the brace yet. I screwed up the angle of the seat back a bit, only two degrees but it's enough to prevent the seat back brace from fitting perfectly. Once the center duct has cured, I will fit the seat back brace in perfectly, so I'm not just filling air holes with flox. Almost done with this step...

05/01/04 (1 hour):

I must be really taking my time because it seems like a simple operation (floxing and taping in the duct and brace) is taking a HECK of a long time to do. However, I'm also fixing mistakes as I go, so I'm only doing a few joints a day, and there are a lot of joints - three joints where the duct meets the instrument panel, two in front where it meets the seat back, two more behind the seat back, and two between the brace and duct. (Total of nine joints to tape.) I could do this all at once but the nature of my mistakes (bubbles, missing glass layer, etc.) requires the side I'm taping/fixing to be facing down, so I'm only doing one longitudinal side at a time.

This all goes back to one seemingly simple mistake, when I started this step. If you read above, you'll see I didn't make the pieces mirror images of one another (I thought I was doing that correctly, but was not). Instead of just making new pieces (I didn't have enough material) I decided to fix the missing/wrong glass layers as I went along. This has turned out to be a mistake. The foam here is only worth a few bucks, and I could have had a new piece SHIPPED IN and made, and be done with this step by now. Live and learn.

The only good part of this step is that my time estimates are getting more accurate. I'm at 16.5 hours now, and will probably just make my 18-hr estimate. Of course, I've looked ahead and read the next step in more detail, and I now think I've seriously underestimated the time investment there. Oh well. Live and learn. =)

05/03/04 (2.5 hours):

Wee HAW! This step is FINISHED! Tonight I put a BID tape inside the heat duct, and the last of the tapes around the front end. On to step 3!

  Apr 16, 2004     Assembly of Sides - (32.5 hours)       Category: C06 Fse Assb

I started this on 4/6/2004. More irritation with the plans - Step 1 is about the longest thing I've ever seen. This should really have been done in two or three parts. Oh well.

Tips:

1. I'm following Wayne Hicks' method of jigging the fuselage upside-down. It's much easier to level a table once than a bunch of individual parts laid out on boards. I laid a sheet of drywall on my table and spent a few hours making everything perfectly flat and level (mixing sticks make great shims). If you do this, check for level on both axes of the table at several spots and also at the diagonals as this will help identify a warped surface.

2. A SmartLevel is overkill at this point, although if you have one by all means use it. If you don't and you're a perfectionist, just buy a few feet of cheap, clear tubing and fill it with water. Water finds its own level, so if you have a helper hold it at one end such that its surface inside the tubing is perfectly even with one edge of the table, you can use the water level in the other end of the tubing to set the height of your side, then just walk around the table checking as you go. Your helper need not move, so "he or she" can be a board or clamp, as long as air can get into the tubing. Masons use this method all the time because their bricks often have uneven surfaces unsuited to traditional levels.

3. You can check a regular level by checking its reading one way, then rotating it 180 degrees and comparing the reading in the other direction; they should be the same. Most cheap levels are slightly off; some have adjustment screws but this is growing less common. If you drop or jar a level it's usually junk, unfortunately, unless you don't mind factoring in some adjustment each time you use it. A few layers of tape can often be used to shim a level that's slightly off, just be sure to taper the addition smoothly.

4. You can check a square by holding one edge parallel to a known-straight edge (maybe the machine-formed edge on a sheet of drywall?), and draw a line along the other leg. Then flip it around so the base faces the other direction, and it should be right on the line. Good squares can be adjusted by tapping the inside of the little notch on the inside corner with a nail set and hammer (to close the angle) or the outside corner with a hammer (to open the angle). Triangles, which have a third leg, cannot be adjusted and if one is out of square it was just poorly made or is damaged and should be replaced. Combination squares (except those from Starrett) are NOTORIOUSLY bad at showing a true 90-degree angle because the ruler can wiggle in the slot - don't use them for this step.

Wayne's method requires a gap to allow the top of the instrument panel to hang down. It wasn't that hard to make but I could have saved some time by just sawing the darned thing off - the top section gets mostly cut out anyway for the switch panel, and it offers basically nothing in terms of structural support. I was halfway through laying things out before I realized I could have saved some time, and I suppose it's easier to set up the tables than to fix the instrument panel. But, if I had known about this in Chapter 4, I might have cut the instrument panel flush across the top and added this section back in later, maybe even with a hinge - that would sure make wiring easier. (Update: upon reflection, I would DEFINITELY have cut this section off in Chapter 4.)

I spent a few hours making my two work tables perfectly level with one another and perfectly flat. I cut the drywall to 80", then used the cutoff section on the second table to support F22 and the rest of the front-end. I drew a perfect center line down both panels and I'll be using this to lay things out. Drywall is nice because it's cheap enough to beat it up without shame, and most holes and other boo-boos can be fixed easily if you want to later use it on a wall, especially if you work on the back side. You don't have to spend money on some type of perfectly flat surfacing material and then cover it with a disposable layer, like hardboard (which is the same cost anyway). You do have to be careful not to pound on it (it dents/crushes), but if the load is spread it will even take hammer blows on the object sitting on it without complaint.

I should have set this log up with sub-steps. Oh well. It's now 4/7/04 and I've just done a small step in the assembly of the sides. I spent several hours this evening getting everything lined up and perfectly square. I made a change to the plans, though; hopefully this won't bite me in the a** in the future. If you read my Chapter 4 you'll note that I skipped the creation of the temporary firewall. Well, rather than try to get this exact, and knowing (from holding the drawings up to the longerons) I'd have to adjust the holes a bit anyway, I did something unique.

I didn't get a picture of it, but it went really fast and I'll be able to get my holes PERFECT when the time comes. Basically, I drilled small holes exactly in the centers of each longeron. In each hole I inserted a finishing nail, adjusting the hole depth so the nail just barely stuck out. Then I held up an oversize piece of 1/4" plywood and tapped each longeron area with a hammer. This made dents in the plywood. I drilled holes using these dents as centers, removed the nails, and used screws to attach the plywood flush with the ends of the longerons. Although I haven't done it yet, when I'm ready to actually cut the real holes I can now just trace around the longeron edges and the holes will be exactly where they belong.

Caveat: To make sure everything would line up the way it should (and that I wasn't taking impressions of an out-of-alignment setup) I marked the plywood sheet with a center line, and then vertical lines where each longeron center SHOULD go. I focused on getting the upper longerons (facing down, flush on my table, since I'm using Wayne's upside-down jigging method) perfect, then adjusted the angles of the sides so the others were correct. This was a good call because my sides were slightly warped and I would have had an oddly-shaped bottom to my tub if I had allowed them to continue leaning out the way they were.

For all that, this step took only a few minutes but laying everything else out took a long time. I really messed up the edge cuts on my seat back, no surprise since it's the first piece. I hadn't understood exactly how the compound angles were meant to fit. Fortunately I was oversized, so some trim work with the Fein and it dropped in place. My angle is not quite perfect - I'm about a degree off - but it shouldn't be noticeable. The instrument panel fit much better, as did F22. (Update: I screwed up again, and installed the instrument panel 1/4" aft from where it belongs. There aren't as many measurements made from the instrument panel as from other steps but I'll have to remember to adjust where there are. I'm not worried about difficulty getting in - if you see my Chapter 4, you'll see my leg hole is a full inch taller than per plans.)

They say you should "read through later chapters to see how the current step affects them" but honestly, this is not very useful advice. If this is your first plane there's a good chance you won't understand what the heck you're looking at until you actually do each step, and that was the case with me and the seatback. If I had known that weird compound angle would fit RIGHT against the double-angle of the lower longeron and its foam foundation I could have done a better job. It would have made more sense for the plans to have you wait until this step to cut that edge so you can get it just right - there's no real reason to do it earlier.

Amusingly (uhhhh....) enough, I somehow made a BIG boo-boo (three inches?) marking the center-line of my seat back. It was the first piece, right? Well, I blindly followed the line when I cut the center slot and you can see the results - it wasn't in the center. I used my Fein to cut out the real slot, and used the scrap to fill the incorrect hole, then patched it with two plies of BID. Nobody will ever know, right? I only had one hole to fix because I haven't cut the center hole out yet for the map pocket. I'm planning a drop-down arm rest and don't want to touch it until I'm sure what I'm doing. (Also, I found a goood pic of this step on the camera before the garbage that the others came out as, so I posted it even though it's not as interesting as the rest of the steps.) I didn't have a lot of time to do a layup since I had to go get Elliott, so I mixed just one cup of flox and did just one attachment, the left side of the seat back to the left wall of the fuselage. I liked this so much, on later efforts I followed this same routine - one attachment at a time. It's much less stressful than trying to flox everything all at once and get it all strapped down perfectly, while dealing with the mess of squeezed-out flox. I made very nice fillets and had plenty of time to clean up before the epoxy started gelling, even with using all Fast hardener. I used band clamps to hold the fuselage tightly together along the seatback section, and I'll loosen them to do the other side, probably tomorrow. It will take longer, of course, since I now don't dare disassemble anything until the flox is cured, but it sure beats an hours-long messy and frustrating epoxy and alignment job.

Finishing the BID tapes on the left side took a long time - at least 6 hours. I know, it seems crazy, but I wanted to experiment with various taping methods since I knew future work will require a lot more taping, so I tried every method in the book. Wetting out on 4mil plastic, transferring, and stippling down works best for me. The ones where I wet the tapes out in-place were the worst. Saran Wrap also worked well but 4mil lets you squeegee through it - the Saran Wrap tears or warps too much.

4/12/2004 (3.5 hours):

I've just completed the last of the BID tapes, the ones on the right sides. It took about 2.5 hours, of which about half an hour was spent measuring and laying out the tapes, an hour was spent mixing epoxy and wetting them all out, and the rest of the time was putting them in place and removing air bubbles. I don't know if that's a lot of time or not, but that's what it took. I'm at 15.75 hours and there's still more to this step!

4/13/2004 (1.75 hours):

I didn't have much time this evening so the only thing I got done was installing F28, but I'm pleased with at least making that happen. I had a concern about its angle (I think it's about a degree tilted) but the consensus on the lists is that this is nit-picking and can be adjusted out later. The issue is its size - it's too short (vertically) to lay a level or square against, and since it's so small it's also flexible.

4/14/2004 (5 hours):

Although it doesn't sound like this should take long, I just got the aft landing gear bulkhead floxed in place. The time sink was re-attaching the firewall. If you read previous steps (and above) you'll see I hadn't cut the holes in the temporary firewall yet - I had just driven screws right through it into the longerons. Tonight I marked their exact locations, cut the holes, and spent some fiddle time with a coping saw, chisel, and other tools getting everything to fit right. It's still not perfect, but it's close enough to draw my exact 5" spacing for the aft LG bulkhead with, and that was all I cared about for today.

Having this thing up on pivots sure helps a lot. There was no need for clamps or anything to hold the bulkhead in place. The one clamp you can see above the bulkhead is just to provide a wall to put a shim against to make sure it can't tilt or shift while the flox cures. (My firewall is slightly lower than my F22 so the bulkhead would otherwise start to tilt a bit.) I also got my camera going again, and the first picture is from this substep.

4/15/2004 (2.75 hours):

The landing gear are both now in place, floxed, and BID-taped. Everything is clamped up so tightly that I could really just drill the front bulkhead holes now, but I'll wait until cure anyway - why rush things at this point?

Funny story (now that I look back on it). I cut my spacers 8"x5" so I could use them for two tasks - spacing the aft LG bulkhead from the firewall, then spacing the front LG bulkhead from the aft. The only thing is, I hot-melt-glued them onto the front LG bulkhead the wrong way (5" sticking out, not 8"). I grumbled, hammered them away, scraped the hot melt off, then put them back on. THE WRONG WAY. AGAIN! I made Nicole stand next to me to make sure I did it right the third time around. Hmmmmmm, I wondered why the bulkhead didn't want to fit between the two sides! The third pic below is me drilling the aft LG bulkhead holes. It went just fine. Don't worry about the gap you see in one of the spacers, I stripped a bit of wood off the end of it the second time I glued it in the wrong freaking place, but the other spacer is fine and I triple-checked the distance between the two, it's exactly 5". Errr, 8". (grin)

4/16/2004 (3.5 hours):

Today I got the second half of the front landing gear bulkhead in place. It wasn't a perfect fit so I had a bit of trimming to do, but not much. Fortunately, I hadn't cut the angles on the edges yet, so the trimming was mostly done in those areas. I ended up with a tiny overhang on one side anyway but I leveled it with flox and the layups across the top went fine. I have the thing up on pivots, as mentioned earlier, so I COULD do the back side now, too, but I ran out of time. Hey, I'm almost done! With the first step!

4/16/2004 (3.25 hours):

Whoo! Talk about underestimating time estimates! I guessed at 18 hours based on the length of the text, but Nat really started to expect you to know what to do at each step here, so he puts several hours of work into a few sentences in this chapter. I thought it would take more flox than it did to attach the firewall, so I felt like I was holding a thermite bomb, but I got the firewall installed and this step is finally done! The clamps you see are holding the firewall against the spacer blocks I made. I just reused them to make sure the spacing was exactly accurate when I put the permanent firewall on.

I made one mistake - I forgot to allow for the thickness of the BID reinforcement between LWY, LWX, and the bottom longeron, so my electrical cable conduit holes are about 1/16" off laterally. I left the holes a bit rough; I'll clean the holes up later when I'm sure no other adjustments will need to be made.

The cost for this chapter was for the drill bit and some extra hot-melt glue sticks. I made a few minor changes here and there, nothing structural. For example, the plans recommend using a light to locate the holes to re-drill them. Instead, I re-drilled each side as that side cured, so I always had one side to re-drill from and make a perfect hole. No big deal.

  Apr 05, 2004     moving through space and time Category: C06 Fse Assb

I intend to do this via the "upside-down" method. The only problem is, I'm sort of stuck between stages. It's still in the 40s outside, so I can't move this to my garage yet, but the room where I've been doing the work is too small to stay in at this point. I may try to find a step further down the road, like the head rests, that doesn't require access to a completed fuselage. The only problem with THAT is that I don't have the materials for most of those steps.

I think I'm going to keep building in my office for the time being. It will be at least a month, perhaps even two (it's the beginning of April right now), before it's consistently warm enough outside to allow the epoxy to properly cure, especially in the evenings when I have the most work time available. I have two options for getting the fuselage out the door. The first is to cut out the front window, and lower it down to the driveway (I'm above the garage). That's not as bad an idea as it sounds, because the windows here are cheap as dirt and are falling apart, so I had intended to replace them this summer, anyway.

The second option is to go through the stairway. I had also intended to replace the stair treads (they're all cheap pine, and have warped over time due to being exposed to the elements), and once they're removed I just need to temporarily remove the center support and I can drop the fuse down into the garage that way. The stairs are a good 39" wide so it should easily fit down if I go sideways.