Clecoed the aft upper tailcone skin back on, but haven't started riveting it yet. I'm putting it off because I really don't want to put a doubler in it and a big ugly ELT antenna sticking up back there.

I made a mistake when I ordered this ELT. Spruce had 2 different versions and I ordered the one that was about $100 cheaper. Turns out the difference between the two is a honking 24" antenna vs. the 15" one that comes with the more expensive Compact ELT kit.

I called Dodson Salvage up the road and they had the shorter 110-773 antenna on a wreck, so they are sending it to me and I'll mock it up to see how obnoxious it looks sticking up on the tailcone.

Even if it looks okay, an RV with a slider canopy isn't physically big enough to meet the antenna separation requirements for 2 garmin comms and an elt. Lots of guys have put the elt antenna laterally in the empennage intersection fairing, which doesn't meed the criteria in the installation instructions for being vertical, but does meet the 32" min separation from a top mounted comm antenna that's called out in the artex manual.

Seems like at this point in the project I'm agonizing for hours or days over decisions that only take a few minutes to implement. I've got to get over that tendency if I want to continue to move forward.

Also, big news yesterday; Vans started crating my finish kit!

The hole pattern in the vans ELT mount doesn't match the hole pattern in the Artex mount. I was only able to pick up one nut plate that I had installed prior to riveting that mount into the tailcone. So the only actual manufacturing work that went on today was to match drill the Vans mount to the holes already existing in the Artex plate. Tomorrow I'm going to have to either try to fish nuts back behind there or figure some way to get nut plates attached behind the holes taht are circled in sharpie in the attached picture.. That will be a head scratcher which may require drilling out some rivets.

If you're using this setup, do yourself a favor and match drill all that before you install the vans kit in the tailcone. They say their nut plate pattern matches common ELT brackets, but the Artex 345 evidently isn't one of them.

EDIT: This is me from the future. Look at the entries for June 16th and June 29th 2022 for a couple of gotchas I didn't know about.