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.