Sunday, December 1, 2013

Can it be December already?

Well the weekend is done and I had a nice long 4 days to work on the airplane....and work I did!  I think I put in at least 40 hours in that 4 days and my body is telling me so.  Lets get to it shall we...what did I accomplish in those hours?  Well not a lot of pictures to show but here is the list.


  1. Thursday
    1. Countersunk the longerons (this took forever!)
    2. Prepared about 40 different parts for priming.  This includes a lot of organizing of the garage, hanging of plastic, wiping parts down with lacquer thinner, and staging them for etching on Friday.
  2. Friday
    1. Turkey day so about all I got done was the etching of the parts and the priming of most of them
  3. Saturday
    1. finished priming the parts that I hadn't got to on Friday and started assembling the fuselage again.
    2. Tons and tons of "little details" that needed to be taken care of before I can start riveting the fuse together.  I know I missed a few but hopefully they wont be hard to fix when I finally figure out what they are!
  4. Sunday
    1. Finished assembling the fuse, took care of a  bunch more "to-do's" and prepped for riveting.  A friend came over to help with the riveting.  THANKS Shane!
Enough of that...I'm sure there was a ton of other things to tell you about but here are the few pics I took.

My "jig" for countersinking the longerons.

This is my idea of a paint booth.  It didn't do a great job but at least it kept most of the priming dust off of the rest of the garage.

The inside of the paint booth after I had completed my first priming session.  Lots of white in here.

Here is a picture I couldn't resist taking.  Its the inside of the fuselage before I got the side skins hung.

Oh yea, my bugaboo.  If you look at the big angle up at the top of the picture you will see a gap as if its sitting crooked.  Well, its not, the darn thing (and its brother on the other side) are actually not square.  I checked the stock I used to make the part and it wasn't square either!!  To fix this I had to drill out all those rivets and put it in my vice to "persuade" it into the correct position.  Thats ok, I also decided to re-prime the firewall aluminum.  As you can see from this pic the 7220 primer does not hold up well.

Ah yes, Shane running the rivet gun.  I can't tell you how helpful it was to have him here!