I am ready to rivet the bottom skins on the wings. There is a lot of wire that has to be run down the wings so I decided to do a little wiring before I put the skins in place. This was kind of fun to switch gears a little and work on something that's not aluminum. The right wing is partially wired now with the coax for the VOR antenna, the landing light, and the strobe/nav lights. I started running the wires for the AP roll servo but since I'm not 100% certain how much wire will be needed in the fuselage I have put that on hold for now.
I also started riveting the inner bottom skin on the left wing. This is going very slow because my back is a bit sore. Amy and I were rear ended on the highway last week and while it seems neither of us is hurt permanently I did end up with some back pain. Its slowly going away now so hopefully I will be able to move a little faster with the riveting.
Finally the engine is home. Harry and I drove to Bremerton last weekend and picked it up after a very unsatisfying round of discussions with the owner of Avian Aeronautics who insisted on charging me $2400 more than was originally quoted. We finally came to an understanding but I won't be taking any more engines to that shop while the current owner is running the show. The lead mechanic was a good guy to work with and he seems to do great work so I'm happy with that side of the equation.
Oh, I also spent a bit of time in the past couple of weeks finishing up my annual condition inspection and taking care of a few tasks that I had on my list for the 9A. One of the tasks was to install a couple of headset hangars under the panel. While doing so I found that the passenger side air vent had almost broke free from it's glue mount. There was about 40% of the glue holding it on. When I removed the vent I found that I had neglected to scuff up the aluminum before applying the epoxy. I took care of that and then re attached with some good epoxy. No pictures, just lots of scraped and scratched skin where I was using a wire wheel under the panel to remove the remaining glue.
On with the show...
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Inside view of the connector on the wing tip. This connector has wires for the landing lights and the Nav/Strobe lights. |
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These two rivets look better but you can see on one that the bucking bar moved off to the side toward the end...easily fixed. |
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Here it is...my bright yellow engine block. Ben was nice enough to loan me his engine hoist and his help to get the engine mounted on the stand. |