Yep, more doors

I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel with this darn doors.  Nothing hard about it but they sure are messy as you will see from the pics below.  These last couple of weeks have been very cold so my time in the garage has been short.  In addition to the tasks I took picture of below I also managed to finish riveting the top skin on the inside.  I forgot to do this when Travis was here so finished up the last 8 rivets.  I also epoxied in the two forward Naca ducts.

If you look at the hand hold (the hole) in the picture above you will notice that the instrument panel (the carbon fiber you see in the opening) blocks about half of the opening.  There is still room to fit your fingers in there but it looked kinda sloppy to me so I drilled the doublers out and fabricated a couple of new ones that move the grip further aft.  In the picture below you can see the new location.  

The hole is not quite as large as it was but its still 3/4" deep and actually has more room for your fingers than the original.  I suppose I could have modified the glare shield and moved it even further aft but I don't think its necessary.

Oh yea, I took the engine to and engine shop in Oregon last week so that they could install the prop governor drive gears that were left out by Avian.  I asked them to run the engine as well if they could.

I did some work on the panel as well.  The lower console is fitted and drilled to the upper panel.  I installed it in the airplane to make sure it all fits nicely.  Next up for this area is to drill the lower console to the tunnel screw locations.

With one side installed and the other off I took this picture to get some sort of idea of the angle and depth that is available in the lower console.  The aluminum square is marked in inch sections and it was 6" long.  It was clear that nothing with much depth would fit down there so I had to re-design the avionics in the panel.  More of that below.

As I mentioned above....we got a little snow this week.  2 full snow days and 2 that were iffy.

Back to the panel redesign.  On VAF there is a thread going on right now where Doug Reeves asked about having his autopilot controller mounted on the glare shield similar to the way commercial airplanes do.  Somebody designed a 3D printed housing that could be used for this purpose but unfortunately the design they used would not work for me.  So, I dusted off the Solidworks program, did a little designing of my own, and printed up this test housing.  It fits very nicely and will exactly as I had hoped it would.  I sent the design drawings off to Geoff at Aerosport to see if he would print the housing for me and possible list it for sale on his site so others with the Aerosport 310 panel might take advantage of the design.

An inside view of the housing.  Notice that the bottom of the housing actually hooks below the glare shield and the tapered part facing forward is there so I can drill a hole and run my wiring down into the avionics bay.

Ok, I saved the door work for last.  In this picture you probably wont see much unless you have built an RV-10 with these doors.  Those two top slots were actually openings where the hinged bolt to the door.  I posted something about this a while ago when I riveted nut plates to the hinges...well this is why.  The door seal needs a flat surface to sit against on the outer edge of this raised door portion.  Those hinges (and the door pin guides in the picture below) leave an air gap if you don't do something to seal them up.  In this picture you can see where I fiberglassed over the opening and then cleaned it up to look like it was stock.

This is the forward side of the door.  In those cavities the door pin guides get installed.

This is the aft side door pin cavities.