Sunday, January 4, 2015

One more year passes by...

Happy New Year everybody.  No big parties for Amy and I this year...or any recent year as far as that goes.  :-)  However we did have a nice New Years day dinner with most of Amy's family in attendance.  New Years is a big holiday for the Japanese and Amy and her mom really did up a wonderful dinner.

This week has been a pretty good week on the airplane.  Quite a lot of time spent in the garage and no major steps back!  I decided to finish up the wings so I can get them to the airport.  That was the plan anyway... I did spend a lot of time working on the wing tips but as usual it takes me about four times as long to get a task done than I had anticipated.  Great learning experience though and I am happy with how things are turning out.

The wings weren't the only tasks of the week...see below!

First step in installing the wing tips was to drill the holes that mount the hinges to the wing and the wing tip.

Next step was to drill another set of holes next to the first set.  This new set of holes will be where the hinge is riveted to the wing tip.  The first set gets cut off and attached to the wing with the other half of the hinge.

The extra row of cleco's and associated hinge have been removed and I am getting ready to rivet the hinge in place.  Before I set the rivets I epoxied the hinges to the wing tip.  This will help keep the rivets from pulling through the wingtip fiberglass due to vibration and stress.  In this picture I have set the hinges in epoxy.

And here the other half of the hinge plus the piece I cut off of the wing tip are riveted to the wings.

And her it is with everything riveted in place.  Now I have to install a couple of ribs in the wing tip and adjust the end to match the ailerons.

Here I have trimmed the end of the wingtip open and the after setting the adjustment where I wanted it I am epoxying it back in place.

Oh yea, did I mention I got my new switch panel?  Well here it is with all switches and cables installed.  The new throttle and mixture cables will work nicely and the switch panel looks nice.  I may have to have the end pieces re-done to match this new color.
Wow was this done this week?  Seems like it was a long time ago but I went ahead and installed the baffles on the engine.  Hopefully I wont have to remove them again for a long time.