Monday, August 17, 2020

On its feet and this thing is BIG!

Yea, I know it hasn't been a full month since my last post but I thought this was post worthy.  I'm pretty excited about it anyway.  The fuselage is up on its own gear!  The process was actually pretty easy with the help of Harry's lift table.  I slid it under the fuselage with a movers blanket on top of it and then lifted the fuse about 2" at a time.   After each lift I would put a small 2x4 block of wood on top of the fuse stand just in case the table failed.  Once I had it up about 11" the legs would slide in so I could final drill and mount them.



Here the fuselage is up high enough to get the gear leg in.  You can't see it in this picture but I did have to support the tail as the rest of the fuselage moved up.

Gear legs are installed, final drilled, and bolted to the fuselage.  The wheels are slid on for support but the rest of the wheel parts (brakes, brackets, etc) are not installed yet.

Finally the gear is all done, the nose gear is done, and I rolled the whole thing out into the driveway so I could clean up the garage.  The orange bucket is full of water to help hold the nose down.  You can also see a blue post that I attached to the tail to keep it from dropping as weight shifts around.  Its actually pretty well balanced at this point.
I also installed the heater hoses in the tunnel.  I had to add a special bracket to the left side of the tunnel wall to keep the hose from interfering with the rudder cable arms.

GPS antenna for the G3X.  This is the internal GPS which is WAAS but not certified so it can't be used for approaches legally.