Take a seat...

Time for our weekly update.  I actually have a few pictures that I think are worth looking at.  Yes, I spent the weekend doing more wiring and I still have a ton more to do but its starting to come together.  One big piece of news happened on Friday.  Amy and I drove to Oregon to pick up my seats for the airplane!  We were suppose to fly but the weather was a little spotty so I opted to drive instead.  Wow, it took all day to make a trip that should have taken a few hours.  Anyway, here we go with a few pictures.

Ok, I lied, I had to show at least one picture of some wiring since it seems I have done little else but run wires for a while now.

I decided to actually do something that required drills and mounting...So I went ahead and installed the Autopilot hub behind the baggage wall.

Oh, yea!  I figured I had to put the seats and carpet in so I could sit for the first time....Oh my!

Another view of the seats and carpet.

This is a picture of the carpet on the floor.  I think I am going to have to have these redone since they don't actually fit the fuel pump cover I am going to use.

I finally think the panel is almost done.  At least with what I have so far.  I still need to paint it and I need to add labels but other than waiting on the GRT Mini X that goes in that small square hole in the middle section I am feeling pretty good about this.  Pretty simple panel with a ton of functionality.

I purchased this ground tab block because the site that sells them said this would be enough for most experimental airplanes....well I guess mine is not "most".  I have three spots left and I don't think that's going to be enough.

A little glassin' going on...

I found that I was missing a few pieces that I need to finish up some of the wiring that I was doing so after ordering what I need from Stein I moved on to a few smaller tasks that need to get done.  Oh, one thing I did that didn't get photographed is glassing in of the stall warning sensor hole that I cut into the leading edge of the wing long ago.  I decided that a stall warning horn was not the direction I wanted to go considering the new capabilities of AOA (Angle of Attack) instruments.  I still have some sanding and probably filling to do but at least there wont be a hole in the leading edge of the wing any longer.

First I finished up installing the Autopilot roll servo.  Its interesting to note that I have been following a thread on VansAirforce.com about a guy who had his servo arm over rotate and jam the aileron controls.  I am making sure that is not a possibility by installing the mechanical travel limiting bracket you see around the arm.  I haven't torqued these down yet because I still have some controls to install.

I decided long ago that I was going to do two things different.  First I plan on installing my wing tips with hinges instead of rivets or screws.  Second I will eventually install a small bullet camera in the top of the horizontal stabilizer.  I decided now is the time to make the first steps on both of those projects.  Here you can see where I used the hinge technique to install the VS fairing.  Actually the fairing/cap is not in the picture but you can see where I am using the bottom half of the hinge as the connection point to the VS.  The top half of the hinge is sitting on my work bench after having riveted and fiberglassed it to the fairing/cap.  No pictures of that yet.

Finally I moved on to the rudder cap.  Took a lot of cutting, sanding and filing but its getting close to fitting the way I want.  There is a significant gap in the middle that I need to deal with and I think I am just going to put a styrofoam "rib" inside to force the cap to fit correctly.  Then I am going to rivet it in place and probably fiberglass the surface to give it a nice smooth profile.

Mini Update

As I mentioned in my last post I was doing a lot of traveling last week and as such not much got done on the airplane.  I have a lot of "activities" coming up that will interrupt my work time as well so unfortunately the next couple of weeks are going to be a little light on progress as well.  However, as long as I am making progress, however slight to use a military term, I am happy.

I started wiring up the different Bus's.  

A top view of the wiring progress.  Starting to look like spaghetti.

As a change of pace I decided to install the Auto-Pilot servo's.  This is the pitch servo installed just aft of the baggage bulkhead.