FIRST – THE WEATHER
To quote Ferris Bueller, “How could I be expected to go to school on a day like this?” Well, for me it is work, but all the same it was 75 degrees and sunny on President’s Day in Indiana this year. It felt great to roll up the garage door and let in some natural light for a change. I was able to sweep up and clean the shop, do some general maintenance on tools and work surfaces. Overall, I spent some serious time just getting the shop in order for when the wings arrive in a few weeks.
FINISHING THE TOP SKINS
I only have one basic picture of this process, but the good news is that it was pretty straightforward. Line up the stringers and match drill. It was pretty formulaic, but it felt good to do something that I had a solid grasp on. Not much else here, so let’s move on.
TAILCONE BITS
This is a terrible heading, but still somewhat descriptive enough to get the job done. By the way, I’m trying to start using headings so I can find what I wrote about in the future. I had an incident where I couldn’t find an exact post and realized that without headings it made finding my images and steps more difficult to find. Anyways, on with the “tailcone bits”.
As I have had to do for many steps in the tailcone, I had to fabricate some more parts from stock aluminum. These two guys here are from stock angle aluminum and were clamped and match drilled into the tailcone. In this picture, you can also see where I finally match drilled the top piece to the longerons. Once again, the thick aluminum of the longerons served to chew on my drill bits, but at least the damage was limited overall. This step also involved me reading ahead a few steps and getting the battery mount pieces cut apart, deburred, and ready for priming and dimpling as well.
REMOVING THE TOP SKINS (ALREADY)
I can feel it coming. The brief step in the instruction manual whereby Van’s simply declares “Undo everything. Ha.” Well, perhaps not so snarky but man does it feel like someone somewhere is having a good laugh on me. It started by removing the top skins in preparation to add a few more mounting brackets.
There it is – the topless tailcone. These pieces were pretty quick and easy to locate, clamp, and drill into the longerons.
Overall, it was a productive day. I am getting the feeling that the dreaded “take it all apart” statement is just around the corner, but we will see.
Total time today – 3.5 hours
Total time empennage – 153.5 hours
Total time aircraft – 153.5 hours