FIRST, THE PITOT MAST
I have many things to discuss here, but let’s keep it about aviation for now. I went to the hangar (yes, saying this will NEVER get old) to continue work on the wings. My goal was to work on fitting the Gretz pitot mast to the left wing. Gretz has supplied not only a fantastically made product, but the instructions have been helpful as well. I did not get all of the way through the process today, not even close, but we will get to that. First step was to fabricate a mounting bracket out of angle aluminum that will get riveted to one of the wing ribs. From here, it was pretty straightforward. The only main difference for me was placing the template on top of the wing skin. I clecoed the wing skin in place and then placed the template on top. I was then able to easily mark and match drill holes for the attach rivets to go in later.
Similar to the elevator trailing edges, this was a case of cleco every hole and drill one at a time. This guaranteed a nice fit for this plate. Unfortunately, this is where I had to stop for the day. I have had to stop for many days recently due to some distractions at home, but such is life I suppose. Here is my latest….
SQUIRREL
I have some builder friends that commonly refer to anything that distracts you from your build as a “squirrel”. This could not be more accurate. My squirrel to chase this past few weeks has been my master bathroom. I’ll keep this short as it has nothing to do with a pitot mast, but perhaps for anyone reading this it may bring comfort to know that indeed we all suffer setbacks in our ideal build timeline.
As promised, no major details here, but make any assumption you’d like that involves all of the tools pictured above. You’re still probably underestimating how much “fun” this has been.