After 6 months of piecing together the tail cone, the big day has arrived...to take the whole thing apart. All those holes that Mike has drilled have created about a billion metal shavings and chips that need to be cleaned away. This is always a disheartening part of the build. You finally have something that looks like part of an airplane, then you disassemble the whole thing into a big pile of parts. Six months to put it together, 90 minutes to take it apart. Also, you can see how filthy the pieces have gotten after six months. With everything disassembled, Mike finally cut off that extra triangle at the front of the tail cone skin. I hovered nervously and snapped pictures like crazy. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but sometimes during the build you come across a single line of instructions that you know is going to take forever. This single sentence of instructions took us a month to complete. Deburring is by far the most boring, time consuming part of the build. We use drills with special deburring bits as much as possible. In some places, there's not enough room for the drill, so you remove the deburring bit and use it by hand. When I say by hand, I literally mean put the bit in place and twist it with your fingers. To make it even worse, you have to deburr both sides of every hole you drilled, so you deburr twice as many holes as you drill. I have no idea how many holes we deburred, but I did count while I was deburring one of the smallest bulkheads at the back of the tail cone and there were 68 holes in that piece alone. My conservative estimate is that we probably deburred 2,000 holes. Mike also deburred all the edges of the skins, which wasn't done earlier. In total, it took us 16 hours to finish that single step of the instructions.
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AuthorThe supportive spouse's guide to building an airplane. Archives
May 2017
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