I can't believe it's been 2 months since my last post! Time has flown by and I honestly haven't spent much time at the hangar lately. We moved into a new house in June (much bigger and closer to the airport!) and that took up most of our time and energy for several weekends. When Mike said he'd like to spend some time over the long weekend working at the hangar, my response was "oh yeah, I forgot that we're building a plane." I don't want to give the impression that no work was done on the plane in the past couple of months. My memory of some of these steps is a little rusty, but I'll do my best to catch you up on what's been done. After we got the skins in place, Mike drilled holes into the stringers, using the line we drew down the center of each stringer to make sure that they were in the proper location. Then we had to level the tail cone so we wouldn't introduce a twist into the plane as we added some reinforcing structural pieces. Next we added some pieces that will eventually be part of the rudder controls. They were pretty challenging to install since they narrow end of the tail cone is, well, narrow. Mike had to use the really long drill bit. Then we were able to add the top half of the bulkhead at the very front of the tail cone and put the longerons in place. The longerons have to be lined up perfectly flush with the edge of the skin and it took some fiddling to get everything into place. There's a cap (called the aft deck) that goes on top of the skinny end of the tail cone. It has lots of holes cut into it, I'm assuming to accommodate all of the mechanical elements needed for the tail. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the entire tail of the plane is going to attach to the narrow end of the tail cone. No wonder it has so many reinforcing parts! Before we could put in the aft deck, we had to create a spacer to fill in one gap. The instructions said to attach it using carpet tape, and it worked pretty well. I imagine we will be drilling holes in it at some point down the road. We clamped the aft deck into place - good thing I have small hands because there's a lot of structural components in that small space. At this point, we realized that the notches in some of the forward bulkheads were rubbing against the longerons. Mike took care of that with a little careful filing. And then, Mike spent hours and hours and hours drilling holes. By my rough estimate, he probably drilled 1,000 holes in the skins, bulkheads, and longerons.
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AuthorThe supportive spouse's guide to building an airplane. Archives
May 2017
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