Monday, August 20, 2012

Prime time

On a right down wind for runway 14 at South Lakeland, arriving to chip at away at this resto...


When I got to the plane and started looking over what had been done so far I noticed this helpful little note of instruction penned on my new turtle deck. It says "Take the Whitney Punch and punch out slugs .030 thick, then to use the Mushroom set to drive the slug into my miss-drilled holes; like a rivet.

So the next time the skin came off we did just that and it worked perfectly. Next time Ill still be more carefull drilling. These holes resulted from my back drilling the hold to diverge from the line.


I forgot to mention that last weekend we did get a few things. I have been cleaning out the interior as we have gone along and had it to a point that I was ready to put some paint down on it. Im sure there were better methods but I cleaned all the adhesive off the inside wiped it down, prepped it , masked it and sprayed it with about 3 rattle cans of "Appliance Paint" in Almond color. After having let it cure up during the week I found that it had set up nice and hard. It passed the fingernail test, so Im pleased and Ill be able to touch it up anywhere there is a wolly-world.
As I mentioned before I'm going to relocate the radios to the right hand side if I can work out the clearances.


This is a little rendering I taped up to signal to Jay that painting the damn thing Yellow what not on my mind. I really would like to paint it flat black but have been talked out of that due to the way it will show fluid stains, forever. So then I still think a semi-gloss black or even full gloss would be good. I understand that with black fuel tanks I may need to not fill them up all the way. Or maybe no more then half if it will be on the ramp for any amount of time, but I'd like to keep it hangered of course. I do not think that it would be any hotter than any other color other than white. As a second choice I like the scheme below. I am partial to the Rockets that are sporting camo schemes, but dont care for the p-51 look; I like the actual camo schemes. Still thinking about it all. Jay said earlier that he wanted a line of demarcation so that we could paint the bottom and then the top and if I picked a solid color I would have a line... Not  sure ho other people have done it then... He is also pretty intent on the fact that I would have to buy him a gun for each and every color I may want other than yellow and white. Im not sure at this point if he is serious or still just antagonizing me about the colors.


I pulled the clecos out of one side and across the top so that I could drill and add some more rivets to the old/new bulkhead joint.


While it was still opened up on one side and since we already had the underside primed we started pounding the rivets that were accessible.
I did the grunt work and Jay and I worked out our communication and got our method down before closing it up and having me crawl inside the tunnel of boom.
I really think I got the short end when it came time to pick jobs.
The first row looks great so its on tho the rest of them now.

Although it may look like I am giving my fuselage a giant hug, It is just where I grabbed it to wheel it out of the hanger for a coat of primer on the turtle deck.



Before

A little pride in ownership pose...
It is pretty clear in this picture that when the guys on VAF say "loose some weight" or "go on a diet" as the best solution for any number of given issues, it simply inst going to work for me...


After (and out of focus)

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Sam James Visits South Lakeland

Sam James Visits


Sammy stopped in today with his wife and brought his photo album of his build of his -4 for me to reference if I need to. I'm sure it will be an invaluable help.


Here is a view of my mock-up instrument panel. I'm planning for the Dynon SV7 on the left with a 6 or 796 in a gizmo mount on the right side. I want to leave the space bl Dynon hardware releases such as the comm that they have in the works. They say that the units face will be about business card sized so I should have room for two side by side. I wanted to keep the current comm and xcom close together to cut sown on interference but also wanted to be able to manipulate the controls with my left hand since my right should be on the stick. For that reason I have relocated them to the left side of the panel. Ideally I will come up with a method to make the instrument panel removable for future upgrades. On that note I am second guessing installing the gizmo mount for the Garmin GPS. I could just use a ram mount and would have infinite adjust-ability to avoid sun glare and additionally if I ever upgraded to SV1000 and moved the SV7 to the roll bar for the GIB Ill need to relocate anyway.

I didn't get a lot done today, we arrived to Jay's kid of late and spent most of the daylight chatting it up with the guys.










Monday, August 13, 2012

Cutting the Turtle Deck

Cut to fit


The Harmon skin/turtle deck was not an exact fit so we lines up one side and rolled it over the back and bulkheads drilling as we went. When we got it folded around (as expected) there was an excess lip that needed to be trimmed off along with the excess in the from at the rear passenger's seat bulkhead.

A friend of Jay's and metal master stopped in and we enlisted him to make the cuts.



With the excess areas trimmed away we re-cleco'd the skin to the frame again and I have to say I'm pleased with the looks I just hope the transition isn't to bulbous where it will meat the canopy at.


It doesn't seem like much but it took the better part of the day so we loaded up and flew back home until next weekend.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Canopy Delivered





Canopy


The canopy i ordered from Todd's Canopies came was delivered to Jays this past week and Im very anxious to see it. We pulled it out of the box and it looks marvelous. I ordered a Harmon Rocket canopy and had it tinted light grey. Todd called me as it came out of the mold and told me it was one of his best and had not a single imperfection anywhere.  replacement canopy at half price if I break this one. The cost was very competitive as well  to say the least.



We laid the canopy in place and began to figure out how much we want to take off the front. In hind sight I would have rather got the canopy all mocked up and built the turtle deck up to a height to match and avoid an ugly transition from the canopy to the turtle deck. By ugly i mean not straight.

We ended up trimming about 2 inches off the front and ended up calling it a day as the weather was gathering and we needed to fly home before hit hit.



We dodged a few cells on the way south to Punta Gorda but didn't stray to far of course.