Now it’s time to take everything apart and start to get ready for primer and final assembly. Oh how fun. Honestly it’s amazing how long it takes to put everything together and how quickly you can pull it apart. Anyway, I pull the top skins off and get the rear shoulder harness anchors cleaned up and drilled into the longerons. I do a little bit of cleanup in the garage, then start disassembling all the parts by the aft deck (marking parts as I go). I keep the plans open so I can make sure I write the correct part number on everything. On a few parts, I make some orientation marks to ensure I put it back the way it was initially assembled. Read more
Tailcone – Part 4
Starting off on page 10-10 and installing the Aft deck on the tailcone. Initially I was having some issues trying to get the skins to line up correctly with the aft deck, and realized this was a self-inflicted issue. I initially cut F-1010B a bit long due to my previous issues with the J-stiffeners being too short. Even so it appeared that with the F-1010B being long it wasn’t an issue (see photo below)
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Tailcone – Part 3
So I’ll start off saying that I had a lot of camera issues this that are leading some some funky transitions due to lost footage or the camera turning off without me noticing.
Anyway, Starting off I got some help from my wife in flipping the tailcone over and getting it positioned in the garage so I could continue mounting the parts and pieces for the second side skin. I keep “double-checking” how some of the parts overlap to make sure I am doing it correctly. While mounting a few of the rear-ribs/bulkheads, I realize that a few of my J-channel stiffeners are actually just a little short of where they should be (edge distance in the images below). This was a bit crushing and required me to contact VANS support for advice. I actually also did some searches on VAF and was glad I wasn’t the first one to make the same mistake :). Read more
Tailcone – Part 2
First step in this video is the bending of the longerons. I was worried about how this work work and was pretty cautious on how hard I was hitting them with the mallet. HA! I ended up really beating on these things pretty hard to get the “slight” bend that was necessary. Give it 3-5 good hits with the rubber mallet while pre-loading the end of the channel, then take it out of the clamp and test fit it against the side skins. Honestly after getting more aggressive I did get the proper bend in both of the longerons. (Later on I was quite happy that when I installed the longeron and it fit perfectly!) Read more
EAA Sportair Composite class
So I had wanted to take one of the SportAir workshops prior to starting my project, but I was unable to make any of the local ones, and didn’t have the ability to travel for a weekend class. Ended up getting the training kits from Vans and figured it out as best as I could. I did make sure I stopped by the workshop area and visited with some experts at SunNFun to make sure I wasn’t too far off and walked away with an axle wrench project. 🙂
Today I got an e-mail that there are going to be a few workshops at Manassas Airport (KHEF) in early September. Perfect! While I would love to take the sheet metal class just to reassure myself, I honestly think my time (and money) would be better spent on the Composite class. I did the 1 hour workshops at SunNFun, but looks like this will be much more detailed and helpful as I look at the fiberglass work in the near future. Excited to learn more skills that I can use on my airplane and hope to make some new friends along the way!