Torque Tube
When bolting on the torque tube for testing,
I noticed that the front tube/collar was not sitting right plus lots of binding
was going on. I decided to unbolt the rear collar and tighten the front collar
to see exactly where the rear of the tube would naturally locate itself in
relation to the rear collar. As one can see by the picture, ugh :0|. To fix
this, I cut through the welds on the bolt bushings at the front, added some heat
to the collar joint area, while clamping the rear of the tube into place.
Stringers & Partitions
I started to use screen door
framing as stringers, only to find that I had a few notches to cut into the
stringers to miss a few fuselage tubes, the notches compromised the integrity of
the aluminium box shaped stringers, so I trashed that idea and went over to
spruce 7/8 x 5/16 for the sides. For the underside, I used some tight grained
pine from the local home depot, since the 9ft+ spruce lengths would be a killer
on freight charges from Aircraft Spruce'. Once dry fitted ,the stringers were
coated twice with ClearCoat.I wanted to block off the pilot compartment where
the stringers terminated at the seat back, so I made up some sheet .025
aluminium to fit the underside, and two more partitions were made for the sides
adjacent to the seat back [LOTS of tweaking]. The steel tabs to fasten these partitions have been
welded on, and everything clecoe'd.
More Welding
I have been on the hunt for stuff to weld on
the fuselage - trying to complete the welding before powder coating, since it
will be a PIA afterwards with a gas torch. I think everything is done except the
support brackets for the canopy rails. This I will be tackling next.
Gas Tank
I had decided to move the rear-inserted flop
tube to the front of the tank for safety reasons. So, a new boss was welded in
place.Moving it I thought, might have opened a can o worms with a conflict
between the tube and a fuel sender probe and also a potential clash with the
flop tube and aninverted stand pipe, it turned out that after having a good
look with my econo-boroscope[a webcam] in the tankwhile rotating the fuselage,
all was OK by a good margin.
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