Nothing exciting, just spent time deburring and cleaning up fuse parts, formers, etc.
Fuse Part Deburring
Hours this entry: 2.5Category Archives: Fuselage
Fuselage Work
Hours this entry: 4.5Worked on the fuselage and rudder pedals today. One item we’ve been delaying on is cutting the avionics access hatch.
Here’s Dad smoothing out or cut of the hatch. This will help access the instruments from the front cargo hatch.
More work on the rudder pedals. For whatever reason, I have two different color pedal assemblies, as you can see the left assembly is a greyish color, while the rest is white.
Controls Part 1
Hours this entry: 7Started working on installing the pushrods and controls. Here is the control column and front control stick installed. This won’t be a final install as I still have to finish priming the fuse and then painting the interior color.
Test fitting the pushrod on the bellcrank
Also started work on the rudder pedals today.
Drilling the holes for the inflight adjustable pedals.
Elevator & Control Work
Hours this entry: 4.5Decided to skip attaching the Horizontal to the Fuse until I could clear the correct amount of space in the hangar, so it was spent working on the control tubes and associated items.
First off was drilling the Elevator Control horns, this was something we had put off as well. Using a .250 piece of tubing and a drill that fit exactly to the ID of the tubing, it went well. As with all of the horns, it seems like they don’t match up exactly, but we had the surfaces matched in trail, since that is the important piece.
Finished fabricating the elevator bellcrank.
Elevator bellcrank temporarily installed.
The first control tube drilled (F-481) and clecoed. Ready for primer.
The first control tube drilled (F-4800) and clecoed. Ready for primer.
Cockpit and Cable Anchor
Hours this entry: 3.5Today I fabricated the F-864E-1 cable anchor from the blank angle stock.
I cut it length first. I made sure I took extra time to measure out all the dimensions a few times.
After cutting, drilling and cleaning it up with Scotchbrite.
Match drilled to the Throttle assembly.
In addition to the cable anchor, I started work on match drilling the Bulkhead caps and right side console.
Cockpit Floors & Console
Hours this entry: 2Spent more time working on the Cockpit floors along with the center console and aft baggage floor. Everything fits pretty well and thank god for the rotisserie or my back would be killing me…
Fuel Valve, nutplates, etc
Hours this entry: 3.5Fabricated a bracket for the Andair fuel valve. Instead of nuts on the backside, I used nutplates.
Also spent quite a bit more time than anticipated installing the nut plates for the left and right covers.
Not many pics, just this of the fuel valve plate.
Cockpit floors part 3
Hours this entry: 6.5Primed all the stiffeners and floor boards.
Back riveted the stiffeners on, and added the nutplates. 
Cockpit Floors part 2
Hours this entry: 3.5Only a single picture, but more work on the cockpit floors today.
Got all the stiffeners fit and match drilled. Put the seatback hinge in place and match drilled. Fit a spacer for the hinge between the floorboards where they overlap, so that it doesn’t bend the hinge.
Now I can take the floorboards, prime the underside along with the stiffeners before they get back riveted on.
Also riveted the footwells together. The longeron yoke worked great for all but 8 rivets, so those had to be bucked with the gun and bar.
Cockpit Floor work
Hours this entry: 4.5Finished match drilling most of the floor boards, and started adding the nuteplates inside the fuse.
I found the best way to set the nutplates was to put the screw in from the back side, one cleco in the hole, drill the first hole and then swap the cleco.
The nutplate for the Flap Bearing Blocks was a huge pain. Extremely hard to get a countersink in. Wish someone had a better solution for this.