Well after some breakfast with Dad and some friends at the cafe we decided to get to work, but we couldn't just yet. Just as we were leaving the cafe, a beautiful -8 pulled up and well, being RV builders we couldn't pass up the opportunity to chat about our similar tastes! The pilot's name was Barry and he was teaching a friend to fly, we talked about the aircraft a bit and became friends! After our chat Dad and I had to bring our trusty Cessna 150 over to the maintenance hangar for her annual today. The first few hours of our day was devoted to this task and found out what does and what doesn't need to be replaced this year. Oh the joy of airplanes, there's always something to fix on them!
After the maintenance hangar closed Dad and I headed on over to our hangar and decided to pick up from where I left off yesterday. Today we drilled the Z brackets to the main spar for the right wing today. Once we had these all match drilled we began drilling the platenuts to the Z brackets. A cleco here, a cleco clamp there, a drill press and some time was all we needed and we were able to get six of them drilled, we had to do some grocery shopping tonight so we had to leave time for that as well unfortunately.
Many reasons for the lack in posting lately, and I feel bad for that. Works been keeping us both busy and I've been spending some time at my mom's as well, dividing the time is hard when there's so much to do! Also, holidays always seem to delay something, whatever it may be. But we're still progressing on the project that's for sure!
Today Dad and I picked up where we left off on the T-712 Z Brackets that attach the fuel tank baffle to the main spar. Since we finished priming and countersinking them, the next step was to rivet the K1000-3 platenuts to them in order for them to be bolted to the spar. We set all of the rivets and they turned out beautiful! 12 of the 14 had already been drilled to the spar and the remaining two were the inboard brackets, I'm not too sure why they have you hold out on these, but you're supposed to match drill these to the spar once the baffle is clecoed to the other brackets. After the spar was off of the wing jig and back on our work bench we clecoed the bracket to the baffle and got to drilling.
Well the first one didn't turn out too great, in fact it's unusable! A simple mistake led to a $2.50 replacement part. Our mistake? We held the bracket agains the spar too firmly which caused the baffle to flex, with it drilled in this position the hole is in the wrong location when the pressure is taken away. Oh well, our part should be here Thursday and we'll be back in business!
Well after some breakfast with Dad and some friends at the cafe we decided to get to work, but we couldn't just yet. Just as we were leaving the cafe, a beautiful -8 pulled up and well, being RV builders we couldn't pass up the opportunity to chat about our similar tastes! The pilot's name was Barry and he was teaching a friend to fly, we talked about the aircraft a bit and became friends! After our chat Dad and I had to bring our trusty Cessna 150 over to the maintenance hangar for her annual today. The first few hours of our day was devoted to this task and found out what does and what doesn't need to be replaced this year. Oh the joy of airplanes, there's always something to fix on them!
