Long delay since the last post–sorry about that. We went down to Arizona on vacation, then had family in town, so work has been slower than normal. We’ve continued to work on the fairings. The main wheel and leg fairings …
The wheel and gear leg fairings make the airplane way more aerodynamic–you can count on it adding about 15 knots to the cruise speed, so not installing them really isn’t an option. I was hoping we could wait until after …
The “main gear” is the legs/wheels on the left and right, as opposed to the single wheel in front, and this is what we worked on first. The gear leg mount is already bolted in the fuselage, so the first …
It’s time to mount the landing gear. The stand the fuselage has been on for the last ~1.5 years is only about a foot of the ground, so to be able to insert the gear legs, we needed to lift …
See the post here for our entry on starting the windscreen fairing. Kelly and I epoxied all those layers of fiberglass cloth in one session. When we were done, I realized we didn’t do a sufficient job getting all the …
We’ve been looking at samples for our interior from Flightline Interiors. We’ve pretty much decided on what’s pictured below.
“A” is a fake leather that we’ll use on most of the seats and side panels. “B” is the carpet. “C” …
The windscreen fairing is a gradual transition between the top of the fuselage and the windscreen. It’s made by laying up many layers of fiberglass of various widths. Here’s a snapshot of the plans, which shows a side view of …
Now it’s time to glue the windsceen. It’s attached to the fiberglass top and sides with the same glue, Weld-on 10, that we used on the other windows. On the front, it’s essentially fiberglassed to the aluminum on top of …
Yes, we’d already fit the windscreen last summer, but we recently noticed a sizeable gap between the windscreen and fuselage top, on the right side. I sanded down adjacent areas to make it sit a little better. There’s still …