[Picture Album] Ready to Fly

Well, here we are, Christmas 2006, and she’s (basically) ready to fly. I do still need to do the condition inspection before calling the FAA out to do the Airworthiness inspection, and there are a few squawks left to clear up, but there probably will be for the entire 40 hour flight test period. Here […]

Main Gear Pants

The first step in the pant installation is a laborious cut and fit exercise to make the cut-outs large enough for the tires, and creating an opening for the gear leg. Unfortunately the factory marked my pants for the gear cut-out on the front half, and I cut them before I realized that the fronts […]

Headset Hook

OK, so it’s not a headliner, but it’s close. Here we stole an idea from the factory, where they’d installed a small bar to hang the headsets from. Pretty slick if you ask me. Headset Hangar For formatting only Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisci elit, sed eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et […]

Lower Cowling Flanges

The lower cowling flanges are made in much the same way as the upper, except it is much harder because gravity is working against you, so after wetting the wing, cowling, and glass, I let it all get tacky. Then I tried to fold and apply it too early, got really aggravated, and just brute-forced […]

Rigging of the Roll System

The first step of this section is to drill holes in the gear bulkhead and firewall and route the aileron push-pull cables through to the wing roots. This is easier said than done, and I spent the better part of an evening getting these fairly ridgid cables to pass through. Argh. Now that the engine […]

Upper Cowl-to-Wing Flanges

Here we’ve duct taped the upper cowling and sanded the wing surfaces down to the glass where the cowling meets it in preparation for the cowling flanges. This is a 5 BID layup that I wetted wing and the upper cowling, then wetted the glass out on plastic and folded in half and laid on […]