Turtle Deck Riveted

The build achieved a big landmark: we got the turtle deck riveted!! A great milestone to end 2012. Riveting the turtledeck is a two person job and Glenn helped quite a bit.

First, I spent a couple of hours fitting and clecoing top-skin to the turtle deck (2 hrs):

Next, Glenn and I got together. Glenn drove the rivet gun while I lay in the fuselage for almost 3 hrs!!! I did suffer with some musucular pain in the arms at night. It was all worth it. Time to rivet 3 hrs.

 

 

Here is a picture that Glenn took of me while I lay in the aft fuselage:

Building on QB Wings

The quickbuilt wings are already fairly complete. The key remaining tasks include: wiring the wings, adding the lights, Autopilot servo and pitot-tube, Plumbing pitot tube line, mounting the ailerons and flaps and finally riveting one of the skin on the wings.

 

The progress on the wings have been slow. While the primary focus has been the fuselage so far, few of the things have been accomplished in past few months.

 

First, mounting the heated pitot was tackled. This is dynon heated pitot with a mount that was bought from SafeAir (5 hrs). The wiring and the plumbing is also done.The mount still needs to be riveted to the bottom of the wing:

 



 

 

 

 

 The AP roll-servo is installed on the right wing (2hrs). One of the aileron pushrods was already fabricated by the previous builder. So it was first simply measured to verify the length:

 

 

One of the dreaded task in mounting the landing and taxi lights on the wings is the cutting out portions of perfectly good wings. Glenn, who is an artist in metal work, did those effortlessly. Taxi and landing lights are installed in left and right wings respectively (10 hrs).

 

 

I also decided to put in flop-tube in the left wing. Did not realize that this would take long. Thanks to Glenn, the flop tube and the fuel sender in the left wing was done (8 hrs).

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the wingtips are also being fitted. Aligning the edges of the wingtips, aileron and the flaps is important and the progress is slow and incremental (5 hrs):

 

 

The previous builder had mounted the aileron and flaps for left wing already. But the right wing needs to be taken care off (5 hrs):

 



The work on the wing will continue in parallel to the fuselage.

Fuselage Misc Items

The goal by end of the year is to get the turtle-deck riveted. So we are slowly making progress to get things done in the aft fuselage.

 

First, took care of the rubbing rudder cables by using adel clamps and plastic tubings (1 hr):

 

 



Note that the wiring for VOR cable is also taken care off (0.5 hrs) and is neatly tucked under and out of the way of rudder cables.

Similarly, the ELT wiring is tied neatly and routed through the fuselage below (1 hr). Once all this was done, we then started to take things apart in order to get ready for the turtle-deck riveting. Below you can see an image with Autopilot and the bell-crank disassembled.