Tue Jul 17 19:43:44 2007 - The left mount turned out great, too. I'm not yet ready to bolt these in permanently just yet. Thinking about painting the interior and I don't want to paint around them.

Tue Jul 17 19:43:32 2007 - The gear mounts went in nice and snug. The instructions call out for shims if enough gap is encountered. No gap here when pushed into place by hand. Don't forget to glue the washer into place (Shoe-Goo works great!).

Sat Jul 14 13:50:03 2007 - I had originally ordered some round baggage tie-downs from a local motorcycle store but when I got them, the clip portion was now cast and quite heavy. A search on Van's Air Force led me to Pit Posse. For $8/ea, not a bad deal and serveral colors to choose from. The mounting holes are on 1 inch centers and you can get away with AN515-8R8 screws making them easy to mount. I mounted four of them - one in each corner.

I now have seats!! Albeit, they still need to be riveted, but given the amount of work it took to build these damn things, riveting is going to be very easy part - I hope (see below). A couple words of thought: 1) Study the plans and then study them some more. There are several small important details that are easily over-looked; especially when dealing with the hinge call-outs. I use a highlighter to emphasise these little nuggets of info to make sure I don't overlook them. 2) I don't fully understand why Van's has you drill the rivet holes SO close to the vertexes of the vertical F-637B angles. Seems to me that the rivets could have been moved inward another 1/8" or so - even 1/16" would have helped greatly. We'll see what happens come riveting time. It's quite possible, however, that given the frequent localized stresses that they are designed to place the loads as close to the vertexes as possible.

On a totally separate note, two recent great news events: 1) After an extensive time looking, my Wife got a job offer from a local company. Congratulations, Honey. 2) Also, local RV-9A builder Scott Card successfully completed his 1st flight today. Congratulations to you both!!!

I'm making sure to have plenty of wiring runs for any future doodads. I was thinking of using the corrugated wire loom, but finding it without a split is not an easy task (i.e. special order). I think I found a very good substitute, however. It's 1/2" corrugated electrical conduit that's readily available at local supply houses. It's pretty stiff but still quite flexible. There's also available several adapters for joining other pieces, terminating, etc. I've got two runs to the "rectangular" compartments under the baggage floor (if I ever decide to use them), and two runs just aft of the baggage bulkheads.

And the steps are riveted on....

Testing out the step. I'm amazed at just how sturdy these things are with such little hardware.

I asked Aniko if she would do the riveting while I bent over into the fuselage to do the bucking. The first step went very well. We only had to drill out one rivet because the bucking bar slipped and bent a rivet over pretty badly. The second step went ... welllll, lets just say that Aniko lost her riveting mojo. I know we've all experienced that one time or another. We ended up with five "smilies" on the pilot's step. So I walked her through the process of drilling out rivets. Needless to say, see did an excellent job and I'm very proud of her. I think I'll start asking her to drill out my rivets in the future. ;)

And so now Aniko's an official air plane builder. Have rivet gun, will travel. ;)

Not much done today. But when the steps get riveted in, a lot of items can be done in the baggage area. I did fit the pilot's side step and got them prepped for riveting. One thing I did was to apply a little heat to bottom aft corners and curve then inward just a bit using a small adjustable wrench. This allows the flange to follow the fuselage a little better. The steps look good on trial fits so we'll see what happens upon riveting. This is going to be kinda neat as this will be the first time that I'll have to crawl into the fuselage....I'm sure it'll get old very quickly though. ;)