Back to Building = Thinking it Through....

Hopefully if you are  a fellow builder you will not have to endure the lengthy pauses I seem to experience at just about every turn in between building efforts. I am doing a horrible job of sticking to my original goal of 3-5 years for completion, but life gets in the way sometimes, and so you just keep doing what you can do I guess.

One of the problems of having lengthy delays is that it is easy to forget just exactly what you doing or what your were thinking about at the time that you stopped working on the plane. You forget where certain tools are located, and you forget the small details about certain activities.

So I spent a short time tonight just reassissing where everything was at. I know that I still have a crap load of deburring wing ribs to do, but I also realized that I still had my horizontal stab sitting on my work table - constantly getting in the way. Only problem is that I knew that I had left it there after taking it down off the wall of the garage some time back because there were still several small things that I needed to do before I hung it back up again.

- final torque the 4 mounting bolts for the center bearing/hinge.
- smooth out the cut lines where I had trimmed the edges of the HS to allow proper clearance for the elevator counter balance arms
- re-prime a couple of areas around the center joint of the HS forward spar and support angles, and also around the tips
- smooth and re-prime the area of the rear HS spar flange that had to be trimmed to allow clearance for the control horns during full down travel of the elevators.

After reviewing those items, I also realized that I still needed to drill and mount a couple of K1000-4 nut plates to accept an AN4 bolt along the web of each elevator. Here is a shot of a 3/16 inch cleco that I inserted through the large hole of the nut plate first, and then inserted the clec through the large tooling hole in the forward part of the rib web of the counterbalance support and the tip rib of each elevator.

This additional nut plate allows me to secure additional lead weight to the elevator in the event that more is needed to balance the controls when the time comes for that. You simply take a piece of lead, drill the necessary hole, and mount it to the web using an AN4 bolt and the nut plate. The subject of some controversy among builders is where to place the nut plate - on the inboard or the outboard portion of the elevator. I have chosen to mount the nut plate on the inboard side of each arm, so that any additional lead and the bolt head will be located on the outboard side of the arm (where the fiberglass tip fairing will be installed).

The reason is simple. if the bolt ever becomes loose for any reason, bot the bolt and the additional lead weight would be retained in side the fiberglass tip fairing. If either of these items are located on the inboard side of the elevator, then they could become lodged between the elevator and the horizontal stab, effectively jamming your controls and causing some very serious problems. Some builders sluff this off and decide to put the bolt and the weight on the inboard side because it is more accessible since it is not covered by the tip fairing, and this is true. I guess I view this as being safe rather than sorry. So it is a builders choice.....

I will need to enlarge the hole for the AN4 bolt (1/4 inch hole I believe). SO I will drill it out a bit, then drill the holes for the rivets, and check that little assembly off the list of to-dos.

Last item for tonight is something that I spent considerable time researching, adn I am still not 100% sure I am going with this solution, bit I think it will work.  Here is a series of pics that shows a pipe support bracket that I intend to use for securing my wiring conduit to each wing rib. I found them at HD. Unfortunately, they are just wide enough to allow the conduit to slip very easily through each hole. I figured I could place a zip tie on each side of the bracket around the conduit to hold it in place.

Using these is  a bit easier than drilling large holes in certain areas of each rib and running the conduit through the holes. The only thing I still need to check is if the aileron pushrod will clear the conduit in the last lightening hole of each rib. There are some other nylon brackets that are designed to do the same job as these, but they are more expensive and come from specific aviation suppliers. It tool me forever to find the information about them on VAF. Anyway, these brackets from HD are readily available, and aside from being a bit bulky should do the job. All you do is mark the rivet hole locations for each hole, drill them, and mount. Most use pop rivets for this which is perfectly fine. I also like the fact that they are non-conductive and therefore are perfectly suited for supporting electrical wires and such.