Drilled engine mount
Yesterday I spent most of the day down at the Auburn Airport helping Jim mount the wings to his fuselage and drill the rear spar. It was great to see that process first hand. That’ll help when I do mine.
Today, my friend Steve stopped by to help out with the project. We made some major progress. We started by riveting in the steps. Julie usually helps me with riveting, but she doesn’t really like the 3X gun very well. Steve and I hammered these out in no time. Access is a little tricky. I ended up using 3 different bucking bars, and messed up one of the shop heads.
Next up was the engine mount. We figured out a really clever way of handling this. First we verified that the holes in the mount line up pretty well with the starter holes in the firewall. They are each off by maybe 1 mm. I drilled the two top holes in the firewall to #12 and then used a long AN3 bolt with a large washer to hold the mount in place temporarily. We shifted the mount around until it lined up with the holes as good as possible, sort of spreading out the error (which wasn’t much). I then drilled the holes in the bottom to full size, and then the top holes, inserting the official bolts as we went along. It worked out great. It’s very cool to have the mount drilled to the fuselage.
I didn’t drill the lower two holes yet. I figured I could do those on my own. I’ll need probably a .063 spacer in there as the mount sits off the firewall a tiny bit as I’ve seen on other builder logs.
Next up was messing with the brake mounts for the gear legs. The instructions and plans for these things are not clear. Steve and I messed around with it for a while and mostly figured out how it was supposed to go together. Steve had to take off, so I browsed a few builder logs and got an even better idea of how it was supposed to go together. Matthew Brandes’ site had some very helpful pictures.
It seemed like every part of this thing didn’t fit well. I had to use a Dremel drum sander to clean up the inside of the brake flange to get it to fit on the axle. The hole through the flange and axle had to be reamed out. And the holes in my brake flange did not line up well with the Cleaveland part. I had to ream out all of those holes as well, but finally got everything in place. For one side. Hopefully the other side goes smoother.
