On and off again building.

Well, it has now officially been enough time passing that many people will have started and finished an airplane project.  Well not me.  I decided to go back to school for a new degree, we had a child, renovated and sold our house, started building a new house, lived with my in-laws while building, moved to new house, etc.  Well I now have the garage organized somewhat, enough to maybe build a few things for an airplane anyway.  I am sure that it will be on and off again building going forward since I am in graduate school now and seems to eat a lot of my time.  But as I get free time I plan on adding to the project in the hopes that someday I will be able to fly the thing.  This past weekend was one of those weekends where I was able to build a few things to hang on the airplane.  I worked on the glare shield, the instrument panel, and created a way for the fuel tank to be mounted into the airplane with stainless steel straps.  I finished welding on tabs that will attach the windows and windshield, fitted a new floorboard of birch ply to the front of the cabin. At least it is some progress.  Hopefully someday I will be able to sandblast and paint the airframe.  Before I do, I still have to add some sort of attach points to the airframe to hold stringers, add a few tabs to attach interior panels to eventually, and make sure that there are no other tabs that need to be added to the engine mount to hold accessories or wires or cables. 

Seats

Someday I will need a place to sit.  The project came with a piece of flat aluminum sheet that I believe they intended to sit on and use it like a sheet.  That seemed pretty minimalist to me.  In order for seats to be put in the airplane and for them to be adjustable as well as removable, I needed to add some rails for them to sit on and some pins on the cross support for them to lock to.  I built some seats the way many of the Tailwind guys do, following a design that Jim Clement came up with.  They are not only light, but are sturdy and best of all you can adjust them forward and backward while on the ground.  They can also be totally removed to have access to the baggage area or to work on the interior.

Engine mount for dynafocal engine.

So the airplane will eventually need an engine bolted to the front of it to give it the power to burn money.  The project came with a "run-out" engine that had a dynafocal type mount.  It was time to build that to the landing gear mount.  First I fit it to the engine to look at where clearance needed to be built in.  Then I made a template of the front of the plane and the landing gear mount.  I then made a small jig from all thread and angle iron to hold the dynafocal ring in space with the correct clearance away from the firewall.  I leveled the false firewall jig, the jig that holds the ring, measured the thrust line to the jig, lined everything up where it should be, and started cutting some tubes.

Adding some firewall framework and stuff

So to eliminate the square area of the forward fuselage at the firewall, I needed to add some framework to the front of the airplane to give it more "shape".  At the bottom this will allow clearance for the exhaust to clear out of the fuselage and not be hanging out in the breeze.  It creates a "tunnel" in this regard.  At the top of the firewall area I added a curved piece of steel to give a slightly rounded or curved shape to the front.  This will allow the cowling to fit better, and overall look a little better than just being a box. I also had to finish building the landing gear mount for the the front of the plane and eventually a motor mount. After completing this I worked on creating a firewall out of some stainless steel.

Some doors and sheet metal.

I decided to work on creating some doors for the project.  As long as I was working on this I might as well build some of the aluminum sheet metal boot cowling and rear window framework.  This will all have to be attached somehow so I had to make some tabs to weld on.  I also had ordered some of the vents from Vans Aircraft that I will place on either side of the boot cowl just ahead of the door which will allow fresh air in the cabin.  I built the doors out of square aluminum tube, made the hinges from some eyebolts that a friend of mine (Alex Frizzel) gave to me since he had some extra and is what many other tailwind builders use as hinges for the doors, and skinned everything with 6061 aluminum from the local metal supplier.