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.

Working on the wings.

So the unfinished wings did not have any sort of wing tips.  If I was going to have to build a wing tip for them, I may as well have the newer style W10 tips on them I think.  This required me having to remove one rib from the outboard tip to gain access to the spar to be able to extend the spar some for the tips to be added.  I then built them back up out of wood as they are done on the W10 wings that I built for my other project.  Strangely enough, maybe not, the ailerons and flaps for these wings were built, but not to the plans for a W8 and definitely not for a W10, so they also require some modification as well.  I had to shorten the overall span of them which required moving some of the ribs in the flap portion which also shortened them flaps back to the normal length called out in the plans.