Skip to main content

She creeps and sleeps

After the burst of activity that was sourcing drag wire stock I let the project lag again. I don't know why. Excuses range from "busy working", to "I didn't feel like it", to "the garage is a disaster." Any way, I'm back at it again for a little while. Some ancillary projects were completed, flashback arrestors on the welding torch and cleaning a sticky regulator, cleaning the garage, and building adjustable sawhorses for wing assembly.
Adjustable sawhorse.

Leveling feet.
















I got a coat of zinc-phosphate primer on my finished wing fittings to stave off rust.


 Last night I finished preparing the new aileron control horns. I bent the old ones wrong and they cracked slightly, unairworthy but useful for practice. The new ones are bent correctly and only need some welding completed before they can get primed too. On that vein, I'm practicing my welding and am finally getting some welds I feel good about. They might not be pretty yet, certainly not perfect, but they have full penetration and look strong compared to my first attempts. I need to get better about adding filler rod and keeping the bead size uniform.
That's it for now, I'll keep plugging away at it. I need to get the drag wire attach brackets bent 
                                                                                    to shape.
Decent, but not great welds.
Backside of the above welds.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fittings. How fitting.

  Not much has happened on the Ace this year. The winter was long and spring has been very cold, so I spent a long time waiting for the garage to warm up. Now that there's a little heat down there I've been making some headway on the next step of my wing build: fittings. I copied the parts off the plans into CAD and then printed them onto cardstock to use as patterns when laying fittings out on the steel stock.    First I tackled the brackets that will hold the pulleys for the aileron cables. I have a lot of extra material in case I had to remake these. The next step was to bend up my fittings. There is one fitting that mounts to the forward side of the strut which gets bent to a 90° angle. The fitting which mounts to the aft side of the spar gets bent at about an 85° angle. I forget the exact number, but don't feel like looking it up at the moment. Next I cut out the aileron control horns. My Harbor Freight porta-band chucked into my vice works well for cutting th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gear Legs

Last updated November 8th, 2022!?  Time sure gets away from you sometimes, doesn't it. Woof..  A lot of time was spend figuring out main landing gear legs. The first step was taking the info from the Piper drawings and laying out the gear v's full size on my table, then jigging the parts in place.  This is what we're building. The left side of the picture would be facing the front of the aircraft.   And here's the jig laid out on my table. The nearer jig sets the relationship between the forward tube and the axle. The farther jig aligns the forward and rear tube as well as the bushings on which the gear leg will pivot. With the jigs laid out it's time to manufacture parts. First came the pivot bushings, and they were a bit of a process. First the little U-shaped piece of metal that holds the bushing needs to get bent to shape. I made a little die the right size to bend the material in my vice. After the U is bent it then gets a notch ground out to fit around the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drag wires

Progress on the airplane has been very limited as of late. It has, however, been made. After a long episode of researching and calculating I have found drag wires.   Not the drag wires the plans call for, but still. The plans want 1050 alloy steel wire to be threaded with a #6-40 thread and retained with what are essentially spoke-nipples from motorcycles wheels. The aircraft rated nipples are about $7 each and I need 24 of them. Spoke nipples are 20 to 50 cents each. We'll, I wasn't going to spend $170 on bolts, but $12 seemed reasonable, so I ordered a bunch of spoke nipples. I had intended to match the thread of the nipples with my drag wire stock, but they are just irregular enough that I couldn't find a thread that matched and it seemed like sending wires out to have the correct thread rolled on wouldn't be worth the effort. So, despite having bought my spoke nipples, I abandoned the idea of using them. Enter the Baby Great Lakes. I researched drag wires and alt...
2 comments
Read more