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Last Modified July 31st 2000
1st - 17th July No building, on holiday in Europe.
18th, 19th July Paint finish sanding
20th, 21st July No building
22nd, 23rd July I had intended doing the rest of the finishing sanding on the fuselage this weekend but in the end only managed about three hours due to the fact that...
The sanding is coming along very well though there are a few spots where I have gone through the top coat and hit the primer. I'll mix up a bit of top coat paint and spray paint these patches with a badger model air brush.
24th July More sanding.
25th July A couple of hours sanding finished off this section. I then dug out my $15 badger airbrush and touched up the spots where I had got a bit too enthusiastic with the sanding. The speckle coat over the top of the baggage bay area needed a bit of touching up so I did that.
I have been doing quite a bit of thinking about the firewall. Graham's phenolic firewall was in place though it ended up being hacked about a bit to allow for the extra cross bar which was added with the XS engine mount. In the end I decided I really wasn't happy with it as it was going to take too much messing around to handle that cross bar. I removed the firewall and cut out a cardboard mockup from the templates provided in the XS manual (I juuuust happen to have an XS manual in addition to the Classic manual). A few minutes of jiggling about had the lower section of the carboard firewall in place. I need to modify the shape slightly to cater for the rudder pedal firesleeves which I have installed but oher than that it fits pretty well.
26th
July Some more work with a pair of scissors and I had a fully functional
cardboard firewall in place. As the fire rating of this firewall is somewhat
less than required for safe operation the next step is to reproduce this in
stainless steel.
27th July No building, SAANZ meeting.
28th July Using a pair of aviation snips I reproduced the upper port and starboard panels in stainless steel. I need to go and buy some more steel as the pieces supplied for the classic firewall aren't large enough for the XS configured firewall.
29th
July Surface sanding. The goal today was to get the port side and underside
of the aircraft to a state where I could happily apply a top coat. There are a
couple of small patches on the side of the aircraft which will need a touch up
but the rest is looking good. I also fitted my flap hinge covers that I had made
earlier. These are two ply carbon layups suitably filled and painted. Attachment
to the aircraft is via nutserts and screws.
30th July With the help of the family we flipped the aircraft upright again, hopefully for the last time! I reapplied the spray pain to the flap actuating arm as it had become a bit worse for wear over the past few months, then in was back into the interior to sand back the areas of filler. Once the filler was smooth I primed and speckle coated the wiring ducts, door surrounds and the area around the instrument panel.
While admiring my handiwork later in the evening I happened to move the control column. Much disappointment. As a few builders before me have experienced, I discovered that my aileron controls have stiffened up considerably. The starboard side tufnol bearing feels like it is the culprit, being caused by differential expansion of the tube and the tufnol. The fix here is to use a mild abrasive between the front bearing surface and the tufnol to grind the tufnol away until freedom is restored. As I don't have any brasso in the house I decided to leave this for another day.
31st July No building - decorating.
