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N377JT

I started working on the right wheel pant today mainly to try to get it drilled to the mounting brackets. I had drilled it to the U-808 bracket yesterday. the rear inside bracket was about 1/4"back from the fiberglass so it was hard to see where to drill. Finally I decided to drill a hole in the fiberglass then into the bracket. WRONG move. The bracket bent back so much that when the drill bit got thru the bracket it was about 1/4" or more off when it sprung back without the very light drilling pressure I was using. I looked at it for a few minutes and decided to go ahead and make the left gear leg fairing and cut out the left wheel pant while trying to come up with something to drill the rear bracket. I trimmed the wheel pant to fit around the gear leg and tire then made some marks on the floor to align the pant with the center line. The left side measurement was slightly different than the right side. I guess I trimmed the tire openings a little different. From the center line to the front and back of the right side pant was 38.125" the left measurement was 38.25".
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Now on to drilling the U-808, no problem. But this time I did take time to bend the bracket a little so that it sat flush with the inside of the fiberglass. Then I removed the rear pant and bent the rear bracket similarly so that it was flush with the inside fiberglass. Drilled a #30 hole in the fiberglass and just left a mark on the bracket. Removed the pant and finished drilling the bracket. Put it all back together and BINGO it was perfectly aligned and all of the holes lined up. Did the same technique for the front same result.
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I knew I could fix the right side I'd just need two people to make it easier. Next onto the gear leg fairing, taped the template onto fiberglass and cut off both ends leaving the trailing edge long. Followed instructions except that I used a piece of alum. angle clamped to the trailing edge while drilling the hinge.
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After I assembled the hinge and riveted it together I tried to remove the pin..... it was very hard to remove. What happened is that I put a little too much preload on it by placing the hinge just a little higher up than what was needed. If I had followed Vans instructions to the letter this would not have been a problem I was just trying to make sure the ends would pull up tight when assembled. They did, just too much. They are still useable just hard as **** to put on.
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My brother stopped by and we drilled the right side wheel pant using my "bend the brackets a little" idea. Worked like a charm.
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Tomorrow I'll mix up some flox and apply it where the fiberglass meets the brackets for a nice tight fit.
 
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Outstanding!

I just took the time to go through (most of) your photos, and I have to say, your work looks superb. Great job documenting everything as well; good inspiration for other builders. It's looking fantastic!
 
Here's your sign!

I got to the shop early today with the anticipation of making some real progress. That progress did not happen. I looked and studied everything over and decided to get the right gear leg fairing secured in place and get the intersection fairings drilled and attached. On the lower side the fairing didn't fit very well so I started messing with the upper side which fit quite well. I soon realized that I needed to have the entire cowl secured to the plane before making any holes. I placed the top half on and inserted the top and side hinges then went to put the bottom pins in..... Here's where stupidity enters the scene..... I had never made the steel pins for the bottom sides, just used the aluminum pins for cutout and checking the fit of the cowl. Well, now that the exhaust is on the plane insertion of these pins is quite a bit harder. So I looked at the cowl plans to see what I was supposed to use to make the pin. Found it and located the material. Now for the fun stuff... I also noticed this detail...
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I remember while helping build my brothers RV-10 and we made a similar piece for it so I went looking for the pieces for my plane thinking surely I have to have one on my plane. About 2.5-3 hours into the search (I'm fuming mad at this point, ready to rip the head off of a cute teddy bear) my brother stopped by and I asked him to help me find these pieces. He said what do they look like? I grabbed my iPad to show them to him..... one tiny movement of the picture and the search was over. FREAKING TRI GEAR ONLY!!!!!!!
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Soooooo, after a few curse words it was getting late and I decided to get something done so I mixed some epoxy and cabosil and taped the wheel pants brackets to act as a release agent and reassembled them with the thickened epoxy in place. Here's a few pics of the process.
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Looking great!!!
Could you post some pics of how much you had to cutout of the inside of the wheel pants to fit over the gear leg/brake area. Just for my reference! thanks
 
Looking great!!!
Could you post some pics of how much you had to cutout of the inside of the wheel pants to fit over the gear leg/brake area. Just for my reference! thanks

It's roughly a 3" square. I wasn't really trying to get it "just right" because of the transition fairings I'm using.
 
More work on the fairings today. I popped off the pants from the brackets then got all of them drilled to final size, countersunk, installed the nut plates and fully assembled.
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The upper transition fairing fit like a glove so I drilled it to #40 and clecoed it in place.
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On the bottom I had to trim the top side of the fairing in place a little to match the lower side. Then I drilled and clecoed it in place.
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Hopefully tomorrow I'll get nut plates etc. installed and get the left side finished as well.
 
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Today I got the left gear leg and the upper and lower intersection fairings in place and drilled and cleckoed together. The lower intersection fairing took quite a bit of heat from a heat gun then I held it in place with a shop towel while it cooled. I trimmed the aft edge a few times and continued the heat gun process about 3-4 more times until it finally laid down where and how I wanted it.
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The top piece was just held tightly in place and drilled. Very easy to install. Next I drilled to #36 and tapped the holes in the upper piece that go into the fuse. I lowered the plane off of the stand and put it back on all 3 tires.

I wanted to get the slider back on so it's not sitting on the floor. A while back when fitting the slider I just drilled the canopy pin blocks and put a cleoco in from the bottom to hold it. After seeing that today I went ahead and disassembled both blocks for final drilling and proper mounting hardware. After reassembly I realized that the holes in the blocks were slightly higher than they were before. I think that the head of the bolts mounting the bracket to the longeron may have gotten in the way and caused the nylon block to be slightly higher when final drilled or just by bending the sides of the block in by tightening the bolts. Either way, I'm thinking of just ordering two new nylon blocks and starting over. It's frustrating to have put all of the work in making my own slider skirt to have it not be perfect.
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Today I went to the hanger and put the wings in the trailer and took them to the shop. I just had to see what it would look like with a wing on it. So, I installed the right wing with some polished hardware store bolts to see how much space I have for the electrical connectors. Turns out not much. I?m going to need to figure out how to secure the wing root electrical connectors before the wing is installed for good. I also took a good look at the wiring runs and the AP servo install.
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After lunch I went to work on trying to get all of the nutplates in for the transition fairings and do the final trimming of the wheel opening. Got all nutplates in except two, the ones that go into the floor of the plane. Also trimmed both wheel openings and reinstalled them. I see a lot more fiberglass finishing in my future.
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Nice job!

Great photos of progress heading for the home stretch ! Your attention to detail will be awarded when you see it all painted-up and posing for pictures. I have one suggestion that will probably be the same on your aircraft as it was on my -4 that I encountered after paint and flying you can avoid at the stage you are now. Others may have comments to validate. The Whitman gear to me is an engineering marvel that does many things well, but it moves around way more than can be imagined when the plane is sitting static during the build. I had my gear fairings trimmed exactly like yours at the upper end for a nice level close fit, but in service, the gear will flex AFT an unimaginable amount which lets the T/E of the fairing/hinge pin hit the fuselage skin, which in turn dents it and pushes the fairing down into the wheel pant..in other words, its "buzz kill" for OCD builder. I trimmed my fairings downward at an angle from the upper mounting tabs so there is only about 3/8" into the upper cuff fairings..make sense? This allows plenty of gear movement without interference when the gear flexes AFT. Keep up the great work!
 
Great photos of progress heading for the home stretch ! Your attention to detail will be awarded when you see it all painted-up and posing for pictures. I have one suggestion that will probably be the same on your aircraft as it was on my -4 that I encountered after paint and flying you can avoid at the stage you are now. Others may have comments to validate. The Whitman gear to me is an engineering marvel that does many things well, but it moves around way more than can be imagined when the plane is sitting static during the build. I had my gear fairings trimmed exactly like yours at the upper end for a nice level close fit, but in service, the gear will flex AFT an unimaginable amount which lets the T/E of the fairing/hinge pin hit the fuselage skin, which in turn dents it and pushes the fairing down into the wheel pant..in other words, its "buzz kill" for OCD builder. I trimmed my fairings downward at an angle from the upper mounting tabs so there is only about 3/8" into the upper cuff fairings..make sense? This allows plenty of gear movement without interference when the gear flexes AFT. Keep up the great work!

Never even thought about that. I will trim accordingly. Thanks for the tip! Your advice is exactly why I started posting in this forum.
 
I am a little bored of messing with fiberglass so I started working on the wings today. First I cleaned the floor around my work area, then drilled the 3/4" holes in the wing ribs for snap bushings. Then i ran some wires and the pitot and AOA lines.
Need to order some more wire for the right wing. Not much progress today but the list is getting smaller.
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Today I rerouted the VOR antenna coax in the left wing so that it is somewhat separated from the power wires and ran the AOA tube with the power wires. I had a piece of 3 conductor 20AWG that was just a bit too short (top cable in above pic) so I pulled it back and used a 4' piece that was in my scrap box and extended it placing the splice in the outermost bay. Starting from the tip and working inwards I put connectors on the landing/taxi lights, strobe and NAV light and the pitot.

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The pulsar NSP lights have about 16" of wire coming out of them and I needed to use that length to make wingtip removal easy. The wires were unshielded and I thought since everything else in the plane is shielded I might as well go ahead and add some shielding from the connector to the light. All of my wiring has a ground wire back to the main firewall ground block, the shield is also tied to this main ground block. I'm not using any shield as a ground. Went to the production dept. on the other side of the warehouse where I'm building and grabbed some shield, heat shrink, etc. and came up with this. I know it's overkill but I want a quiet electrical system.

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Next was getting the root ends terminated and installing the terminals. I cut the wires all to the same length and crimped on the terminals. Oh yeah, those solder on with a heat gun thingies (for getting the shields thru a connector) are great but if you don't make sure the solder is completely melted they might fail in service. My brother stopped by at the end of the day and looked over my work. I asked him about the solder joints and he said they weren't good enough. He said heat them up till you think they are hot enough and then add more heat until you can see the solder melt. He grabbed the heat gun, turned it up to high and demonstrated. Yep, he was right. Now I need to go back and reheat some other ones at my splice joint.

Before:
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And after, done correctly:
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No Smoke!

Today was quite the treat because I got to check out the tail light, wingtip lights and the landing light. When I got to the shop today I populated the left wing connector and checked the pinout many times. I found a few mistakes and corrected them.
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Rolled the wing around to the plane and connected the wire and when I hit the switches..... No Smoke! Alll of the lights came on when they were supposed to.
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Those were my best attempt to get a pic of no strobe vs strobe on. Then I pulled out a headset and plugged them in and retested everything. Complete silence in the headset! No noise whatsoever. No strobe noise, no light noise, just dead silence. I guess it paid off to not ground anything locally and run all of the grounds and shields back to the firewall to a ground block separately. My brothers RV-10 has just a faint noise from the strobes and it is a little annoying.
Feeling like I accomplished something good today I decided to go and start the exciting task of drilling, deburring, and dimpling the left skin. I got the drilling and deburred one side and left remembering what it was like on the RV-10 we built years ago. It's amazing how much work goes into the line "final drill, deburr, dimple and prime of needed" in the -10 instructions. Oh well, back at it monday....
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Spent some time today after work to get all of the left lower skin deburred on the inside and dimpled.
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Also deburred and dimpled the inside of the ribs.
Had to reposition the skin a few times to find the sweet spot for the correct alignment. Dimples don't always line up "exactly".
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Found the sweet spot and set a few rivets on the inner most skin to rib assembly to try and "true" everything up.
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Been slow on the build the last couple of days but, I did make some progress today. If anyone remembers a few days ago I got the lights in the left wing wired up and tested. Everything was quiet as a mouse in the headset. The problem with that test was that I didn't have the antennas connected. When cleaning my bench for prepping the wing skin, I decided to go ahead and connect them to the plane just to get them out of the way. At the end of the day last Saturday, I wanted to demonstrate how nice and quiet it was to my brother. Powered everything on and had all kind of radio noise when I turned on any light. The lights were breaking squelch on both radios (GTN 750 and GTR 20). After messing with it for a few minutes I just said the heck with it and went home to think about the problem. I read about the auto squelch function and wondered if that was the problem since There have been updates to address this function. My G3X's have never been updated since I got them in early '15. Today I downloaded the latest software from the Garmin site and proceeded to do the update. Problem 1) The GSU 73 wouldn't update and problem 2) the GTR 20 wouldn't update. Called Garmin's tech support and got quickly transferred to a guy that helped me get the GSU 73 to update. Rebooted in config mode and it updated very quickly. I think I wasn't giving it enough time to do its thing. Problem 2 took longer, I called back and we couldn't quite figure out what was happening, I said I'll just wait and call back after giving it some more time. More time was not what it needed. It seems I may have a CAN bus problem. After calling back, he told me to turn everything off except the PFD and the GTR 20. It worked. I have some troubleshooting to do. The good thing is that my GTR 20 radio is dead quiet now with all of the lights on just need to figure out why I'm getting some error on the CAN bus.
I did manage to get the aileron servo bolted in and set a few more rivets in the left wing. Man its hard to reach some of the rivets at the aft side of the wing.
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Left wing skin is now riveted on.
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Ran all of the wires for the right wing.
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Tomorrow I'll try to find a way to secure the wires on the right side of the servo. I don't want anything that could flop around or get caught up with the servo or control linkage.
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Your build is looking great! Nice work indeed. Thanks for posting these for us people that aren't quite there yet. :)
 
Your build is looking great! Nice work indeed. Thanks for posting these for us people that aren't quite there yet. :)

Thanks and you're welcome. I just got back at it today after all of the holidays and will be updating more regularly.
 
Today was fun, I match drilled approx. 302 holes in the right lower wing skin. Deburred about 1100 holes, dimpled around 500 holes and set about 30 rivets. I think I'd rather be doing fiberglass work but hopefully tomorrow I can finish the skin and start on fitting the wingtips. Oh yeah, I also made one extra hole while dimpling. I didn't get too upset, just but on some flat dies and squashed it flat. :eek:

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Today I wanted to get the wingtips in place and drilled to the wings. I only got the right one drilled to #40 but it is straight! To start I made an aileron center jig and clamped the aileron to it. Then I had to cut some material off the bellcrank jig to allow it to clear the Garmin AP servo brace. Once those were in place I adjusted the pushrod length and tightened it down. Next I clamped the bell crank jig to the bolt that holds the pushrod so I could get the wingtip aligned.
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While installing the pushrod I found it very difficult to get the washer and nut on the bolt that attaches the aileron to the pushrod then I remembered having similar issues while helping build my brothers RV-10. A long time ago I stumbled across some tools that hold washers and nuts for a situation just like this and bought them. Here they are in action. VERY handy!
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The wingtip didn't fit very well at first but after using a cut off wheel to trim the rear edges and a long sanding block to even out the flanges it looked pretty good. I held it in place keeping it even to the trailing edge while I got my dad and another coworker drilled the tip from the leading to the trailing edge clerking every hole as we went. Turned out just about perfect. I only need to sand the tip at the outside edge and trim it a little to match the aileron perfectly.
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AeroSun VX install attempt #1

Today I removed the right wingtip and read the installation instructions for the AeroSun VX landing lights. I thought I understood them pretty well and started to make the cutout for the light. I placed the template in the tip and drilled both holes to #30, marked out the area for removal with a fine sharpie and used a cutoff wheel to remove a large portion. Then I used a small bit in a air grinder and cut up to the line being sure not to remove it. Some 100 grit sand paper was used and I sanded into the line a little before checking the final fit. It took about 3-4 times of removing just a little here and there before the light would fit in the cutout like it says in the instructions. I think they call out about 1/2" on the inside and 2" on the outside that the light protrudes from the opening. The instructions don't say anything about trimming the light but I had to remove a little material at the flanges that hold the insert nuts so they not hit the tip. (pics below) All looked great and I went ahead and drilled the two screw holes to #27. I assembled the screws and washers and springs.... Uh Oh.... something isn't quite right. It looks like by inserting the screws that the whole light has moved outward by almost 1/8". What used to fit perfectly now fits like ****. I checked the template against the left side light and the holes in the template seem to line up pretty well. Not sure whats going on but I suspect that I may have to fill the holes and drill new ones. I'll figure this out tomorrow but I do want to say that I am looking for perfection here. I like working with fiberglass and I want a perfect even reveal all around the light of about 1/16". Heres some random pics of the process and some of me just taking pics at different angles trying to figure out what to do.
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No progress today but I did think of the idea of over cutting the hole completely on all sides and then putting enough tape around the light to make a 1/16? spacer all around then just fill it in with epoxy and filler. Just need to figure out the centering of it and redrilling the holes. I know I?m going overboard with this but I just want a perfect looking light cove. I mean these are really nice looking lights and they deserve a proper fit! Just rambling on..... We?ll see what tomorrow brings.
 
Hey Jamie,

Looks like you're doing a good job on the AeroSun VXs. I've also installed them on my 7 (still building). You've probably considered this for your taildragger, but one light may be angled differently for taxi compared to the other for landing. Maybe a slightly different fit with the fiberglass per side.
 
Hey Jamie,

Looks like you're doing a good job on the AeroSun VXs. I've also installed them on my 7 (still building). You've probably considered this for your taildragger, but one light may be angled differently for taxi compared to the other for landing. Maybe a slightly different fit with the fiberglass per side.

Thats an excellent idea! I've been wondering how to overcome the pitch differences in the different phases of landing and getting the lights to cover them.
 
Success!!

So, after thinking about the cutout for the light, I decided to overcut the hole and fill it in with epoxy and filler. After doing this I realized that it was much easier and more precise than trying to cut a perfect hole for the light.

I took all of the protection material off of the light and wrapped about 6-8 layers of electrical tape around the perimeter of the light where it is close to the wingtip. Next I used an air dremel and enlarged the opening about 1/8". Roughed everything up with 100 grit paper and wiped it down with acetone. In order to get the clearance at the outermost tip I had to slot the two screw holes. (I'll fill them in later) Then I mounted the light, mixed some epoxy and put it in a syringe. Filled in the outside edge and let it cure. Today I got to the shop and popped the light out after removing the screws and clekos. I took about 2-3 minutes with some 100 and 180 grit paper to have it sanded down to near perfection. I'll let the pics take over to show the process.

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For Sale

Airplane is for sale. Wings finished (not installed). To fly, it needs final assembly of wings and transition fairings, interior installed (have all of it). Doesn’t need much if anything or parts to buy. It’s all there. Engine was test run late last year before taking to the hanger. Accepting offers now. [email protected] plane is located at KOFP.
 
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