Joshua's RV-9A Project

Completed the initial installation of the roll bar by fitting it to the fuselage and drilling, countersinking, tapping as required.  Some trimming of the aft ends was necessary for a good fit, as noted in the plans.  Clamped and drilled the connector channel and associated angles as well.  The roll bar is surprisingly solid, even without being completely bolted in.

Next, on to the upper forward fuselage/subpanel area.  A  bunch of small angles needed fabrication, and the only snafu was when one pair fell off of the bandsaw into a bucket of waste oil…so a second set of those were made.  Fabricated the “stub ribs,” trimmed various things according to plans, and drilled them together.  The manual says “drill the hat channel to the aft face of the subpanel”…don’t do it!  Despite what the manual says, the drawings clearly show the hat channel on the forward face of the subpanel, and the hole pattern is slightly different left/right, so it can’t just be flipped…I’ll have to order a new piece.  For now, this isn’t critical (it is the bracket that holds the canopy jettison pivot assembly), so I drilled a few holes to hold it in place for spacing until a new one can be fabricated.  Finished up by disassembling the whole thing and deburring the bits…decided I didn’t feel like etching more parts (didn’t I just do that?), so I called it a night.

I am seeing here where it would be expedient to have a panel plan in place (at least the instruments and radio stack locations nailed down) — things like the final location of the left/right panel ribs would be much easier to deal with on the bench than after parts of the assembly have been riveted in place.  I’m going to look at other folks with panels similar to mine to see if I can come up with anything…or I suppose I could cut the ribs flush and then wait until later to rivet in the forward portions (I know at least the left rib will need to move).  There are a couple almost identical to what I’m planning, but they are both sliders, so the structure is all different.

(900 hours tonight)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Cabin & Interior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.