Joshua's RV-9A Project

Started off tonight with more center section — I picked up some hardware-store Grade 8 bolts to use as temporaries in the wing spar bolt holes, two large and two small on each side.  Then I set to fabricating the 1 7/16″ aluminum tube spacers that go on bolts between the bulkheads (not the wooden ones).  After making four perfect spacers, I realized that only two were called for.  Somehow, I’d been thinking I needed a top and bottom set, and in the process used up the second piece of tubing, which must have been intended for a later part.  Will have to order a new chunk in the next Van’s order.

With that said, I now had two extra spacers…so I made sure they fit where they were supposed to, and drilled those holes in the bulkheads to size.  Then I removed those two and placed them around the 1/4″ bolts at the top and bottom of each side–voila, they’ve taken the place of the wooden spacers.  (I’ve read of some folks using PVC pipe chunks instead of wooden spacers, so using these extra tube pieces, which I took great care to get the correct size, should work.)

Moving beyond the center section, work began on the F-705 bulkhead, which is the structural member that the rear spar attaches to, and also provides support to hold the seats upright, and latch the canopy shut.  The bottom of the bulkhead involves some large aluminum bar stock, which I cut to length, deburred, and marked as appropriate.  I also cut to length the doubler bars and rough-cut the spacers that go between the two pieces.

This bulkhead appears to be the place where the instructions become quite terse.  “The details are on drawing 20″ seems to indicate “use drawing 20 to figure out what you need to fabricate, bend, drill, countersink, and so on; we’re only going to mention the big important stuff here.”  I’m fine reading the drawings–in fact, I enjoy working from the drawings and visualizing how the parts fit together–but I do see what others have commented on in the disappearance of hand-holding from Van’s.

Life is crazy, but shop time is cheap therapy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 11:48 pm and is filed under Bulkheads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.