January « 2008 « Matt's RV-7 Project

Archive for January, 2008

Gearlegs & misc

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

The first thing I did on the airplane this weekend was to finish riveting the tricky rivets that I hadn't been able to finish last time I worked on the subpanel/firewall area. While setting the bottom-most rivet on the starboard side, I screwed up the shop head bigtime and had to drill it out (which I didn't do a great job of either, sigh). I discovered that I also managed to crack the very edge of the dimple – from whacking it with the bucking bar, maybe – and decided to drill out the hole to get rid of the crack and use a bolt instead. So now I have this mystery bolt on my firewall:

I fished the gearlegs out of storage and got to work getting them ready to go on the airplane. These things are about the size of golf clubs, but are made out of solid steel and weigh something like ten pounds each.

Here are the Cleveland wheels and brakes. This stuff is all made of magnesium… light but expensive!

I swapped the pressure and bleed ports on one of the brakes so I'd have one left and one right.

These are the U-403 brake mounting flanges, bolted to the gearlegs. It took forever to get these on here, since I had to grind away all the excess powder coating and then polish the outside of the axles with emery cloth to get the flanges to slide into place. Then I needed to ream the pre-drilled but undersized bolt holes up to 1/4". I'm glad the holes in the gearlegs were already there, or else I'd be taking these things to a machine shop… I looked up the properties of 6150 steel, and it doesn't sound like drilling through an inch of the stuff with hand tools would be a lot of fun.

I swear that two hours elapsed between the last photo and this next one. See, the plans for the wheel/brake installation aren't exactly clear. It took me a couple hours of fiddling, head-scratching, and web-searching to realize that if you follow the instructions as they're written and bolt the U-403 flange to the gearleg first, it's impossible to get the brake mounting plate installed because the bolt is in the way. Of course, it wasn't obvious to me which way around things were supposed to go, so I wasted a lot of time trying to get things to fit the wrong way. An exploded view would have saved me a lot of time here, but oh well.

I can't believe that's all I got done on the airplane all weekend. Blah.

Oh yeah, somebody told me I need to take more big-picture pictures so the casual reader might be able to have half a clue what I'm rambling about, so here you go, a photo of the fuselage… soon to be converted from a metal canoe to a real live honest to goodness airplane fuselage on wheels. I hope.

Posted in Fuselage, Landing gear |

Upgraded tailwheel

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

I finally received the Doug Bell tailwheel fork that I ordered a couple years(!) ago. I was one of the first RV builders to place an order for one of these upgraded forks, but since the one-man production shop's output is limited, I kept giving up my delivery slot to people who were closer to flying than I was. But now that I actually need to get the airplane up on its wheels for good, I told him to go ahead and ship it to me.

Much has been said about the Bell tailwheel before, so I won't repeat it. Suffice to say that it is well made, easy to install, and way ahead of the stock Van's tailwheel when it comes to ground clearance. Not to mention that Doug has a payment policy of "I'll ship it to you so you can try it out, and you can either send it back or send me a check." You don't see that very often.

Posted in Landing gear |

Finished radio trays

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Hooray, at last I got to spend most of a weekend working on the airplane! I finished fitting and installing the radio trays:

I riveted the aft attach brackets to the instrument panel. Notice in this photo how there is barely any clearance between that nutplate and one of the screws that attaches the tray (430 #2, I think) to the angle. Also notice that I had to make some of the rivets double-flush to keep the #6 nuts from getting hung up on them.

Following an enlightening email conversation with the very helpful Joe Blank at Van's, I decided to add a bunch of additional pieces of angle to reinforce the radio stack cutout. To add stiffness and to provide a place to anchor the right side of the audio panel, I ran a piece of angle fore-and-aft between the panel and subpanel. At the aft (panel) end it attaches to the upright bracket via one of the audio panel's mounting screws, and at the forward (subpanel) end it attaches to the forward upright bracket with a #8 screw, as well as being riveted to the subpanel via the small clip you see in this photo. The corner of the audio panel tray is attached to the angle with a screw, nut, and spacer.

Across the top of the subpanel cutout, I ran another piece of angle to stiffen the subpanel. On the passenger side of the cutout, it attaches to the upright bracket as well as to the small angle clip shown above. On the left side, it attaches to the F-7108C angle.

I don't need to do yoga, I have an airplane:

Along the bottom of the subpanel, I riveted yet another piece of angle, and tied it into both of the subpanel upright brackets via smaller pieces of angle. Sorry for the terrible photo.

Here's another view of how the bottom angle brace is tied to the upright brackets on the subpanel. All this bracing effectively forms a box around the subpanel cutout, thus making it very stiff.

Here's the money shot. How cool is this?

The avionics come with temporary plastic covers to protect their faceplates, of course, but I removed them for this photo and so I could make sure that the faceplates of all the radios are even with one another (they are). Also, the entire radio stack area is now extremely strong. Success!

Posted in Electrical/Panel |