We were entertaining guests most of the weekend, so not much progress to report on the plane. I did a few miscellaneous things, though.
I made up the low-pressure hoses that go between the brake fluid reservoir and the passenger's brake pedals. These will have nothing but ambient pressure in them, so even my mediocre hose-making skills were up to the task. I decided to have all four of the high-pressure brake hoses professionally made, however – a real hose shop has better tools to assemble and test hoses than I do. For my own future reference, I'll need two 36" -3 size and two 16" -4 size hoses.
In order to estimate the required hose lengths, I had to figure out roughly where and how the parking brake valve will be mounted. So, I made this little standoff for it out of some hat section material I got from Van's a while back. This will get riveted to the firewall later. I used nutplates here on the assumption that it would be a pain to get nuts onto the back of this once it's installed.
Then I spent a bit of time making reinforcements for the armrests. On my old airplane, both armrests were sagging in the middle after a couple years' worth of use. On this plane I decided to rivet on some aluminum-angle doublers to stiffen them up a bit. I used my rivet spacing tool to mark out the rivet holes:
The 0.032" angles are oriented flange-up, thus making a sturdy C-shaped section where before there was just a single bent flange. This view is looking backwards from the forward end of the armrest, which is noticeably sturdier with the angle clecoed in place.
I dimpled and deburred the angles and armrests – the Burraway tool was handy for deburring the holes in the already-installed pieces – but I didn't rivet anything in place just yet. It turns out that the reinforcement angles block access to a couple of the rivets that will eventually hold the F-704K's in place, so the angles will go into the parts box until they're needed.
