I built these two sawhorses today. They're getto-sturdy. I'll be using them to hold the fuselage during the wing mating process pretty soon.
Archive for May, 2006
Horsies
Saturday, May 13th, 2006Belt puzzle answers
Thursday, May 11th, 2006A kind reader saw my seatbelt predicament and sent me a very helpful note and some photos, which he agreed to let me reproduce here for anyone else who's facing this issue. Thanks, Jim!
Hi Matt
I have recently installed the Hooker 5-point harness. Three comments with pictures may be helpful.
1. The attachment hole in the plates in Van's crotch strap kit needs to be placed lower to allow the steel shackle to sit correctly in the opening in the plates.
2. The attachment plates in Van's crotch strap kit are 1/8" apart. Although this is the correct spacing for the shackle, the Hooker strap is thicker than this and consists of three layers of webbing sewn together.
This pushes the front attachment plate further forward.
I had to make the two front screw holes in the seat pan oval to allow the screws to line up with the front attachment plate.
3. The length adjustment buckle is too wide to fit through the hole in the seat pan.
I had to widen this slightly.
Jim Talbot
Tauranga
New Zealand
This is pretty much exactly what I had resigned myself to doing, after I called Hooker and they had no help to offer me, so it's great to have photos to examine while I lay things out – this weekend when I have some time to work on it, that is.
Ordered seats and interior
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006I ordered my seats and interior kit from Classic Aero today. The promised delivery date is in August. I'm hoping to wind up with an interior that looks this nice; we shall see.
More wing riveting
Sunday, May 7th, 2006RV hopeful Dave Blair came to check out the project and help rivet on the left wing's outer bottom skin. He got the hang of the rivet gun pretty quickly. By dinnertime we were cranking the rivets out one after another.
Don't be fooled – this is a lot less comfortable than it looks:
We got it about three quarters finished. I'll pester Mary to help me drive the last few dozen rivets sometime this week.
We put about the same number of dings in this wing as the other one that got riveted last week. Meanwhile, the pre-riveted part of my quickbuild wings have exactly one small surface imperfection that I've been able to detect. How in the world do the quickbuild factory people do such a flawless job? Do they have some kind of ultra precise robotic rivet-driving laser beam out there in the Philippines?
Belt puzzle
Thursday, May 4th, 2006I didn't have much else going on tonight, so I got out the parts for the crotch strap anchor kit. Step one is making cutouts in the seat pans to let the belt pass through, although it turns out that this is already done for you. Unfortunately my Hooker rotary buckles are way too big to fit through there, so I'll have to enlarge these holes once I get a better idea of how everything lines up.
The big surprise was that the metal tab on the end of the crotch strap doesn't seem to be the right length. If you put the bolt where it's supposed to go, the thick part of the webbing where it loops around the metal tab is down between the two anchor brackets. This will push them apart by about 3/8", which will cause the alignment of the upper part to be all out of whack. Hmm.
I sent an email to Hooker to see if they have any suggestions. I suspect they might have a different style of strap with a longer attach tab, which would solve my problems.
P.S. I just realized this site is probably now the top-ranked Google search result for "hooker crotch". Great.