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.
