Mid 70's in August?

The weather this weekend is too nice for me not to put some time working on Goat.  And it's only Saturday!

I was working earlier this week on making some brackets for the jury struts the other night, but then I realized I drilled them at 3/16" instead of for rivets, so that was frustrating and I quit for several days.  Throwing away parts sucks.

But today is another day.  Doing some swaging, the left wing now has four steel internal bracing wires.  They're still temporary on one end, but it's nice to feel it getting stiffer already.  These lengths set the wing as a rectangle rather than a parallelogram.  Working on the right wing is the current task.

A little rearranging in the shop & garage helped also.  Now the drill press and belt sander are in the garage for much easier access.  I'm seriously considering buying a Grizzly brand band saw (now that I'm well over half-way) for making the aluminum bracket work go faster.

Speaking of bracket work, here is a before and after shot of the trailing edge strut upper attach bracket.  The completed one just needs final 3/16" holes drilled, but will be used to help match-drill the new one, which is still just a sharpie outline on a piece of flat stock.  A dozen minutes with a hacksaw to cut the rectangle, belt sander to round the corners, file to chamfer the edges, two clamps to hold the new part to the existing one, Dremel with a 1/16" bit to make the match drilled holes, cordless drill with a 3/16" bit to make the thru holes, and a deburring tool for these new holes to complete the part.  Simple, eh?

As a point perhaps of interest, here's a picture of all the bolts remaining to go into Goat.  It's several pounds of fasteners.  Some are AN42B eye bolts, lots of general AN bolts, both drilled and undrilled, nuts, washers, and the stainless cable hardware.  Boltalicious :-)

I did do a test assembly in the back yard today, but forgot to take pictures.  Really feels good to see it coming together again.  Visible progress is awesome.

Some more strut work

On an extremely rainy morning, I cleaned up the shop and did a little work on Goat, for a change.  The as-drawn trailing-edge strut upper attach brackets I found were too short to allow an interference-free fit of the TE tube and the strut.  An easy remedy was to remake these brackets with the same length spacing as the LE brackets.  Easy enough, but I guess I lost momentum when I found this a month or more ago.  A little hack-saw work this morning and cleanup on the belt sander, and out popped three (still one to go) shiny new parts.  Working on the most accessible wing turned out to be the left panel and that one is now installed.  I do think in all the hole marking with regards to strut length, there is a wee twist in how the bolt holes and double-shear brackets line up.  Not sure if it's anything to be concerned about, but that's why I'll have a local A&P over before getting too much further.

Finally, I started looking harder at cables.  I put in a single cable and have paused to think about it.  I should really take this end into work and get a thumbs up or down just to feel better about the work.  There is a lot riding on each of the Swagelock crimps and I'm just not familiar enough with them yet to have full confidence.  Once confidence is up though, there are a solid dozen cables to make up that will really make a huge difference in the feel of the setup of this Goat.  Obviously the photo to the right is of the temporary setup with a cable clamp.

(this post is for you Walt)