Bandsaw

Few good steps forward this weekend.

Bought a used bandsaw ... finally.  It is a reasonably new Craftsman 10" with a rusted deck.  After some steel wool and fluid, it's looking pretty good.  Ordered a bi-metal blade more appropriate for cutting the aluminum brackets, and I'm up & running.  Thanks Duane!

First part cut was a set of new 3/16" quick-pins.  I was already done with the 1/4" pins, now I'm up to four 3/16" pins.  Think there are 6 more to go total.  Now with the saw, I should knock those all out in an hour.

Final swaging on four internal wing cables ... Trent (who helped with the FEA) came over and we did some measuring to try resolving my uneven wing twist.  We realized the wing internal truss bracing was slipping during the setup and allowing the wing to both parallelogram and twist (explaining the extreme washout last time I assembled it).  So we took everything back apart and carefully jigged & measured the squareness of the left wing alone.  Finally, we very carefully final swaged the first and second truss cables and remeasured everything again.  Perfect under a 1/16th inch.  This sets up the rest of the alignment process.

I also jigged up the right wing to do final swaging before realizing that I am out of thimbles.  Darn.  I borrowed enough from the aft sweep cables to start the left wing, but will have to order more.  Bummer considering I just put in and received an order from Spruce.  Should really go through again and find what more stuff I need.

Reassembly with the newly final-swaged wing cables makes the alignment much more positive.  While there is still some jiggling needed for pinning the struts right now, it's so much more solid once assembled that my confidence level is soaring.  This is going to work great!