Jury struts

Wow much progress.

The new bi-metal, 14tpi band-saw blade arrived.  Makes a huge difference.  Why didn't I invest in a band-saw before?  Cuts straight, fast, and the teeth marks less ragged than the old blade.  It probably also helps that I spent twenty minutes aligning the blade and making sure the line guides weren't too loose.  Now the saw doesn't make tick-tick-tick noises.

So I cut a whole bunch of flat parts one weeknight.

Ten 3/16" quick pins in one evening, oh my.  That was more 3/16" long bolts than I had for the pins, so I had to stop at eight.  I think there are just four more pins to go after these eight.  Really knocking them out.

This weekend has been a jury strut weekend.  First, I put in the sleeves to the forward and aft struts.  Boy are those ever fun.  I measured a dozen times where exactly the sleeve should go (a little different since I added a few inches to the span), and made a circumferential mark around the strut.  Then, I used a straight-edge to find what level is for between the fwd and aft struts.  From here, I drilled one of the two 3/16" holes and made a point to deburr inside of the hole.  Now we're set up. 

Taking the sleeve, I drew a center-line on it.  This piece I slid into the tip-end of the strut and pushed it down slowly with a measured push-stick.  Push until the sleeve centerline arrives at the pre-drilled strut hole. 

Center-punch and drill the sleeve through the strut hole.  Drop in a bolt to maintain alignment, and drill the opposite side of the strut through bolt the strut and the sleeve.  Push the bolt all the way through and call it done.

Now that the jury strut eye-bolts are in-place, I can start the jury struts. 

And I did!

First was to put the plate that spans the fwd and aft tubes.  This should make handling my strut assemblies so much easier!  Feels better too.  Weird to start crimping tubes again after doing all the cable work recently.  And I did a bit of work too on the forward and aft jury struts.  Here they are on the left wing with Clecos holding one end in place.

The string you see will hold the alignment for drilling the diagonal member.  I didn't happen to make the forward jury strut quite long enough for the diagonal-member to attach to it, so I'll have to look at options for that later. 

That's it for this update.  Busy for the next few weekends, so may not be a whole lot of progress for a bit.  Have a whole bunch of wing secondary structure brackets and ribs to make eventually, so might start on that in the evenings.  We'll see.