I'd really like to hear from anyone reading this ... I opened up the comments to anyone with or without signing in to whatever account thing this site has. Just a few words of "hello" or "having fun reading" or even "I have a hanger and towplane and a trailer you're welcome to use." I'm just curious who all is reading.

So I caught up on some other pressing stuff around the house & office, so I decided to do a little assembly work this morning. Notably, I installed the elevator control line pulleys sometime earlier this week while it was raining.

Now, I also made the control linkage part to connect the sliding tube to the elevator itself. Well, um, there is no elevator per-se. I haven't yet bent the 3/8" tubes to make up the trailing edge for the elevator. Despite this, the elevator leading edge is done and hinged. So it's a little anti-climactic. But now I have another moving part!

The bottom of the control linkage shows off more of the temporary work back here. The marine pulleys from Harken are rather smooth and very nice actually. They'll do much better with larger line. The control tube guides will also do much better when they're bonded to the structure with epoxy and cabosil. The foam anti-twist supports will be nicer too without the wrap of electrical tape, so look out for that to happen when I mix up some big batch for doing ribs in the next month.

Speaking of ribs, I did a little work during the last snow storm to attach the horizontal stabilizer to the vertical tail, necessitating some filing of aluminum and using the die set from Harbor Freight.

That's all for now!

Harbor Freight is my friend

I have heard the name Harbor Freight before, but hadn't ever really looked into them. With the snow finally plowed enough to get out, venturing to Harbor Freight was on the list! Their prices on tools I have bought before were generally half what I paid ... meaning a half-hour drive to the store is worth the savings. I bought several random things, including a tap & die set to make the quick-pins for Goat. I already modified the horizontal stabilizer AN3-30A bolt to accept two lock-nuts (low profile ones) and trimmed it to 1-1/8" long. Now my previously jury-rigged bolt actually stays in by itself! I was thinking hard about getting a drill press for making all those sheet metal parts a bit easier, eventually deciding against it since I'm almost done making those kinds of parts, heh.

In other news, I started a jig to re-bend the keel tube. I have to find some fine-grained sand to stuff the tube before I try to bend it this time. I have been told that will dramatically help reduce the kinking, along with a good jig of course.

No pictures this time.

I did give a go at sleeping inside that igloo by the way. Unfortunately, I didn't put in a secondary vent hole, relying simply on the main entrance for ventilation. After about two hours outside, I woke up extremely light-headed and abandoned it... I was quite warm, I think my CO2 was just not escaping enough without that vent. DOH.

An igloo?

Goat is waiting in line behind some RC projects right now ... and then it snowed ~20" today, so we made an igloo in the front yard. Oh yeah :-)

It's big enough inside that I can crouch on my feet and we can get two adults inside. I'm seriously debating sleeping inside just to be EXTREME! Actually, if I kept dry, I'm sure it would be fairly comfortable inside. While digging it out, you could see steam leaving the entrance from body heat melting the snow. Despite being soaking wet from working several hours on it, the temperature change (or at least getting rid of wind chill) is noticeable. Ah, the insulating power of water!

If I had to do it again, I would buy a snow shovel first.

A little snowy work

Finally I beat a stomach bug ... four inches of snow meant staying inside and getting a little work done on Goat.

These are the aft control line guides from G4T14. I have yet to put in the 1/4" spacers, instead simply using a washer to give just enough space for the temporary control line. I think they look pretty slick :-)

I also worked a tad on the rudder, evening up the control throw stops so now the rudder pedals feel more balanced. I'm a bit taken back at the short stroke of the pedal for full ~30deg of rudder deflection. An easy fix will be to lengthen the control arm on the rudder to suit. What should a "normal" stroke for the pedal be (let's say measured at my toes)?

So what's next?
* 8' of 1/4" x 0.035" tubing for the vertical tail internal struts
* peel ply for horizontal stabilizer rib LE and TE wraps for securing the ribs
* redo the bolt hole in the upper vertical tail tube (one hole is out of line with the other, hmmm)
* elevator linkage for inside the vertical tail
* finally do the two cabane replacement tubes
* measure the nose keel bend, make a jig, and bend a new keel without kinks
* 1-1/8" x 0.058" x 20" and 1" x 0.035" x 20" to redo the main structural member from G4N1
(ouch) ... the holes for the cabane pins are not orthogonal as one expects from View D G4N2.

Marine hardware: check

I placed an order with Berkley Point for some hardware ... in fact for pretty much all the marine hardware. A good price break on 25 quick-links made that an easy choice and saved hundreds compared to West Marine. The steel rings are pretty cool and the snap hooks are quite pretty. I dropped in six quick links in the nose section alone. Next for some more cleanup of the nose section, including a new keel and a new structural carry-through since the last one actually wasn't drilled orthogonal as the G4N1 drawing suggests.

Rudder pedals with some control lines

I found some time and worked on the rudder pedals a bit this weekend. First, a suggestion from a friend was to get some 6063 bar stock from a local place for easier bending for the rudder pedals. This worked and was a lot less cutting than the 2" wide piece of bar stock I have been making all my parts from. About an hour after cutting the two pieces to length, I had them both bent (using a spare drill bit to make the bend radius) and then spent some time getting the pieces mounted to the pedals and symmetric left and right. Then I made the little support pieces from 1/4" x 0.035" tube to triangulate the structure.

Here is an overview picture of the control rigging. The piece of white going from the pedals to the nose bolt is just string and will get replaced by some 3/16" shock cord, per plans. For now, it's just providing some resistance so the pedals don't fall over!

The elevator rigging is about how it'll be. I still need to get some larger washers to hold in the turn-around pulleys mounted in the center of the photo. I only had some small AN washers on hand.

Anyhow, yeah the control rigging is coming along nicely. Here is a closeup of the line guides on the control rod tube and the front seat tube. In earlier photos, I had the elevator line guides on the bottom of the tube, before I realized they went on top. I just flipped around that tube :-)

I also put in a little plastic end cap in the aileron torque tube, you can see on the right middle of the picture. I liked how the plastic caps dressed up the front and other tubes, so I sampled one that would fit in this location. Much prettier!

One more thing. My homebuilder buddy has made custom seats for other folks using foam bases. I'm hoping we can get together to fit the space better and be a bit more secure than the parachute cord version.

One other thing. I put in an order for 25 quick-links, several 2" marine snap hooks, and a few stainless steel rings. They should get here middle of next week. Cool, hardware!

Two rudder pedals installed

I had a pair of pair of pieces (4 total) to attach the first rudder pedal. Tonight I whipped up 4 more to attach the second rudder pedal. Now both of my pedals are riveted to their hinge pieces and are mounted on the eye bolts. Cool. Now I need to make the long 9" u-shaped piece that makes a place to capture my shoes and attach the control lines too. All in good time...

Here is an image of putting the hinge supports on. The holes are match drilled by using a cleako and a clamp after the first one and then replacing the clamp with another cleako. This way I'm assured that the holes are all aligned when I install rivets.