Friday, June 21, 2013

Power on, Jim. Power on, Steve. :fistbump:


The battery was waiting when I got home, an Odyssey PC680.



Don't know what it is about Einar, but he always shows up at the right time. Sunday Jim and I had unpacked the nose and prepped the frame, and I had literally said "This is when Einar usually shows up." when him and Craig walked in. It took all four of us to carefully move the avionics from the crate to the nose.



The cockpit is really coming together. Beautiful. 

 

We've had a steady stream of visitors, here Merrill Wien stops by to chat. Local SeaRey builders Ken and Mike also came up.

 

Jim's supplies arrived, and the doctor laid out his tools 



Thanks for bringing the Florida sunshine too, Jim!


 
I started working on Ken Berger's ball bearing modification for the aileron torque tube.



Time to power up. The services of the BLI AFFS were not required, they were just cruising the airport and stopped by to say hello. The electrical install went in easily, but Jim uses some proprietary parts and techniques to build and mount his electrical system so I won't be publishing any photos of the install.



Configuring the Dynon System. Engineers want to make it complicated, but after thousands of hours in glass cockpit airplanes I know the Simple is Better, and I'm getting rid of as much extraneous information on the display as I can.



The three most common things said in a glass cockpit are "What's it doing? Why is it doing it? How do we stop it?" 



Moving on, a big reason I brought Jim out was to check over my work. I had a feeling I had not put the boom tube low enough in the hull, and I was right. We had to undo everything,



pry the boom tube up



and cut the transom down another 3/8". Better to have too much material than have cut it down too far. 


 
 Much better. Embarrassing, but fixable.




Some fine tuning of the turtledeck. Trim the lower edge of the carpet off 



and a little off the bottom edge



for a perfect fit. How many clecos is enough? However many it takes. 





With the turtledeck in place it's time to move on to the brackets inside.



 Attention to detail: beveling the holes in the aluminum/ply/aluminum arch sandwich.




I've also been making slow progress on the bearings. Here the sleeves are in place with a bit of sleeve retainer, and left to dry overnight. We may just be covering the wings Saturday.