Are you a turtle?

 Home very briefly, coming home it sprinkled. I was even wearing a sweatshirt in the hangar in the morning...

A unique aircraft built by a unique man was in transient parking the other day, Dick Rutan's Berkut. 

The floor pan mod has been straightened out, I've seen the draft of what we're trying to do and if the guys can pull it off it's going to be really cool. A small touch that will hardly be noticeable, but small touches add up. Especially when they don't add weight. I can't wait to see it completed.


First was to touch up some loose spots on the carpet with more glue and a syringe. The Weldwood glue gets glopped in the ziplock bag, an end snipped off and from there into the syringe.I had been worried about too much glue, I shouldn't have been. (I didn't have my regular camera with me, cameraphones are getting better but some of the photos in this entry still aren't as good as usual.)

I spent the rest of the day doing more work fitting the turtledeck. Getting to spend the day with the guys last week crawling over 2 SeaReys was incredibly useful, and answered a fit question I had, allowing me to carefully finish fitting it to the boom tube. I didn't want to cut too much off but you want the turtledeck sitting right on the boom tube, who'd have thunk you could (very carefully) stand on the boom tube through the aft fuselage to work on the engine?

I found it easier to just remove the bulkhead angles and fit the aft curve of the deck in the proper position, over the hole for the wing drag wires, I'll reinstall the bulkhead angles after the hull has been mated.

Measure once, cut twice. Or is that vice versa? Comparing the factory marks on the turtledeck to what's called for in the manual, when there's a difference you just gotta grit your teeth and hope for the best. All of this ridge will be hidden under the pylon, but my precision side hates it when measurements conflict, and I'm usually building on the west coast after 2pm when the factory is closed on the east coast at 5pm, so I can't call and get advice.

It usually works out in the end, though. The delays of the floor pan have actually been a blessing making me get a lot of other work done. Maybe there's a reason things happen in the order they do, after all....

While messing around last year I found a problem; the torque tube plate was slightly off, resulting in the aileron torque tube (fuselage) being misaligned. It could not be forced back into place without severe binding of the controls, so something had to be done. It's a big chunk of metal that would be hard to bend precisely with my limited tools, the solution drove me up the wall over the winter. At the Garner's Landing fly-in this year I mentioned this to another builder who had the same problem, and he shared his solution. 

The solution is to rivet a 3/64" shim in place, tilting the plate backward and resulting in perfect alignment.

 

 

That took all day but the tube floats in the bearings just beautifully now.