Mmmm... Spaghetti....

To do, you must undo. So with a fresh blade in my X-acto knife, and a mostly steady hand, it's been time to take wiring bundles apart. The replacement of some avionics necessitated the rearrangement of the layout, meaning wires had to be re-run, so the bundles had to be taken apart and redone.

You don't want to know how many times I've rearranged those cardboard cutouts. Thought I had it all laid out, only to find out the wires did not reach, or were in each others way, or... Since once of the purposes of this redo is to make it more easily field reparable, I'm taking a lot of time to pretend "Ok, this broke. How can I get to it?"

Hire the best, then get out of their way.

Our schedules finally matched up and TJ made it out to help bend metal.

A local pilot owns a boat building shop. There was a sign inside I loved, it said "No smoking, no loafing. State your name, you job, and GET OUT. We have work to do." 

It was unbelieveable how fast those guys did what would have taken me all day or more to do half as well.

"What can I do to help?"
 "Leave."
"Ok."

 An hour later he was packing his tools, the new mount was perfectly fitted, and the gunslinger was on the way to the next town. I'm undoing the lacing in preparation for rearranging the wire bundles.The cardboard pieces are mockups of the various black boxes that will be fitted. CAD/CAM is great, but sometimes it's better just to have a physical piece of something to move around and check with.

TJ also left me with some other work. Though he trusted my glassing job, he hinted that he'd really like to see a 4" layer of glass around the bulkhead, just to be safe. No worries, I'm getting good at glassing again. 

He also pointed out how little of the bow reinforcement plate was actually touching the hull, so I made up a slurry and glassed the plate in place. 

Time to pay the piper, off to work I go for the next few weeks, but on the way I could not resist stopping and seeing the 737Max parking lot.

.....

A lot of small steps

The control surfaces are in the paint shop.

After much trimming, I finally felt that I had a good fit for the bulkhead and cut one out. Another kitbuilder at the airport had some extra glass layups from his kit and kindly donated a piece to OspRey. 

Note the mockup battery. I finally got wise and made it out of scrap wood, allowing me to fit the 16# battery without being terrified of dropping it and breaking the hull. 

Tack the bulkhead into place with 5 min epoxy, and wait for it to dry.

Then make fillets. I was doing this on a Friday afternoon and plannig to work through the weekend when I realized I should check my supply stock. Sure enough, my big can of resin had crystallized, but luckily, Fiberglass Supply is just across the airport from me. A quick run over and I had a fresh can, ready for the weekend.

They say a perfect fillet should be the radius of a tongue depressor. I ran out but discovered a quarter was also perfect. 

The next morning I refreshed my fiberglassing skills and sealed the bulkhead in with 2 layers of glass: a 1" strip over the fillet, followed by a 2" strip over everything. 

Nothing secret, just keeping the avionics from getting accidentally glassed.

Jim is going to freak when he sees this. Because of some new equipment that would not fit on the old tray, we've pulled the avionics tray he so carefully built and are building another one.

Next steps will be to design and fabricate the new tray, rerun the wiring, and continue working on the new panel. All good...



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