I ended up picking a used floor standing drill press for $200 I'm going to take up your advice and pick up a new belt for it to smooth out some of the vibration on the motor.
I do have a pneumatic die grinder which is the same size as a hand held dremel that I was planning on using. After I had $2000 bucks of eletric power tools stolen I've been slowly replacing my collection with air powered tools.
Here's a tip to determine where to cut the hole in your lower cowl for the exhaust stack exit. The problem is a typical "Catch 22". You can't mount the muffler with an uncut cowl in place, and without the muffler in place, you have no idea where to mark the cowl.
Raise the tail on a stand and chock the wheels. Get yourself two pieces of PVC pipe, one that slips over the exhaust stack, and another small enough to slip inside the larger pipe and slide telescope style. Now, mount the muffler and attach the larger PVC pipe to the exhaust stack. Next, slide the smaller pipe downward until it touches the hangar floor, and glue it in place with a glob of hot melt. Now sliding the larger tube down out of the way, remove the muffler, reattached the cowl and slide the PVC pipe back up until it touched the bottom of the cowl. Draw around the pipe where it meets the cowl, and presto! You've got a perfectly marked cowl.
Not a must have, but without a doubt the most frequently used tool I own is the expander wheel from Eastwood. It mounts on a typical bench grinder motor. It is very useful for deburring outside edges on tubing, fittings or sheet metal. I will also use it to debur holes in steel. The bands last almost forever and the older they are, the finer the finish on the metal. I've had mine for almost thirty years. Vhttp://www.eastwood.com/expander-wheel.html
There are a few reports of seat pans cracking at the front lip. To prevent the seat from dropping and possibly interfering with the aileron push rod many builders install wood supports. The supports are sized to just touch the bottom of the seat pan. By bonding to the frame instead of the seat pan, control rod clearance can be checked when making rigging changes.
I installed supports on both sides of the control rod and on both left and right seats. The supports take most of the pressure off the front lip of the seat pan which should prevent cracking.
Even if the seat breaks, it will not contact the control rod.
John Pitkin
Greenville, Texas
Last edited by jtpitkin06; 10-25-2011 at 04:23 PM.
Feeding wires from the instrument panel to the aft fuselage is a challenge. There is very little room in the center cockpit tunnel with few places to tie anything. Make a chase to keep the wires safely away from control cables and levers.
A sturdy and inexpensive chase is made from thin wall 1 ¼ inch pvc pipe. Make V cuts in the pipe where you needed to make turns leaving a small PVC “hinge”. The hinge keeps the pipe pieces aligned. The best way to close and bond the joints is to use 2 inch Polyfiber tape and glue it down with Polytack. The bond works almost instantly and it is hard as a baseball bat in about 15 minutes.
The 1 ¼ inch pipe has room for lots of wires and coax with room to spare. The inside is smooth without ridges so wires pass though with ease.
Make oval shaped openings in the pipe where wires need to break out of the bundle.
It's best to run the chase on the left side of the tunnel. You will need to dip down a bit to clear the seat pan and then com back up to just left of the rudder cable sheaves.
John Pitkin
Greenville, Texas
Here's the chase before installation. This one has five joints to snake around frame tubing. The opening int the pipe is for the trim control wiring.
When routing Stainless steel cable though eyelets and guides the ends have a tendency to fray. Stop the fraying with a few drops of super glue on the end to keep the individual wires in place. Wipe the end after you apply the glue to smooth the wires.
To cover the ends of wires to guard against "meat hooks" use heat shrink tubing. But what do you do if you already have a ferrule crimped in place? A simple solution is to coat the exposed wire end with hot melt glue. It forms a nice smooth coating that can be molded when it cools a bit. Or simply heat the glue witha heat gun to smooth out any strings or blobs.
This is in reply to Jbonewitz suggestion on locating the exhaust cutout in lower cowling. I just tried his method on my SuperSport and it works perfectly for locating the exhaust pipe hole location. Everything works as advertised and is a very simple process. Thanks for the info.
Good tip John,
Another one that a few of us in the Phx area have used for a wire chase is the 1" drip irrigation hose. It is usually black with a blue stripe, very light and quite flexible.
Rib stitching is not too hard for itself: it is more or less a therapy IF you get the hold on it! And since there are several YouTube films on the internet (and the FAA-films, not to forget) i had lots of help from them.
But most of my learning-process was done on a practice-board: just tie your knots, starterknot, modified- and endknot - and see how it looks!!
Re: Building tips and hints
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