Re: The Barn Find Build
You're not going to believe this, but I got sidetracked from the project for a few weeks.
I had to get ~6,500 sq ft of landscaping done before the fall rains began and turned the place into a mud hole. I put ~130 plants in the ground, spread 30 cu yds of bark mulch, laid 137 ft of edging brick, excavated a walkway, back-filled and compacted it with 3/4-minus gravel, then topped it with 30 bags of marble chips. It wore me out!
With that done, I finally got back to the Kitfox, but I did a little more shop preparation first. I cleaned out my garage and moved a bunch of auto and power equipment supplies onto some empty shelves in a spare bedroom closet. That cleared a shelving unit in the garage to get airplane parts off the floor. I also moved bulky airplane parts (tail sections, landing gear, windshield, cowling halves, etc.) into the spare bedroom for storage (being a single guy has one or two advantages...).
Next I built a workbench to hold a 6" vise and bench grinder that I got for a song at an industrial auction, as well as a new drill press and disc/belt sander (cheapie Chinese, but surprisingly well built). The bench is made from 2x4s held together with Simpson Strong-Tie brackets, which produced a remarkably solid frame. The top is a layer of 3/4" particle board and a layer of 3/4" melamine; the lower shelf is just melamine. I bolted the tools down so they don't walk around, and mounted a box with 4-way receptacle under the top to plug the tools into. An old extension cord with the female end chopped off lets me plug in the whole table. Finally, I put retractable caster wheels (from Amazon) on the legs so it can be rolled around, but sits solidly when in use.
[Note, if you're in the market for a disc/belt sander: apart from some plastic parts being orange instead of green, the WEN sander that I bought is identical to the Ryobi unit sold at Home Depot, but is ~$50 cheaper on Amazon.]
With that done, I used some rough-cut lumber that I got free from a friend in the timber business to build wing rotisseries. They're loosely based on the EAA design I posted recently, except I didn't like the widely spaced legs (they looked like a tripping hazard), so mine have a single, central leg. I also didn't see the point of using cable stays to brace the upright, so I used scrap pieces of melamine from the workbench to make gussets instead. My upright posts are 4x4s fabricated from two 2x4s and a piece of 1/2" plywood sandwiched together. I like the EAA design's pivot system, so I'll stick with that. The rotisseries aren't 100% done, as I'm not ready to mount a wing yet; I'll finish them when I do that.
Finally, some progress on airplane parts: I used the new drill press and a #30 drill to remove all of the rivets from the rudder torque tubes. Unsurprisingly, I found that two of the four plastic bushings are unusable due to the first builder ruining them. With the tubes apart, I used a wire wheel and wire cup to remove powder coat from the tube parts in preparation for welding on gussets. I still need to get the tail wheel mount down to bare metal but I'm still on the fence about how to proceed, since the bottom rear half-rib is already bonded in, as is the fiberglass rudder post fairing.
I also spent an hour or so getting one of the brake calipers cleaned up. Fortunately, it looks (and feels) like the cylinder bores cleaned up well enough to make a seal with new o-rings on the pistons. The outside of the caliper bodies are pretty badly pitted, but I think they can be rescued with some chemical cleaning, followed by body filler and silver paint. Perhaps I'll send them to be powder coated, for the sake of durability. TBD...
Today I went up to Tacoma to see Alex's "Project 5" (he's doing very nice work, and coming up with some neat ways to do things), then we both went to visit with Nate to see the AeroMomentum AM15 (117hp) installation in his SS7. I was leaning in that direction before the visit, and I was pretty impressed with what I saw. The engine looks very well put together, and Nate sounds happy with it after ~22 hours of flying.
Nate is the Kitfox beta tester for the AM15, and he's only had a couple of small problems. One was a failed radiator that was attributed to the mounting method, but AeroMomentum provided him with an aluminum cage to mount the replacement, and that feels very solid. The second failure was the loss of a tooth on the crank position sensor reluctor. AeroMomentum said they had never seen one fail before and suspected that the part may have been dropped at some point before installation in Nate's engine. They sent him a new one at no cost. Nate said he's had good support from the factory and joked that if he had called them right then (a Sunday afternoon), they would have answered. Performance-wise, Nate said he's seeing ~2,000 fpm initial climb with his 3-blade Luga pitched at 15.5°.
Alright, time for dinner then back to work!
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by bbs428
