In the morning Elizabeth and I managed to lift the fuselage off its work bench. It was about the maximum of weight I could manage and I was glad that I had to move it just a few feet to get it cleared and let it down.
After that I had another artistic episode. Remember my artsy fuel line bendings in the fuel line installation section? Well, this was even better! I could bend large sculptures free hand this time. I'm talking about the brake line installation.
The cutting and flaring part was harmless yet.
In deviation from the plans, I started bending the circular 360 degree bend around the brake calipers and the gear leg. After I had an idea how to get this done and I had an angle to follow the gear leg, I installed the opposite end in the tunnel. It needed a bend in there too to clear the gear leg hardware.
The left brake line was rather long and I had to add some curves to "burn" the excess length.
The same artistic bending procedure was done to the right side.
The cable ties and plastic tubes were added and tightened but that rather disturbs the otherwise nice looks. I moved on to mount the nose gear leg. 13 AN3 bolts had to get inserted and torqued. I started by adding two temporary AN3 bolts on the front of the firewall which helped keeping the leg in place while I was inserting the correct bolts from the bottom.
The work on the nose fork was a bit tricky because I wanted to avoid having to take this all apart again in section 36 when installing the wheel pants. So I looked ahead and figured out what changes they wanted me to make to the fork while generally following section 35.
The first step was to countersink nutplate attach holes and rivet the nutplates in place.
This was followed by more countersinking to rivet on the little plates on the inside of the fork. I also put the AN5 bolt and the stack of washers in place.
That's when I hit a road block in form of a missing tool. The plans asked for a 5/16"-24 tap and my toolkit obviously didn't contain that. It was 4pm and beginning rush hour so I held off on driving to the hardware store and instead built my HP shop crane for the engine installation.
It's in its folded configuration in this picture. I hope this will make the One-Man-Rotax-Installation easier.
Two hours later I drove to the store and got my tap and continued section 35.
I tapped the two holes and inserted the screws but my happiness about continuing was short lived. I hit another major roadblock. This time in the form of a missing part. I went through the inventory lists over and over and couldn't find a hint of it. U-611 the two disc springs were the pieces missing. I started to clean up the shop and after searching for more than an hour I finally found them. It was passed sunset at that point and there was no point in trying to finish the next step.
Instead I got everything ready for an early start in the morning. I packed the bronze bearing with AeroShell #22 grease and laid out all the necessary parts.
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