Sat Jan 31 2009

Fitting gear weldments

Yesterday, I picked up my parts from the powder coater. They came out great. I went ahead and had the seat belt brackets re-powder coated since I had to trim some of them. I also had the brake fluid reservoir powder coated.

The powder coater I used uses Sherwin Williams powder. Van's uses Cardinal. We were able to find a color that was a pretty good match. The bracket on the left is Sherwin Williams number RAL7047 and the bracket on the right is Cardinal number T009GR230. They're close enough for my preference.

I also received my shipment of extra nutplates and screws from Vans. These will be used to attach the baggage floors. I wish my 5/32 clecos would arrive so I could do all that drilling and get Brent's nutplate drilling jig back to him.

In the mean time I decided to work on cutting the holes for the gear leg weldments to protrude through. Here I've just drilled a couple starter holes with the unibit.

After some work with the die grinder and a burr I had the hole roughed out, but found it difficult to get the weldment to fit through the hole.

After some investigation, I think I've found the problem. The bolts which hold the correct spacing between the forward and aft halves of the F-704 bulkhead stick through the front of the bulkhead. This is handy for temporarily bolting the gear weldment in place, but it's a problem because the gear weldment can't slide in along the angle of the gear socket. It's hard to explain, but basically I'm going to have to remove these spacers to be able to fit the weldments in and out.