10/3/2011

The Show Plane Makes Its Debut!

Wow, talk about a long time since the last update. Since the last one in March, a massive amount of effort has been put in and the bird has officially been debuted in the public eye. From March to June, to get it done in time, I was actually staying up to 1-2 am every morning working on it, every day of every week, and then getting up to go to work at 6 am, all of this while my wife was finishing Law School, and then starting to cram for the Bar exam. In hindsight, this time was just a blur. But, there are those times, when the best way to get'r'done, is to just plow on through. This update has a bunch of photo's, so enjoy. Also, this is not the end of the project by a long shot. I've got probably about another 2 years or so, before I think I'll be done, so continue to stay tuned for updates.

These first 2 photos show some of the work on the rivets that went on under the black and the clear coat, so that you'd get that just so subtle rivet look under the paint. I got pretty good at doing these by the end…. about 1000 per hour. When I was finished, there were over 104,000 rivets put on the plane !?!?!!!

The next 2 photo's show some of the work related to putting on what little color the plane has, the red 'No Step' stripe.

Once the painting was finished, it was time to start installing equipment. Here is a shot, looking at what the main landing gear look like when they are stowed away, plus all the wiring coming from the aft section.

This shows an area in the aft section of the right nacelle. The top servo goes to the full flying rudder. The 2 on the right are ganged together, to run the outboard elevator. They are connected with titanium links and carbon rods with titanium ends. There are a total of 50 pounds of force available to the end of the pushrod, being delivered through a bearing on to the elevator.

The main equipment tray.

Once all of the equipment was installed, it turned out to require 2.5 pounds of lead in the nose to balance. That was actually really great news, because the cockpit has not even been started, so when it's done, it will almost remove all of the lead weight.

The rest of the photos are a walk around from test flight day. I got 2 great test flights in on this day. As the Summer went on, I got 5 flights in at Kentucky Jets, where we debuted the plane in public, 4 more flights at the Jet World Masters, in Dayton, OH, 4 flights at Minnesota jets, and 3 flights at Route 66 jets, in Litchfield, IL. That makes for a total of 18 flights this year. As the Summer went by, I learned and improved on some of the systems, and started adding some of the goodies to the plane. In the next update I'll get into those details, and also give you a hint on the remaining extras going on it as well.

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