Com1 Antenna Doubler

I am going to put COM1 under the left rear passenger seat and COM2 on (or behind) the cabin top. I built a doubler for COM1 but need to wait until my wife gets home so I can shoot the rivets. I did have an annoying slow down on this one. I ran out of 6d nails for use with the dimpler dies (the ones you use with a blind rivet puller). So I had to run to ace hardware for some 6d nails for the plane. (I just like saying I had to run to the store to get some nails for the plane).

Static System

Everyone seems to put their static system up the left side of the plane. That probably makes sense, because my pitot and AOA tubes will be coming out of the left wing and it would be nice to keep all three tubes in the same run. As I was routing everything though I did not really like how the run was looking. The left side of the plane has the baggage door, so you are forced to drop down to under the rear baggage floor and seat following the battery cable. I went back and forth in an internal debate on this for more time than I care to share. I think ultimately I am going to make the static run up the right side of the plane to not have to drop under the floor. I ordered some clickbonds and will make the decision when they show up.

Cabin Top drilling

One of the things that I really have been looking forward to. Match drilling the cabin top holes to the fuselage!

Cable conduit runs

A lot of people use the blue 1" cable conduit from HomeDepot, and for some reason, every home depot in my area is showing a stock of 4 or 5 rolls and not a single home depot could actually locate the items. I finally found some 1" black lightweight conduit on amazon.

I ended up punching some 1.5 inch holes in my ribs to accept some locking grommets that I ordered off of McMaster (5269T62). On top of that, I had ordered some nylon 1" cable clamps from SteinAir to lock all of the conduit along the ribs.

Sorry for all of the fiberglass dust. You can imagine the other section that I am currently working on.

Beringer Wheels

If you drill back a couple of months in the blogs you will see that I picked up a full Beringer set of wheels and brakes. I finally got around to getting my nose wheel duracoated (yeah, I still have a bunch of duracoat left over so I am using it in any location that is going to get really dirty).

SB08-6-1 (Part 2)

A couple of weekends ago I realized that I had fallen into the trap where I have too many active 50% complete sections going on. One of the first ones that I had been putting off was the Service Bulletin 08-6-1. A couple of months ago, I drilled out all of the deck rivets and got access to start drilling out the doublers. Everything was at the point where I could finish up the drilling, deburring, priming, and riveting.

Match drilling the doublers.



Starting to rivet the doublers in place.


A couple of months ago I picked up a CP alligator rivet squeezer. I really had no use for it, at the time, but I ended up winning it for $45. While the rest of my air tools are Sioux, I guess I can live with some older solid CP tools in the box.

Anyways, the top row of rivets could not be squeezed with any of the yolks I had. The angles were just not right. I was going to hit these with the gun, but I was able to squeeze all the rivets with the alligator squeezer.



A couple more rivets and the deck can go on!

Initial Cabin Top Fitting

My father was around for fathers day and I had the day off. What better way to spend it than taking the cabin top down from the ceiling and getting its initial fitup done! I am happy to say that with a fair bit of sanding and cutting everything fits perfectly. I know everyone has horror stories of dealing with fiberglass, but I found it to cut like butter with the right tools (25K 3M cutoff disks) and a dust mask.