Door Strut: Making a drill guide

The aftermarket door strut brackets that accept the McMaster seals are really well designed and look great, however they have a lot of angles to deal with during the installation. Additionally, the cabin top also have a lot of fillets to work around. If those angles are not followed exactly, you will never get the screws to line up unless you oversize the holes. To aid in this task I decided to make a (2 time use) drill guide to get all of the holes in alignment. I say 2-time use, because I did not have the patience to wait for mcmaster to send me a tool hardened drill guide so I sacrificed a #10 screw to make a set of #40 pilot holes in the cabin top.

Getting the bracket and screw in alignment.
 


Taking off the screw head and finding the screw center.



Putting a #41 hole through the center.


Thankfully everything was tramed and came out center.


Drill guide in use.


Don't mind the positioning of the actual bracket, there is still some fiberglass to take off of the edge.

Beringer brake assembly

Today was a cold rainy day, so Mackenzie and I sat by the fire and assembled the Beringer brakes.



Everything went together as expected with the exception of a part number labeled AV-VANS-016. This appears to be a wheel fairing bracket spacer, but it was neither in the install instructions nor does it appear to fit anywhere logical. It is the same height as the standard spacers but the spacers do not step down in hole size in order to accept the caliper assembly the way that the AV-VANS-013A spacers do (leaving a lot of play in the caliper to AN-4 bolt).

*Edit: There are new assembly instructions on the web, which call out the usage of AV-VANS-016 rather than AV-VANS-013A. I have to give them a call on this one. The AV-VANS-016 look good, and are I am guessing the preferred install as they give more support to the wheel fairing (a known problem). However, the AV-VANS-013 have a turn down on them adapt the caliper hole size to the AN-4 hardware. 

Engine Arrival

I owe so many posts that still need to be edited, but this one is quick and easy. The Engine is here! I ended up going with a Thunderbolt. They were a dream to work with. I will post more as I get it opened and mounted.

Firewall Passthroughs

With the engine delivery nearing, I need to stop messing around and get my firewall ready! My punch list has a bunch of open things on it to include:

• Lavashield heat barrier
• Oil Cooler bracket
• Control Cable pass-throughs
• Power Cable pass-through
• Universal Pass-through
• Engine mount

I was able to knock off two of those things today, I started with the power cable passthrough. I purchased a firewall pass-through from summit racing a couple months ago and it was finally time to install it.



I used the stock location, but if I were to do this again I would use the factory hole, but push the location up and to the pilots right a bit. There is a doubler in this location, and while I was able to avoid running into it, I will have to fab a washer for the interior so the nut it sits flush. I drilled this to about 3/4 of an inch, then pulled out a carbide burr to take care of the rest. Yes, those are straight sides as that is the anti-rotation design from the pass-through.

I was also able to take care of my cable control pass throughs. Like the power connector, I purchased some eyeball passthroughs a couple of months ago. In all honesty, I have been putting off installing them because I was not sure how I wanted to lay them out. I finally decided to just put them in because it would be a complete pain to do this later.



There are three holes by default. I split the difference on the two left holes and these holes disappeared after I drilled the 1 1/8 hole for the eyeball.



That left the right hole off center but complete within the second eyeball cutout.





I placed the holes such that the backing plates were sided by side and touching. This was the decision point on where to put the third eyeball. I really wanted to put it to the right of the other two so that they were all on the same plane. If I were to do it again, I would probably do it that way. It looks like the control cables will all three line up nicely if you were to put them in the standard same plane configuration like the default setup. However, I was worried there there was some interference from something I needed to install in the future because every photo I have seen of an RV-10 firewall everyone seems to avoid the right mid part of this box...?



Yes, these plates are on backwards right now. These are not installed, I was just trying to find where to put the third passthrough. I ultimately decided on putting it lower than the previous two. It seemed to fit nicely in there. I guess I will find out when I go to install my control cables if this was a good idea or not ;) Hopefully I will remember to come back and update this post when I get that far.







I wanted to keep this paper in my files, but I was too lazy to walk it inside, and too impatient to have it just laying around. So I will archive it here for later.

Fathers day

I forgot to post this the other month. This was from fathers day. My dad helping me do the finishing kit inventory!

Trim motor connectors

I originally was going to take the stein air approach to the trim motor connectors and just use some heatshrink and dsub connectors to build a removable connection to the trim motors. That was until I started working on the horizontal stablizer service bulletin. If I ever had to service one of the connections in the tail, I quick realized how big of a pain in the butt it was going to be. I decided on the following series connectors for tail and wing connections. (EDAC Connectors)

Thankfully I have some fairly nice Molex crimpers ;)

I need to start documenting these things, but for my own future reference: Orange, White, Green, White, Blue.

The wires were bare, so I protected the wires with some standard expandable sleeving.

 The assembled connector.

Organizational skills

I spent a good 2 hours the other day going through every washer that I had looking for 2 washers for the nosewheel axle. I broke down and was about to order them off of vans when in a last ditch effort to establish sanity I pulled out my inventory sheet. Low and behold, the washers that I could not find were B/O ordered on my last kit purchase!!!