29, January 2015

Worked 2 more hours tonight just chugging away on crossmembers. Not hard, just tedious.  Usually tack welding these in place is easy but tonight I experienced a "senior moment" and blew a hole through the thinner stuff pretty bad. Will have a good amount to fill during final weld....sigh...  Cut and fit cross members between upper stations 4&5 and 5&6 as well as tacked them in. I also tacked the rearmost cross piece at station 6.  You can get a pretty good idea of how cramped my space is here. The nice part is... I don't have to go far to get anything or do anything!  Total time = 108.5 hours

Jan 25, 2015
Got a sold evening of fabricating under my belt. 4.5 hours of putting cross braces across the upper longerons.  Again, using the laser level tool I bought - it was easy to make sure the upper longerons were centered correctly while tacking the cross braces in place.
Total time 106.5 hours

January 23rd, 2015

Worked 2 hours tonight on the three cross tubes between lower longerons stations 3 and 4. Tack welded these in as well as re-tacking between stations 4 and 5. I've come to realize that on average it takes me about one hour to cut/fit and tack each tube in, no matter how long it is.

Total time - 102 hours.

Playing catchup! I have in fact been working on the Sport Trainer and made some decent progress since my last blog. Below are pictures, I'm now back in the groove of working about an hour per night. Have learned lots about cutting/trimming all the tubing to fit. One of the best purchases I made is a laser pointer/leveling device used for home projects - it's great for making sure the fuselage is leveled.  It has 90 degree cross beams as well so I can confirm height of upper longhorns is the same without moving the leveling device.

I did purchase the Super Sport plans adaption from Wag Aero as well. I stumbled on a 0-time Lycoming 0-290D for a very good price and grabbed it. This means I've got additional supports I've got to add.

 One interesting thing about this project, the more you read the plans, the more stuff you find. Stuff is just buried in them and it takes hunting to find it - not at all like my Sonex project was.

It takes more time setting up jigs than anything else. Once the jigs are setup, cutting and notching tubing goes quickly and tack welding just takes a couple of seconds.  For the most part I notch with aviation snips for the .035" tubing and an angle grinder for the .049" thicker stuff.  One item I learned - don't make big tack welds!  You WILL have to cut stuff out where you find you screwed up. Tack welds should not be more than 1/4" long at most. Also, the stations between upper and lower longerons are different - don't get confused between them.  I did drill 1/8" holes in my lower and upper longhorns where the tubing intersects. It will allow for the linseed oil to flow through it for corrosion protection later on, and it also gives a vent for hot gasses when welding so that you don't get "volcano's" from hot gas blow outs.

Below is a slew of pictures since last year's update.  Yes, as you can see, I'm in a tight build area in my basement. I did build my entire Sonex/Waiex in here though - so it can be done!

Total time invested since my last update is almost exactly 60 hours. That brings my total time on this project to 100 therapeutic hours - including table build and other misc. stuff.