June 9th, 2013

Sad week last week. My sister in law's father, John D Hall, USAF retired, passed away May 31st. He was a pilot and Vietnam Veteran with over 750 combat hours in an OV-10 Bronco. He is survived by Linda, his wife of 47 years, 4 brothers and sisters, 4 children, Heidi, John, Jason and Jeff, and 5 grandchildren. We'll miss you John.


 This week I started on the F751 and F652 bulkheads. These are the corrugated vertical panels that cover the back of the baggage compartment. When I was first looking at it and measuring the drawings, it seemed like an 8" radius circle would be about perfect for cutting the upper edge of the F652 bulkhead.

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I often read and look over the plans while eating lunch, and I noticed on one sheet that Van's specified a radius for the cut which I'd overlooked the first time. I'd already laid out the curve from my template, so I made a simple 8 1/2" radius trammel for my sharpie pen to compare them.

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The difference in the curve was so small (especially with the difficulty of getting a decent curve inside the corrugations) that I ended up using the line I'd already drawn. Once I had the curves cut and finished, I clamped & clecoed it into the fuse to make sure it all fit and there was sufficient edge distance all around for the nutplates.

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June 2nd, 2013

We've been doing the annual on our Cherokee the last few weeks so I haven't had much time to work on the  RV.

As I started working on the baggage compartment floors I realized this and the seat pan area were getting ready to be sealed for good.  I know I want to put at least one comm antenna on the belly, and probably two.  That got me to looking at the floors, good spots, etc.  While I was doing that I realized there was some unfinished business, namely the seat belt anchors, bolt/spacer where the rear spar will attach, and I also missed the rivets at the aft end of the outboard seat ribs.  Went ahead and took care of those and final torqued the bolts.

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Lousy shot, but it shows the seat rib that needed riveted and the attach bolt and spacer where the rear wing spar will install later.

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As I was looking over the forward removable seat skins, I noticed I did not install nutplates on the outboard ribs (no idea why I decided to do that unless I misread the plans - I'd already done all the others when prepping the ribs originally).  At any rate, I went ahead and did those.

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After looking around at various RVs and thinking about how I wanted to do the antennas, I still haven't decided on my final plan, but I did decide to make the left baggage floor removable so that if I want to put an antenna in that area I will be able to.  Turned out to be a lot of nutplates to do that, but I feel more comfortable having the option if I decide to go that way.  I put a K1100-08 or a 21051-L08 nutplate at nearly every rivet location.

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The right side F747-R baggage floor skin was installed conventionally.  It takes about 10-15 minutes to do it this way, and I'd guess about 4 hours to do it so it is removable.

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Left F747-L baggage floor after finishing all the nutplates and screwing it down about half way.  Works great and I think I will be glad I did it this way.

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Time to finish the aft baggage compartment wall/skins.  The upper skin needs some work before it can be match drilled and installed.  The top edges need to be radiused first.  After looking at it and doing some measuring I concluded an 8" radius would be perfect.  I poked around and found a 16" pie pan, made a paper template from it and quartered it.  That will be my cutting template once I verify that it looks reasonable.

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The lower baggage compartment wall is more or less finished, just needs to be match drilled to the upper part of the F706 bulkhead.  I'll start that once I get the top skin trimmed to shape.

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