Lindy
3/22/2009
Today's shop time started out good...then went downhill...I'll get to that in a second. Last night I ran over to Carl's house to pick up a sheet of .032 AL to make the fuse block plate. He has a bunch of left over stock from an abandoned hat rack project for his 9A. After I cut the plate out, I drilled the hinge to it.
Then I hung it in position to mark the fastener locations on the bottom of the panel.
Another thirty minutes later, and I had the fasteners in place.
The only bad thing I see from this type of fastener is a possibility of someone hitting their knees on one of them. The panel is high enough that it won't be an issue in flight, but getting in and out, they could come in play. Works very well none-the-less.
Then I installed the diode that will connect the two busses on the plate, and set the blocks in place for a pic.
It was at this point that I realized a mistake, and the downhill slide began. Look at the picture above again...you can barely see the hole on the panel that I had previously drilled for the air vent on this side, between and below the top fastener and it's reflection. When I took that picture, I realized what I had done...how in the world am I gonna get air to the vent with the block plate in the way??? The vent inlet off the side of the fuselage is below this plate. After stewing about this for a while, there's only one possibility that *should* work to allow me to still use that hole...run the air vent in a loop off the NACA vent behind the sub-panel, the thru the sub-panel above the diode, then over the fuse blocks to the vent. I may run in to interference though with the fuses and wires coming off the blocks...we'll see. Not to happy about this right now.
While I think about that some more, I went ahead and cut out the hole for the vent on the left side. I had to make a small adjustment to this one (relative to the right vent, symmetrically) to avoid the Enigma's flange, but it's a small adjustment that can't be seen. I am using used vents that came out of a Piper Aztec, but they are in good shape, and the price was right.
I DO have a problem on this side too though...the ring used to secure the vent was unaccounted for when locating the hole, and was too big to fit between the vent and the bottom panel ledge. So, I had to cut off part of the securing ring to get in in place, AND I'm also going to have a tough time clamping SCAT tubing to the vent due to the very small amount of flange coming thru the panel. I'll figure something out...this is a small problem compared to the other side, but it will have this same issue.
3.75 hours