6/27/2006
I lucked out big time one the rudder pedal rails. The holes I drilled in the front line up almost perfectly with the holes in the bottom firewall angle. Had I thought this through before drilling I would have drilled all but the end holes in the rails first and then back drilled the ones on the end. I think the instructions should say to do this. I am only wildly guessing here but maybe the instructions and plans in rudder pedal kit were written at a time when the hole pattern in F-822PP was slightly different.
I need to prime the rails. I will do this when I have enough other parts queued up to justify the setup and cleanup time. I plan to prepare the next prime job with some stuff called "PreKote". Spruce sells it. It is supposed to do the job of Alumiprep and Alodine without all of the health risks. I hope it works because I really need something like it when the time comes to prepare the outside skins for painting. There is no practical way for me to contain the runoff for a big job like that so something non-toxic is a must.
I spent about an hour leveling the fuselage. The main problem was that I had to raise the fuselage about 2 inches because my tail stand was too high. I made the two F-810E spacers from some 1/8" sheet. I need to remove the elevators as soon as I have absorbed enough of the coolness of how they look sitting on the fuselage.
Not relevant to building but I have had cable modem problems for the last year. Lately my connection would be dropped and stay that way for days at a time. My web server for this site is running on an old computer at home so it too would become inaccessible. I finally lost patience. I switched to DSL. So far so good. Surprisingly I am getting noticeably higher download and upload throughput.