DATE: 03-31-26 – TIME: 9:10 – 0:00 ~ 0:00
Well, it’s been a long delay since stopping at the end of January. Partly because of lack of rivets but primarily also due to being heavily engaged in pruning the orchard and subsequent cleaning up.
As of this morning, the cabin was clecod in place to the front of the rear fuselage so the process of final alignment and riveting was the next step. Plus, I had received the master brake cylinder so that I could finish off installing the pilot side (left) pedals. It turns out the brackets for holding the master cylinder are the same width apart as the slave cylinders. The master cylinders do not come with the controls, or the fuselage, but with the finishing kit, but if you order the dual brake option then you can use the slave cylinders to properly locate the master cylinder brackets.
We also found, during the installation of the engine mount brackets, that the lower left engine mount was missing. This necessitated getting one from Zenith and then having it powder coated, which caused a further week delay.
I also had to wait for A5 rivets. Initially, when ordering the fuselage kit, I received 2900 A4 rivets and 1200 A5 rivets. I initially bought 200 more and Roger sent me another 300 from Zenith, gratis.
Anyway, today we started with the installation of the left right engine mounting bracket which comes with no holes drilled for either the engine mount bolt (3/8th) nor the bolt holes to bolt to the floor. One of the oddities of the mounting brackets is that Zenith specs a countersunk screw for the forward “bolt”, while the bracket itself is not drilled, nor countersunk, because otherwise there isn’t enough space for the 3/8th engine mount bolt. By the way, this is also true for the upper engine mounts.
The floor of the cabin and the firewall do have holes for the bolts so the way we installed the bracket was to locate the centre front of the bracket and place it in line with the hole in the firewall, then drilled that hole with a #20 bit, clecod it in place, and then drilled the three holes into the base of the bracket from beneath the floor.
The easiest way to drill through the steel, and most accurate, is to start with a really small bit, I think we used a 1/16th or less, which goes through the steel much faster than, say a #20 or #12. Then drill the holes with the correct size bit.
I have placed some photos here but you really can’t see much because the cameras are not in a good place for the work inside the cabin. I took some photos with my cell phone, after the fact.
After finishing the engine mount installation we continued with the fitting of the brake master cylinder vertical bracket installation on the left (pilot) side.
More to come here…