Some further milestones

I'm still plugging away.  I had a visit from my technical counselor, Wally Anderson, of Synergy Air.  His attitude is that building an airplane is no more or less than obsessively and compulsively making "to do" lists and completing them.  Eventually, you run out of things to put on the lists, and you have an airplane.    

The first photo shows the nutplates that hold the spinner on.  There are several cute ways to do this that hide the screws, but I'm not doing any of them.  I am going to have visible screws on both the front and aft plates:

Rear plate with nutplates

Nutplates

To hide the piano wire that holds the top and bottom cowling together, I fabbed two plates of aluminum, and made a recess to hold them out of fiberglass.  And yes, more nutplates.

The piano wire will be oriented curve in when I close the cover

Showing cover on

More nutplates to hold top and bottom cowling at cooling aperture

Built up forward portion of cowling aft of spinner for cosmetic reasons

There are days when I look in to the avionics bays and think, "this is pure chaos":

But then I get back to work bringing order to the chaos, one "to do" list at a time

These two photos are to document that I complied with a service bulletin from Andair that the screws holding the selector valve together are tight.

I checked the torque

I applied torque seal

Doug checks out the seating position.  I am going to stop here and note that the center console is an ABSOLUTE PITA to install.  If I build another RV I am definitely not doing it.  Except for the fact that the finished product, at least on the ground, is a joy to sit in.  Look at how naturally Doug's arms rest and how comfortably the throttle and stick fall in to his hands.  This is ergonomically perfect.  Better than an F16 (or a Cirrus)

I also made my first official log book entry (for the aircraft logbook; not the builder's logbook)

First log entry

Wally made many DAR-like observations.  I took notes and in parallel with building, I am working through his suggestions.  One was to hold the fuel line down lower so it didn't ride upward toward the upper cowling.

And this is my solution to where to put the "red cube".  It needs a five inch straight run prior to the cube, a level surface, relatively good support, and should be downstream of the mechanical pump.  Mine is here, next to the fuel distribution spider.

More nutplates...

The ELT is supposed to be mounted"as far aft as possible",  "in line with the direction of flight", and "affixed to a rigid structural assembly".  I think I have satisfied the requirements here under the empenage fairing.

Wow, I am impressed that you made it all the way down here!