Chapter 29

Happy New Year Van’s builders. Nothing new to add apart from a whole day of etching and priming. Dog likes the smell of etching fluid.

Despite my concerns that the new spray bay might not be warm enough with just the little electric heater but it worked out fine. The primer sprayed and dried nicely and I have made a…

Still building, just lots of separating, trimming and deburring. The pile of metal grows on a daily basis. Lots of priming to be done before a concentrated burst of construction.

Jumping forward again until I can get some priming done. I separated the Cowling Hinge Shims and then moved onto fabricating the cowling hinges. There are 2 lengths of piano hinge supplied with the fuselage…

I had jumped forward a couple of pages as installing the Control Column Assembly required a good run of patience. It involves bolting one side to the bearing bracket after inserting a set pattern of…

With the structure up on its side we were able to get on with riveting the joins together. It’s a complicated little pattern which slowed us down constantly referring to the rivet layout. I had…

We put the structure up on its side using the jig and wooden dowels. It was all quite stable but I became paranoid about the dowels and so have ordered some bolts. The structure is…

New chapter and it is really starting to look like a big aircraft. First job was to prime the skin where the forward and bottom skins overlap. I had already done this but the wrong…