A good day of kit construction work.
Yesterday, spent the morning with the daughter designing and cutting material for a saddle rack. It's gonna be nice. Quality time with the girl (about to be 21!) is priceless.
In the afternoon, 3 misc. hours tearing down the finishing kit shipping crate. That's a lot of irritating work, almost (but not quite) worse than proseal.
For today:
Fabricate battery box.
Match drill mounting brackets to box. Deburr, dimple.
Cut lightening holes in box. Deburr and prime.
Cut battery hold down bar to length and predrill holes.
Rivet mounting brackets to battery box.
Drill out rivets on firewall for battery and contactor mounting.
Drill for battery box mounting platenuts, countersink brackets and prime.
Fab contactor doubler plate.
Drill contactor doubler to firewall. About this time, I realized taking the 7106 forward top skin off would make life a lot easier for reaching inside to work on the aft side of the fueselage. But I wanted to get the cowling attach strips drilled first, to minimize how many more times the 7106 has to be clecoed in place. So that started a detour on the cowling strips.
Cut cowling attach strips, edge deburr. I bought 2 square feet of .063 sheet. Van's shipped (and charged me for) 4 square feet, cut 1' x 2'. Glad I got the extra, it will be needed. I cut strips 2" x 24". This seems to be a good length, since only one of the strips is actually 24" long. The rest are shorter.
Start drilling cowling attach strips to firewall. It takes a few strips to realize the right way to do this. The strips have to conform to the curve of the skin in three dimensions. I figured it out after a while. Add to this the proper layout of the camlocks, and the rivet spacing. It makes a fun puzzle, but guarantees you'll get to remake some of the pieces, since your first try isn't up to standards. I figured out I can save most of what I did today, but will remake the left side and upper corners. The bottom is easier since there is no compound curvature.
