Month: December 2020

Fuselage gussets

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Today I spent a couple hours putting the forward fuselage gussets in place. They are unique to the -7 vs the -7A. The tri-gear plane rear landing gear are mounted just forward of the center section. Since the -7 is a tail trager, there is a gap here that need to be reinforced using these gussets. They are attached to the sides of the fuselage with 5 bolts that need to be match drilled. The gussets also line up with the bottom wing attach bolts.

I lined everything up and then drilled the holes to #40 and then enlarged for the AN3 bolts. I prepped and primed these and then attached them to the fuselage. The whole interior will be painted with my interior paint, but it’s good to prime all the parts especially mating surfaces.

I also sent a bit of time working on the panel attachment brackets. Since I’m using twin Skyview HDC screens, I need to move the Vans panel supports inboard. This requires making some custom brackets to attach the panel to the sub panel. I received a shipment of L stock from vans that worked perfectly for this.

I decided to wrap up the center section bolts that are used for the tricycle gear. In the tail dragged version the bolts need to be put into the center section.

The bottom bolts were difficult to reach but everything is now in place and torqued.

I also placed the remaining two cover supports on the sides of the fuselage, forward of the center section.

Next up is to wrap up the exhaust hangar modification. And to drill the wing fuel attachment bracket to the sides of the fuselage.

Fuselage gussets

Behind the scenes and Wire Harness

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Over the last two weeks I’ve spent many hours working out how much stuff there is left to do. I put together a list of everything I can think of, adding effort estimates to each item and adding time spent.

list of things to do

Google sheets has been awesome to organize my to-do list. I’ve completed about 100 hours since I made the list a few months back, so I’ve updated it all to be as accurate as possible. I then took the remaining items and I’ve been organizing them in a JIRA project I made to track my active work. This is a product I use at work on a daily basis to manage my teams’ projects, so I figured I’d try it for managing my own project.

JIRA Project

Here is the collapsed view of my project. By using this interface I can manage all my project links on the left, as well as drag and drop my to-do items into their respective statuses based on what I’m working on.

An Item I just completed – the full aircraft wiring harness. I’ve spent the last week designing and verifying the wire harness using http://www.diagrams.net by Google. Its been great to look at pinout diagrams from my avionics suppliers and then visualize the harness pin-to-pin. It really helps me to understand the way I will make the harness.

System Block Diagram

I made a system overview block diagram to make sure I was accounting for all the items in the system. This probably doesn’t have every item, but it was still great for visualizing the system.

Full System Wire Harness

I then used all the documentation I had for all the ECUs and components, and made the full system wiring harness. Again, I think this has everything covered, but I will continuously be checking the system before completely turning it on. I have a power supply that I will use for testing that has protection circuits in place in order to prevent any overcurrent or shortage issues.

Behind the scenes and Wire Harness