Travels with FatCatAir

Tuesday January 09, 2007

Some progress

Over the holiday break I got some work done on the Velocity. Nowhere near as much as I hoped to get done but that is always the case. I've decided to work on the fuselage for a while instead of the wings/canard. It's a lot more assembly and much smaller fiberglass layups.

The very first thing you do is level the fuselage side to side and front to back. I have a cradle I built that has adjustable feet so it is pretty simple to adjust for level. The side to side level is pretty easy just use a long (6 foot) level and check (and mark) a few places on the flange. Front to back it a little more complicate since you have to use a water level (or an optical level /transit). The front point is a hole in the flange marked by the factory. The rear point requires some measuring. In any case I was happy in an hour or so.

The you have to mark the airplane centerline and well as the locations of the canard bulkhead, instrument panel and firewall. The instrument panel isn't particularly critical. The firewall and canard bulkhead are pretty critical. You want them plumb and also perpendicular to the centerline. You want to really sure that they are parallel to each other since the firewall has the spar for the wings mounted against and and the canard bulkhead positions the canard. You'd really like the wings and the canard to be parallel to each other.

I fussed with the placement of these parts for about 3 days before I was happy. I think they are as good as I can get them. Once you are happy you use structural adhesive to mount them in place (along with the gear bulkhead and gear pockets). That part went pretty smoothly.

Then I started working on fitting controls into the keel. The first thing to do is mount the upper aileron torque tube. This control stick gets mounted to the torque tube. Here you can see me sitting in the fuselage pretending I'm flying and making airplane noises.

This picture is sort of a tribute to Andy Millin who has a similar picture on his web site where he is building a Velocity too.