Preparing the sleeves

This week, progress was made on the preparation for the bottom longeron reinforcement. The longeron section that was removed was replaced with new sections and welded in place. Also, the external sleeves were cut and trimmed to fit the shape of the adjacent tubes:

As you can see on the picture above, the forward gear attachment bushings were slid in place to check the fit. They will be welded a little longer and then will be trimmed using a counterbore tool such as this one:

In the meantime, I worked on my nosebowl attachment. My nosebowl is a two piece type such that you don't have to remove the prop to remove the cowl. When I bought the airplane, the two halfs were riveted together at the center which was kinda dumb. I decided to install piano hinges last year to make them splittable again:

However as you can see, there was some chafing with the flywheel and one side was getting close to failure. I realized this the morning I was leaving for my last contest of the year last year. I had to cut and fix a plate (therefore the two holes on the outboard edge) as a last minute fix and managed to leave on time for the contest. While the fuse is getting fixed, I took the time to work on a new attachment design (inspired on Wes Liu's S2-A I saw at the contest in question). An aluminium plate riveted on one side and nutplated on the other side.

First I determined the best nutplate location, cut the aluminium brackets, bent them and drilled them. Here is a shot with both plates clecoed in place:

Then I made alumiprep and alodyne treatments to protect them from corrosion (thanks to my friend Scott for the chemicals):

And finally riveted them in place:

The nutplates are riveted on the foward side of the top piece. The holes beside the bolt hole on the bracket above will serve as rivet head clearance holes. I will upload pictures of the final nosebowl once it's back from the paint shop.

The plan for this week is to weld the bottom longerons sleeves in place as well as the gear bushings. These will be a challenge to fix since they need to be aligned such that the gear beam is perpendicular to the fuselage axis.

The repair is progressing step by step. Thanks all again for you encourangements, it really helps keeping the morale up, especially for days like today with wonderful wx!!