Completion of pitot installation

The pitot mast was painted with Stewarts EkoCrylic, but the result was not great with minor patterning and bubble marks. So I sanded bac a bit with 400 grit and gave it another wet coat. The result was much better, albeit not a mirror smooth finish. Left to cure for three days. I have some work to do before I am prepared to do larger-scale spraying.

I did not much like the provided 2.5mm self tapping screws, preferring bolts. I went for M4 stainless steel button head 6mm bolts. Purchased M4 taps to create threaded holes in the pitot tube structure, quite successful though one hole was at a very slight angle. Used M4 x 6mm button head bolts with 243 Loctite. Reasonable result achieved, but the curvature at the front of the pitot tube might have made M3 bolts a better choice.

I added a third attachment hole to stiffen up the pitot mast bracket a bit .

I chose M4 x 30mm stainless steel button head bolts to secure the pitot mast. However I found that the hole passing though the fabricated aluminium block at 4.1mm was too narrow to avoid frequent binding of these bolts. This would be an extreme problem in the future when the only access is via the small access port. So I chuck reamed the hole through the pitot tube block to 4.3mm. I also enlarged the pitot tube mast holes as well as the mounting bracket holes to 4.3mm. This solved the binding problem. The bolts were then smeared with Duralac yellow and tipped with Loctite 243.

The blue and green pitot and AOA tubes were trimmed and pressed fully home into the couplings. Marks were made on the tubing with edge-distance closest to the end of the tubes of 20mm. When pressed fully home, these edges were 5mm from the end of the coupling, implying the tube ends were located 15mm from the surface. This is consistent with the12.5mm figure given in the Dynon installation notes.