Day 37

Today we finished joining and riveting the firewall to the side skins. This process is a bit slow and tedious, but critical as much of the weight of the fuselage and motor are distributed through this section. There are two plates and spacers that are all connected through the firewall. They go,

1. Outside skin,
2. Spacers Strip,
3. Firewall.
4. And lastly the Cowling Fastener Strips.

All Four of these get cleco'ed and riveted together. It is all a rather tight fit, especially trying to get everything to wrap and follow the curve properly. Cleco'ing each hole and working down one hole at a time helped to accomplish this. We also utilized two pairs of clamps to make sure everything was sandwiched together tightly when we pulled the rivets.

After we finished this we then were able to to intsall the firwall foam, paracute reinforcemens and motor mount.

With the motor mount done we wanted to start the wheel hub assemblies, but found we wer again missing some pices. So we got them orderd now and when onto installing the nose gear. Everything was going great until the lower bussings and retaingn brakets were not alinging. So we sent of an email to Sling Technical Support and just heard back from them. They told us;

"This is a common issue, and is caused during manufacture.

The common solution here at sling is to remove the assembly from the aircraft after initial fitment as you have done, Making note of the contact points, you can use a large drum sander and slowly remove material from the bushes both top and bottom at the contact areas, until such point as the bushing fits in the engine mount without moving, and the nose gear tube can move freely within the bushings.

The parts numbers and regions you are to sand are below.

UN-BSH-001-C-A-1     -       Nose Gear Bush                

UN-BSH-009-C-A-0     -       Nose Gear Bush (Half)  

Only the surface contacting the nose gear tube is to be sanded.

What I mean by "until such point as the bushing fits in the engine mount without moving", Sometimes people are a little over excited and remove too much material from these areas, on the odd occasion can cause the bush to rotate in its housing on the engine mount, which is not ideal. The nose gear needs to be able to move and not the bushing."

So this is what we will be trying tomorrow to fix the issue.