Day 117-119

It’s been a busy few days, but much has been accomplished.

The nose wheel from Matco that we were not expecting for quite some time showed up on Friday. We were absolutely thrilled! We immediately set about getting that assembled. It took a little bit of work to get the bent valve stem to fit properly, but with some patience we got it assembled and bolted onto the nose gear.

We also worked to get the control sticks fitted, aligned, bolted and riveted in. This took quite a bit of work because the room to work is getting smaller and smaller. And being these are the main control sticks for maneuvering the plane, we wanted to take special care that they were installed perfectly and operated smoothly. So this required taking then in and out a few times. We also hooked up the cross through rod linkage between the two.

We’ve started installing the front inside side skins. The left one is Cleco’ed on right now. After making sure the other side fits properly, we’ll use SikaFlex to seal the channels and rivet on the skins.