Sunday work

I managed to spend about 4 or 5 hours in the garage today and made quite a bit of progress. First things first I finished putting the casters on the work benches. They turned out great and even sit on the floor without rocking. Either the tables actually ended up being square or they are just as crooked as the floor. I've already put them to good use and am really glad I spent the time building them.


With that finished I got to work on the glider. One of the first things I did was cut out a piece of balsa for a new cap on the vertical stabilizer. Leah sanded the top of the vertical down last night so it is ready to be glued on. I just need to get some Epoxy and glue it on. Next I started removing some hardward and miscellaneous stuff from the fuselage. First was the seatbelts and the bottom of the seat, then the static and pitot lines, along with capacity flasks. I also removed the fresh air intake.

I discovered some more damage tonight that will need to be repaired. It looks like I inadvertantly broke some wood when I removed the Rudder, way at the beginning of this process. I didn't even think about it at the time, but there are a couple of pretty massive return springs behind the rudder pedals. When I removed the cable from the rudder the tension in that spring pulled the pedal forward and smashed the pedal into a frame. This broke the frame on the right side pretty good, as that was the first side that I removed.


As you can see the wood is pretty wrecked. I was bummed to see this but it can and will be fixed. Also I noticed that one of the connecting pieces between this frame piece and the longeron, just above the break, had cracks in the plys, although it doesn't show up really well in the picture:


There is some corresponding damage from the left rudder pedal. It is not as bad but will still require repairs to the wood.

Finally I noticed that one of the scarf joints on the longeron on the right side seems to be slightly separated. Should be pretty easy to re-glue the joint though.

So that is what I accomplished today. Also, I made a bunch of updates (again) to the Roll Call post. I just keep finding more pictures and info. I added pictures that are included in the file with old Cherokee II Newsletters and build info from Stan Hall. Check out N9191Z, this Cherokee was built "Flat Topped" with a Jetson's style bubble canopy. I think that some old LK-10's were modified into single seaters and looked similar.